Unfortunately, Mr. J. Goldberg, to whom the email was addressed, doesn’t, not in fullness, anyhow:
I wonder if in time the theme of legislation in all things, an attempt at a governmental guarantee that all risk will be reactively legislated against, vs. individual freedom and personal risk / responsibility (including the freedom to abuse that) will be a more important divide than the old Left / Right split.
That should be the entire basis of the Left/Right split. Or Red/Blue or Green/Yellow, whatever you want to call it. The important thing to understand is that from a political perspective, government is there to fuck you over!
So long as you accept government’s claim to jurisdiction for anything but the wholly voluntary, you are guaranteeing that if you do not hold the whip hand, you will get whipped. You may be happy about banning smokes, but upset about banning cheeseburgers… or vice-versa. It doesn’t matter, it’s all the same.
It’s never the momentary What that matters, but the How.