Titicut Follies is not an instructional film

Sally Satel — most recently seen emerging from the gauntlet of the American Enterprise Institute’s rigorous peer-review system — has contibuted a piece to this collection of essays by liberals who turned conservative, or something equally trite. Anyhow, Paul from Powerline really loved the book and was especially thrilled with this passage from Satel’s essay:

My Hill experience gave me a startling insight: Liberals and conservatives seemed to have mirror-image approaches to paternalism. Liberals made intrusive laws for the competent while conservatives preferred to rely on individuals to make their own decisions. Conversely, conservatives preferred intrusive laws for the incompetnet [sic] to whom liberals applied a hands-off policy. Liberals were comfortable with public health paternalism: intrusive nonsmoking laws, taxes on unhealthy products, strict risk-averse EPA and FDA regulations. . . . Yet, when a person was incoherent, defecating in the streets, or freezing a limb off in the part [sic], than [sic] — and only then — did the principles of autonomy apply.

Funny, because if memory serves, it was the Grand Exalted and Beloved Comrade Ronald Reagan who — first as governor of California and then as president of the US — released the limbless, feceating incompetents into the streets by defunding community mental health centers and withdrawing on a massive scale public support for the “incoherent.” Among Reagan’s most infamous gifts to California was a paranoid schizophrenic named Herb Mullin, who killed 13 people between October 1972 and January 1973 because he believed it would stop an eathquake from destroying the state. In the wake of Sacramento’s deregulatory glee, Mullin’s parents had been unable to find a state facility to handle him; their son had repeatedly been judged by psychiatrists to be a danger to himself and others, but private care would have cost his family nearly $40,000 a year. After Mullin was convicted of executing four teenage campers, bludgeoning a priest to death in his confessional booth, disembowling a hitchiker, and commiting seven other murders, the jury foreman wrote an open letter to Governor Reagan that assigned him partial blame for the crimes. The next year, the state legislature halted Reagan’s community health rollback — a project he nevertheless resumed in 1981.

If memory also serves, the “intrusive laws for the incompetent” favored by conservatives during the 1980s and 1990s fell mostly into the “law and order” rather than the “prevention, treatment and rehabilitation” category. Preoccupied with the rights and comforts of the “competent,” many conservatives — who continued to believe that homelessness, for example, was a mere lifestyle choice — would rather have returned the days of yore, when the feeble-minded and deranged were warehoused and sterilized. I can’t say specifically what Sally Satel would have advocated back then, but it’s good to know she feels so strongly about anti-smoking laws.