Consumer protection
by digby
Tyler Cowan (who once expressed fear for his personal safety because I wrote that I was buying pitchfork futures) said a particularly ignorant thing on twitter yesterday and is justifiably getting skewered for it.
Oh how clevah.
Scott Lemieux writes:
[I]t’s remarkable how proud some conservative commentators are of the idea that if you support some state regulations that a conservertarian doesn’t you must presumptively favor all state regulations, given how utterly asinine it is.
Cowen does, however, have to be given credit in a way for choosing an example that makes the silliness of his premise particularly obvious. Yes, indeed, many of the people appalled by Virginia’s reprehensible forthcoming abortion regulations favor other regulations that provide information to consumers. The “contradiction” is not terribly hard to understand if one thinks about it for a tenth of a second or so. On the one hand, the typical consumer regulation does not require consumers to pay substantial direct costs to undergo humiliating and invasive medical procedures without their consent. And on the other hand, the “information” provided to women by the regulation is worthless, since women are generally aware of what pregnancy entails.
Yes. Women know very well that they are pregnant and, what's more, they know very well that it will eventually result in the birth of a child. If they didn't know this, they would not be taking proactive steps to end that eventuality. In other words, if she didn't know what she was doing, she would do nothing. The idea that after a woman finds out that she is pregnant, decides that she doesn't want to give birth, makes an appointment, arrives at the office for the procedure, then needs to be shown that she is pregnant is fatuous in the extreme.
There are only two reasons to support this: you either believe that women are mentally disabled and are incapable of understanding that they are pregnant and will give birth if they don't have this procedure or you believe they should be punished for seeking the procedure by shoving a probe inside them while lecturing them about their decision and showing them pictures of the inside of their wombs. That's it. My guess is that Tyler Cowan and the rest of these people making all these clever bon mots believe the second. But it doesn't matter: you're a jackass either way.
.
