Last Action Hero

Mark Steyn has another grand slam column out this week. This time he looks at the current rage to make the government the "last action hero" for a number of things, including "global warming" and the justifications for taking away individual rights. This one is a must read.

Everyone's "dealing with" global warming now. The G8 nations just devoted their summit to it. Time magazine has a big story this week headlined "The New Ac-tion Heroes." It's about Michael Bloomberg in New York and Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, photographed together looking either like a couple of mob enforcers or a gay couple who've just been told the church was double-booked for a Jerry Falwell memorial. But, either way, this heroic duo is not like these do-nothings in Congress, mired in partisan bickering. They're men of action, and they're getting things done.

What are they doing? Why, Bloomberg was "opening a climate summit" and "talking about saving the planet." All of it, including the bits west of the Holland Tunnel. And Schwarzenegger was "talking about eliminating disease. All of them. "I look forward to curing all these terrible illnesses," he announced.

As Madame Cornuel observed, no man is a hero to his valet. But fortunately it's a lot easier to be a hero to your typist, especially when it's Time's Michael Grunwald. "They're tackling not just the climate," he says, anxious not to give the impression they're a couple of slackers sneaking off for golf after lunch. No, sir. These action heroes are "doing big things that Washington has failed to do." Bloomberg, coos Grunwald, "also enacted America's most Draconian smoking ban and the first big-city trans-fat ban."

At one level, Bloomberg and Schwarzenegger have a point. Why wait for national or international action when a mayor or governor can just get on with it? But the assumptions underpinning Time's paean to the new action heroes all operate in one direction – in increased government regulation and restraint on individual judgment.

The argument for this is that the state has an interest in a healthy workforce: If you're poor, and you get lung cancer, you'll be filling up hospital rooms at public expense. If that's true, then the state arguably has a greater interest in you continuing to smoke and dying young: The ever-aging population of the Western world will be the biggest burden on state resources in the coming decades.

But in the broader picture it might be truer still to say that the individual, unlike the state, therefore has an interest in stopping and reversing the government annexation of health care – because that argument can be used to justify almost any restraint on freedom – and, in the end, you may not get the health care, anyway. Under Britain's National Health Service, smokers in Manchester have been denied treatment for heart disease, and the obese in Suffolk are refused hip and knee replacements. Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, says that it's appropriate to decline treatment on the basis of "lifestyle choices." Today, it's smokers and the obese. But, if a gay guy has condom-less sex with multiple partners, why should his "lifestyle choices" get a pass? Health care costs can be used to justify anything.

The nanny state is coming on strong – but if we examine places where it has been firmly in place for a number of years, we can see where it leads. Rationed health care and denial of services for people who choose to do anything the nannies deem wrong. There is rampant fraud in the "carbon mitigation" schemes the UN and the EU are running. There is deforestation going on at a staggering pace – in the name of saving the planet, mind you. Orangutans and humans are being killed so more biofuel can be produced. All in the name of what is good for the planet. As Steyn points out, a government that swears it is unable to stop the flood of illegals entering this country now appears bent on "fixing" the climate. Steyn also read what Vaclav Klaus wrote this week: "What is at risk is not the climate but freedom." You need only look at the "accomplishments" that Bloomberg brags about as proof of where this all leads.

The government as last action hero is the last thing we should want.