X-Message-Number: 5075
Date: Mon, 30 Oct 1995 23:53:29 -0500
From: "Keith F. Lynch" <>
Subject: Re: Non-cryonics issues, Stodolsky, anti-big-government, etc

In #5068, Robin Helweg-Larsen <> writes:
> I've also lived in Denmark for five years, and am familiar with
> the need to have a social security number (which incorporates your
> birth-date in it), and to inform the police of your new address
> within five days of changing residence, etc.  This doesn't bother
> me (boarding school was a lot worse).

Boarding school is for children.  Adults shouldn't be treated like
children.

Someone should be treated as a criminal if they steal, rape, or kill.
You think a peaceful and honest person should be treated as a criminal
if they refuse to carry papers, or to inform the police of their
whereabouts?

> The thought of a country with no government, ... is worrying.

I haven't seen anyone on this list argue in favor of anarchy.  But
to suggest that doctors or patients would be better off if the
government was a doctors' only possible employer is frightening.
For one thing, a patient is unlikely to be able to get unique services,
such as cryonics, this way.

This summer, I took a vacation in Europe.  I have bad teeth, and I
could have spent that money on having them fixed, instead.  But I made
the choice I made, and I don't regret it.  I wouldn't want to live
in a country in which this choice was stolen from me, in which I was
compelled to pay (via taxes) for perfect teeth, whether or not that
was what I would choose to spend my money on.

What is the value of perfect teeth?  What is the value of a vacation?
What is the value of a life-saving surgical operation?  What is the
value of being cryonically suspended?  It isn't infinite -- there
isn't yet enough money in the world to give every ill person every
possible medical treatment that might help.  But wherever the line
is drawn, some people will be condemned to death.  Should government
be the one to draw this line?  To evaluate people based on political
pull, social utility, whether they know the right people in the right
political party, age, race, religion, etc?  Or should it be triage via
waiting list, in which if 100 people need a life-saving treatment, and
the government has allocated resources to treat 60, the 100 will be
forced to wait until 40 of them have died?  Or perhaps a lottery?  Or
a TV show whose viewers vote by phone on which patient's pleading was
the most pathetic and moving?

I maintain that the only moral way to make this choice is for the
patient to make the choice.  Let each individual allocate their own
resources based on their own unique set of values.  Some will choose
to spend money on the best possible medical insurance, and will live
a spartan lifestyle.  Others will choose to live lavishly, and to
take the risk that they will someday need medical treatment that they
won't be able to afford.  Yet others will choose to do the work they
love, even if it pays so little that they can afford neither a lavish
lifestyle nor top-notch medical insurance.

Is this any more irrational than mountain climbing, hang gliding, or
smoking, in which it's fairly likely that one will end up dead with no
possible treatment?  (In fact, smoking kills more people than medicine
saves, as shown by the mortality statistics of religious groups which
avoid both tobacco and doctors -- they live longer and healthier than
the population as a whole!)

Why is medicine so expensive?  A big part of the reason is that the
government grants licensed doctors a legal monopoly on the practice of
medicine, and on the prescribing of drugs.  Government is protecting
us to death.

> When you're suspended, and can't act for yourself, you better have a
> good government at all levels: ...

I agree totally.  I think the single biggest risk to suspended patients
is a government which decides that cryonics is an unnecessary waste of
precious natural resources, or that it's a fraud and the patients were
deluded and need to be protected from their folly, or that it consists
of medicine being practiced without a license, or that the patient care
funds represent a handy source of government revenue given that it is
"owned" by people who can't vote or complain, or that no place on the
planet is zoned for cryonics, or that no medical care should ever be
provided to anyone over age 70, or that it's "unfair" for some people
to be cryopreserved when others aren't.

Another major risk is that general technological progress will be
slowed by government red tape, regulations, taxation, borrowing (which
siphons off money that would otherwise have been invested in furthering
some productive activity), or inane ideology (such as communism or
the-sky-is-falling environmentalism), such that cryonic repair
technologies are not developed during the lifetime of currently
existing cryonics organizations or their successors.

> And.... maybe you want people to go through your mind and reconstruct
> your personality?  Guess what!  They're going to know more about you
> than you even know yourself - they'll have to, to be able to do a
> good job!  They'll know your conscious, subconscious, unconscious,
> preconscious, reflexes, predilections, crimes and misdemeanors.

I doubt it.  In general it's easier to repair individual parts than to
fully understand the interrelationships of those parts (e.g. you can
recognize a crack, or a loose wire, or eroded gear teeth, or crosslinked
proteins, or a burned out light bulb, or a brittle parchment, or a
dead battery, and take the appropriate corrective actions without
understanding the system into which whatever you fixed fits).
--
Keith Lynch, 
http://www.access.digex.net/~kfl/


Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=5075