Your chances of being seriously injured in an automobile accident today are much less than 1%.
If you have a baby in the car with you, and the child is not in a protective "infant seat", the child's chance of serious injury or death is still much less than 1%. It's not even 1/100th of 1%.
But if you want to see our friends on the political left start tearing out their hair, ripping their clothes, calling the police, and having fainting spells, just throw a two-year-old in your car without strapping the kid into an infant seat, and make a quick run to the grocery store and back. There is a very small chance that you could do some small injury to the child, and this makes nanny-staters have anxiety attacks.
Now, consider this:
If a government doesn't have any restraints on its ability to print paper money - i.e. "fiat currency" - the chances of inflation ruining its economy are 100%. It will have a ruinous effect on every child in the nation. They will all live diminished lives as a result of older generations refusing to pay as they go. It will happen every....single....time. ALL paper money has eventually become valueless (except to collectors and hobbyists) and it has always been the younger generations who are stuck cleaning up the mess.
Here's another fun fact..... Each year in the United States, approximately 30,000 persons with BB and pellet gun-related injuries are treated in hospital emergency departments. Most (95%) injuries are BB or pellet gunshot wounds; 5% are other types of injuries (e.g., lacerations sustained inadvertently while cleaning or shooting a gun, or contusions resulting from being struck with the butt of a gun). Most (81%) persons treated for BB and pellet gun wounds are children and teenagers.
That's why most of our friends on the political left don't allow their kids to go near a BB or pellet gun. (Side note - When I was a kid, my friends and I often had minor BB and pellet gun-related injuries. None of these battle scars were accidental, because we were shooting at each other. Fun as hell, and the current generation of fragile, dainty, precious little snowflakes will never know that joy.)
30,000 minor injuries per year from BB guns, and 95% of the victims are children and teenagers? That's a lot.
Contrast that unspeakable horror with this one. The minority teen employment rate is now approaching 50%. With 8 million minority teenagers in the U.S., this means 4 million are unemployed.
Our minimum wage laws make it illegal to employ them.
(The thought process of the Statists is that the kids are better off unemployed and jobless at a minimum wage of $7.25, than employed and productive at the wage of $3, $4, or $6 per hour that their skills are worth.)
Our friend on the left do not give a shit. You really can't imagine the size of the shit which they do not give. Go figure.
Our friends on the political left want to do whatever is necessary to protect us from the big, bad world. They'll delay the approval and release of life-saving medicines, even though the delays probably cost us 100,000 lives per year. They even boast about how many lives the new drug will "save" each year. Do the math, and you'll quickly learn how many lives were lost by preventing the manufacturer from selling it 5 years earlier.
So why the disconnect?
My theory is that Statists just enjoy messing with agreements that are none of their business. I don't like the idea that there are people whose skills are only worth $3.00 per hour. I hate it. But I also know that work of any type, for any salary, teaches people about punctuality, dependability, and other good work habits. Almost all $3.00 labor is eventually worth $7.25 to someone, somewhere. So you'll never catch me lobbying for an alternative universe where low-skilled labor is worth as much as skilled labor. I don't have that mindset. As long as the parties in the job agreement does what they says they're gonna do, it's none of my business, or yours.
Here's another possibility for the contradiction. Statists generally aren't held responsible for unintended consequences of their policies. Rather than voting for the candidate who promises to reduce eliminate Social Security payments to millionaires, they support the guy who is going to print money to make the payments. The kids don't see an immediate harm to themselves, and plus, kids can't vote. That might explain some of the bizarre policies, and the same explanation easily applies to stimulus packages, economic development boondoggles, and healthcare debacles.
Those theories - love of meddling and freedom from consequences - aren't enough to explain all of it.
There's always the possibility, of course, that they're just freakin' stupid.
If you have a baby in the car with you, and the child is not in a protective "infant seat", the child's chance of serious injury or death is still much less than 1%. It's not even 1/100th of 1%.
But if you want to see our friends on the political left start tearing out their hair, ripping their clothes, calling the police, and having fainting spells, just throw a two-year-old in your car without strapping the kid into an infant seat, and make a quick run to the grocery store and back. There is a very small chance that you could do some small injury to the child, and this makes nanny-staters have anxiety attacks.
Now, consider this:
If a government doesn't have any restraints on its ability to print paper money - i.e. "fiat currency" - the chances of inflation ruining its economy are 100%. It will have a ruinous effect on every child in the nation. They will all live diminished lives as a result of older generations refusing to pay as they go. It will happen every....single....time. ALL paper money has eventually become valueless (except to collectors and hobbyists) and it has always been the younger generations who are stuck cleaning up the mess.
Here's another fun fact..... Each year in the United States, approximately 30,000 persons with BB and pellet gun-related injuries are treated in hospital emergency departments. Most (95%) injuries are BB or pellet gunshot wounds; 5% are other types of injuries (e.g., lacerations sustained inadvertently while cleaning or shooting a gun, or contusions resulting from being struck with the butt of a gun). Most (81%) persons treated for BB and pellet gun wounds are children and teenagers.
That's why most of our friends on the political left don't allow their kids to go near a BB or pellet gun. (Side note - When I was a kid, my friends and I often had minor BB and pellet gun-related injuries. None of these battle scars were accidental, because we were shooting at each other. Fun as hell, and the current generation of fragile, dainty, precious little snowflakes will never know that joy.)
30,000 minor injuries per year from BB guns, and 95% of the victims are children and teenagers? That's a lot.
Contrast that unspeakable horror with this one. The minority teen employment rate is now approaching 50%. With 8 million minority teenagers in the U.S., this means 4 million are unemployed.
Our minimum wage laws make it illegal to employ them.
(The thought process of the Statists is that the kids are better off unemployed and jobless at a minimum wage of $7.25, than employed and productive at the wage of $3, $4, or $6 per hour that their skills are worth.)
Our friend on the left do not give a shit. You really can't imagine the size of the shit which they do not give. Go figure.
Our friends on the political left want to do whatever is necessary to protect us from the big, bad world. They'll delay the approval and release of life-saving medicines, even though the delays probably cost us 100,000 lives per year. They even boast about how many lives the new drug will "save" each year. Do the math, and you'll quickly learn how many lives were lost by preventing the manufacturer from selling it 5 years earlier.
So why the disconnect?
My theory is that Statists just enjoy messing with agreements that are none of their business. I don't like the idea that there are people whose skills are only worth $3.00 per hour. I hate it. But I also know that work of any type, for any salary, teaches people about punctuality, dependability, and other good work habits. Almost all $3.00 labor is eventually worth $7.25 to someone, somewhere. So you'll never catch me lobbying for an alternative universe where low-skilled labor is worth as much as skilled labor. I don't have that mindset. As long as the parties in the job agreement does what they says they're gonna do, it's none of my business, or yours.
Here's another possibility for the contradiction. Statists generally aren't held responsible for unintended consequences of their policies. Rather than voting for the candidate who promises to reduce eliminate Social Security payments to millionaires, they support the guy who is going to print money to make the payments. The kids don't see an immediate harm to themselves, and plus, kids can't vote. That might explain some of the bizarre policies, and the same explanation easily applies to stimulus packages, economic development boondoggles, and healthcare debacles.
Those theories - love of meddling and freedom from consequences - aren't enough to explain all of it.
There's always the possibility, of course, that they're just freakin' stupid.
