Proof that Democrats seek equity in misery.
Proof that Democrats seek equity in misery
S tarting a country can leave one parched, so it’s no surprise that as the drafting of the new U.S. Constitution drew to its close, our Founding Fathers headed down to City Tavern in Philadelphia to get plastered.
There was plenty to celebrate on September 14, 1787: George Washington’s greatness, it was a Friday, and they were finally set free from the sweaty room in which they had labored over the document. And celebrate they did, joined by the Light Horse of Philadelphia, a volunteer cavalry corps. Over 45 gallons of spirits, wine, and beer were served to 55 men in attendance.
“Pounding Fathers” indeed.
Little could Ben Franklin, James Madison, and the boys have known that the very government they just created would one day shake its spindly, judgmental finger at their night of Dionysian bonhomie. Just as Joe Biden is about to exit the presidency, his surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory recommending new labels on bottles of alcohol that link drinking to cancer. Claiming alcohol is a “leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States,” Murthy suspects slapping bottles with cancer warning labels can save up to 20,000 American lives per year.
Of course, bottles of alcohol already have government-mandated labels that warn about things like drinking while pregnant and drinking while operating heavy machinery. Most importantly, they warn that drinking alcohol “may cause health problems” — so the fact drinking may be harmful for you is already on the label.
Suppose the government never mandated any labels. Is there anyone in America who needs lawmakers to tell them excessive drinking is bad for them? Has anyone ever woken up pantsless and covered in cold pizza after a heavy night of boozing and thought, “You know, things are really going great for me right now”?
Murthy’s recommendation is simply a giveaway to the pointy-nosed ninnies who yearn for the days of alcohol prohibition. These are the people who see America’s law books as a way to socially engineer their desired outcome, even if it means scaring drinkers or raising alcohol taxes. These Temu Carrie Nations see imbibing alcohol as a personal failure, and they won’t stop until drinking becomes a joyless transaction in which you stare into a glass of Scotch as you ponder your mortality. (Or at least more often than you do now.)
But everyone knows alcohol is the world’s most effective social lubricant, making interesting people hilarious (as George Herbert said four centuries ago, “Where the drink goes in, the wit goes out”) and making insufferable people temporarily tolerable.
And since the Founding Fathers’ night of revelry, presidents have generally recognized the social-healing power of drink. When Barack Obama wanted to quell racial tensions after the arrest of an African-American Harvard professor outside his home, Obama didn’t do so over a plate of egg salad sandwiches; he hosted a “beer summit” to help everyone chill out.
Murthy doesn’t even have his facts straight. In his report, he notes that drinking is associated with an increased risk “for at least seven different types of cancer, including breast (in women), colorectum, esophagus, liver, mouth (oral cavity), throat (pharynx), and voice box (larynx).”
But he neglects to mention a report issued just two weeks earlier by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that casts doubt on those claims. The report notes some of the health risks from heavy alcohol use but found almost no effects from moderate drinking.
“No conclusion could be drawn regarding an association between moderate alcohol consumption and oral cavity, pharyngeal, esophageal, or laryngeal cancers,” wrote the NAS report’s authors. The report also determined that “no conclusion could be drawn regarding the association between moderate alcohol consumption compared with lifetime nonconsumers and risk of colorectal cancer.”
Murthy’s recommendations further obfuscate the difference between heavy and moderate drinking. As Reason’s Ronald Bailey has noted, only 17 percent of the 20,000 alcohol-related cancer deaths cited by Murthy resulted from moderate drinking, meaning only around 0.6 percent of cancer deaths in America last year were attributable to moderate drinking.
Of course, there are downsides to drinking, especially in excess. It can cause organ failure, obesity, and all the health problems that come along with weight gain. In many ways, drinking is like casual sex: wildly enjoyable at the time but with a high potential for regrets.
But the fact that drinking is harmful to you has been known for centuries. America even once amended the Constitution to prohibit it. The critics’ reviews for Prohibition are in, and it turns out it was even worse than Joker: Folie à Deux.
If medical professionals want to make the case for people to stop drinking, there are myriad ways to do so, short of requiring a government-mandated label. But for progressives (who were the driving force behind Prohibition), nothing really happens in the world unless the government is there to do it.
This unquenchable thirst for social restructuring via government fiat is why Joe Biden inexplicably decided to court black voters by banning menthol cigarettes, thereby making smokers of color miserable in the process. It is why governments continue to attack vaping despite its relative harmlessness. It is why Obamacare ordered restaurants to begin labeling food with calorie counts, turning once enjoyable meals into math homework.
No doubt many people drink because they are depressed. But the know-it-alls in the federal government now want you to be depressed because you drink. They should remember what Stephen Fry once wrote about quitting smoking and drinking: “You don’t live longer. It just seems longer.”
Alcohol has been a vital part of American life literally since the day of the nation’s founding. Even the Puritans approved of a drink every now and then — the first ship that came from England and landed in Massachusetts carried more beer than water. In the old days, Americans drank all day, which can be the only explanation for the bizarre decision to put the nation’s capital in a fetid swamp.
And it is in that swamp where our national government continues to nag and berate us, securing an egalitarian society in which nobody will be truly happy until everyone is equally miserable.