Holy Crap! Bill Frist Reads the News-Leader!

The News-Leader published this "reader letter" a week ago:

On March 2, the Senate approved legislation placing tight restrictions on the purchase of cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine and ephedrine, the ingredients used to manufacture methamphetamine. As News-Leader reporters have found, methamphetamine has done tremendous damage throughout the Ozarks.

While some states, including Missouri, already have laws that restrict the sales of medicines that contain meth ingredients, many don't, allowing drug users to cross state lines and purchase unlimited supplies. The federal legislation will close this loophole.

Under the new law, which Missouri's Sen. Jim Talent introduced and advocated for in the Senate, cold medicines containing meth ingredients will be placed behind the counter or in a locked cabinet. People seeking to purchase these products will have to show identification and sign a log book. While law-abiding citizens will still be able to purchase up to 300 typical 30mg cold medicine tablets a month, drug users seeking to use the medication to cook meth will see their plots foiled.

This law should have a particularly significant impact on Springfield: last year, Missouri led the nation in methamphetamine lab seizures while my home state of Tennessee had the dubious honor of coming in second. By helping the Senate pass a tight, tough national methamphetamine law, Jim Talent has made a real difference for Springfield residents and for our country.

Bill Frist, M.D., Majority Leader, United States Senate

Thanks, Bill! You do your best to get Jimmy Boy re-elected. I like how he's still so proud of that M.D. that he puts it before "Majority Leader, United States Senate."

The good news is that with the Republican party image tarnished nationally due to the incompetent leadership of the Prez, and the party's incompetent management in Missouri, it seems likely to me that Talent could be thrown out on his ass with the rest of them.

Here's hoping at least.

To clarify

I really only have two policy concerns.

First, is affirmative action programs. Lots of people think these are unjustifiable in any case, but I can't agree. My hope for this country--for the world really--is that we realize Dr. King's dream: that one day, men will be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. The problem is that we're not there yet. And there's good reason to think that if we don't act to make a difference now, then we may never reach that point. Affirmative action programs are designed to get us there by ensuring that a person's achievement is not limited by societal prejudice. And we accomplish that by distributing goods based on race.

Even my description there is muddied and unclear. But can affirmative action be justified in this way? Is it acceptable to distribute goods based on race?

Second, what about proportional representation? PR is supposed to ensure minority representation. It is my understanding that PR originated as a way of ensuring different economic classes would be guaranteed representation in various European parliaments. Of course, minority does not have to mean economic class, or ethnic or racial minority--it can also mean political minority, i.e. people who maintain political views that are on the margains--the Greens and the Libertarians, for example. So, PR can be repurposed from its oringal goals for and justified for reasons unconnected to group rights.

But I would worry that it's vulnerable to attack.

That's about all I can come up with off the top of my head.

I think you're mostly correct, but it is a very troublesome area since conceptions of group rights have been accepted in a lot of different ways. To give examples, again, of what we talked about, group rights conceptions range from believing that ethnic groups have a right to an independent country to the belief that proportional representation is a better electoral system because it allows lower classes or women to gain seats in parliament to believing that racial or ethnic minorities deserve preferential treatment in admission to college.

Part of my problem is that I'm for some policies that are based on group rights. But I simultaneously have a strong dislike of group rights based on my internal norms regarding individualism and legal equal protection. In short, that all men are created equal.

So, my next question is then how can we separate out policies based on group rights? Can we tidy up our thinking regarding groups rights?

Group Rights

I was thinking about our group rights conversation the other day.
The idea of rights vesting within groups, instead of within individuals, is dangerous for multiple reasons.
As I said in our conversation, I think one of the greatest dangers posed by the idea of group rights is that the rights cannot be universalized without extremely negative consequences. On its face, the notion that certain people should be entitled to rights simple because of their membership within a subset of the larger population seems to be extremely minority friendly. That minority groups could get advantages vis a vis the majority population could help those groups achieve parity with the majority. However, attempting to universalize this concept though would mean that a given majority group should also get the same rights as the minority. This appears to destroy the concept of special protections, in the form of rights, of minority groups, leading to a balkanization of societies.

Another reason why the concept is dangerous is because the concept of group rights begs the question as to how to define a given group. There are Catholics all over the world, but are American Catholics, Latin American Catholics, Southeast Asian Catholics, African Catholics, and European Catholics alike enough to justify special group rights vesting in "Catholics"? Or are other differences within the broad group of "Catholics" worthy of protection? How the questions of group affliation and identity are defined are extremely important and difficult, such that to attempt to vest rights within a specific "group" seems inordinately difficult to me. A simple answer would be to let groups define themselves, but doing so wouldn't account for differences within groups that could lead to propagation of discriminations based on differences within those groups. I am not sure, and I could do the research on this, but I believe the federal legal structure dealing with American Indians allows for registered Indian tribes to define the members of their tribes how the tribes choose. This could lead to, and I believe has based on a hazy memory of a news article to the same end, situations in which economically and politically enfranchised majorities within tribes could define out members of the tribe, such that for federal legal purposes those disenfranchised members of the group no longer are able to avail themselves of whatever special benefits come from being a member of the tribe. However, as I stated, I am unsure as to the legality of such a move. I am just attempting to use the hypothetical to highlight definitional problems with groups as another problem inherent within the concept of "group rights".

We can talk more about this later.