My father was a proud veteran of World War II and participated in the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where countless Jews were murdered.  He never talked about the horror of it, except to recall how hard the ground was (as only a farmboy would) .  The fact that he wouldn’t talk about it and chose instead to focus on the hardness of the ground naturally made me even more curious.

As I learned more about incredible horror of it all, I was stunned to read actual justifications for it.  How could the murder of six million people ever be justified?  Obviously, it cannot — but it did introduce me to the notion that any horrible thing can be rationalized and made to sound reasonable.

The Carolina HealthCare System operates over 900 facilities including hospitals, nursing homes, and physicians offices.  According to The Daily Ticker, that huge healthcare system is already watching credit card transactions for purchases of cigarettes and unhealthy foodstuffs.  Imagine getting a phone call from the hospital that they see you’re still smoking cigarettes and need to stop!  Imagine sitting in your doctor’s office when he asks you to explain the purchase of some Hostess Twinkies on June 29th?

Here is the rationalization:  People with unhealthy lifestyles waste the money of healthcare insurers until they go on Medicare and then waste the money of taxpayers.  Why should either my healthcare premiums or my taxes paid be used to subsidize your affection for Twinkies?  To protect my dollars, Big Brother is watching your credit card transactions!  How about if they call you and ask about some local hotel charges, since AIDS is an expensive disease to treat?

Maybe, ranting about the loss of privacy is like ranting about the loss of a loved one thirty years ago, as privacy also died long ago.  Maybe, some things are still worth fighting for — even fighting like Don Quixote.  Killing innocent people is clearly wrong, but killing the human right to privacy is also wrong!

According to Austrian economics, if you want more of something, you should subsidize it.  If you want less of something, you should tax it.  If we want less smoking, we should tax it to the point that the cost of smoking cessation programs seem modest.  We shouldn’t pay for less smoking with less privacy!