Reflections on the Beaver State

This week's court ruling on the Oregon assisted suicide legislation provides so many opportunities for comment it is difficult to know where to start. The collapse of medical ehtics and/or Western civilization? The painful irony that is Anthony Kennedy, John Paul Stevens, and Ruth Ginsburg upholding the sacred principles of federalism? The laugh-out-loud dissent in which Antonin Scalia points out that Congress probably did not envision suicide as a legtimate form of "health care" when it passed statutes governing the prescription of powerful sedatives? A target rich environment, to be sure.

It would be petty to dwell on these ironies. Too easy, sitting Ducks, as it were. Dr. Potomac would rather take his (and your) precious time fully illuminating how the Oregon law that overturns several thousand years of human wisdom concerning the practice of medicine fits with the avalanche of illogic, denial and wishful thinking that from time to time seizes the state. Follow the story -- if you dare.

Chapter 1: The Tri-Met Honor System

In the mid-1980s, the denizens of the local bus system decreed an end to fare collections. In a fit of civic-minded lunacy, Tri-Met, which served hundreds of thousands of riders across the Portland-metro area, decided that the costs associated with collecting fares exceeded the revenue they generated. How this calculation was achieved Dr. Potomac cannot recall but he thinks the math would have been suspect even to the lower third of his high school algebra class. At any rate, it was decided that fares would now be collected on a sort of a don't-ask-don't-tell policy for public transportation. Riders who didn't drop their coins in the farebox were "assumed" to have purchased a pass elsewhere but didn't have to present one. Local and national news outlets hailed the program as the "next step" in mass transit, one that focused completely on the benefits of public transportation without sullying the concept with profit and loss statements.

Painful, isn't it? Even you, dear reader, can imagine the outcome of the scheme. Ridership skyrocketed, revenues plunged and red-ink, in an already heavily subsidized system, poured out of the Tri-Met offices into the streets. Fares had effectively been repealed but human nature -- you know, that part you heard about in your intro Econ courses called "the free-rider" phenomenon -- remained fully operational. Tri-Met was sinking fast.

Normal human beings would have bowed to defeat and reinstated the fares. But Oregonians are not normal, they are liberals. When confronted with indisputable evidence that the world is not as they wish it to be their response is completely predictable: double the bet. Also like liberals, they fell back on the coercive power of the state to attain their goal of a remade human nature. In this case, the Tri-Met board hired cops -- you know, public employees complete with generous salaries, benefits, and pensions? -- who had the sole purpose of staging raids on buses to catch fare-cheats. Dr. Potomac personally witnessed such a "bus-bust" complete with youths trying to scramble out of the bus windows to avoid capture. After a few months of the Tri-Met police state, a proof-of-fare policy was quitely reinstated.

Chapter 2: Free Bikes

Having learned nothing from the Tri-Met experience, in the early 1990s the City of Portland and a non-profit organization joined hands in a project that combined moral up-lift of the poor and the religious cult of environmentalism. In an effort to reduce traffic in the downtown core, the city and its non-profit partner decided to make bicycles available free of charge, and without locks, in special bike racks across. The bikes would be maintained by troubled youths from poor areas who, it was said, would learn a trade in bicycle repair. (You might well ask: how many bicylce repair-persons did the people of Portland need? Was the local community college undersubscribed in its bicycle repair classes? Were the pleasant folk of Portlandia being left with slipped chains and flat tires on the major thorough fares?) Users, it was thought, would return the bike to any one of the conveniently placed racks so that other car-averse Portlanders could have a turn.

Uh-huh. Well, it didn't turn out that way, of course. The bikes, hundreds of them, had a strange way of disappearing. It seems that the cash value of the bikes was somewhat greater than the non-cash benefits derived by riders or the youth who were building skills. Strike two for Oregon.

Chapter 3: Don't Kill Yourself -- Unless You're Really Sure

Twice now, by referenda, the People's Republic of Oregon has passed its physician assisted suicide legislation. Bad idea, of course, one Dr. Potomac thoroughly disapproves of, top of the slipperiest slope imaginable. What's really interesting, however, is the way Oregonians are responding to their own law.

One evening last fall as Dr. Potomac was driving home from a hard day SERVING THE PEOPLE, he chanced upon an NPR story concerning a curious (to them) phenomenon: a dramatic spike in suicides among elderly Oregonians. Turns out the old and sick were quite sensitive to the signal the public gave them in approving physician assisted suicide. The elderly, few of them terminally ill, were offing themselves in substantial numbers and without the aid of a doctor. The conventional means (carbon dioxide, gunshot and hanging) were quite adequate to the purpose and since the state had sanctioned it, why not?

True to form, Oregonians were agast. A sad, traumatic thing it is when one's mother or father or grandparent decides to shuffle off the mortal coil ahead of schedule. Something must be done, they cried, and so something was. (Can you guess? Wait for it.) Yes, the solution to the problem of elder suicide is a state-financed program...to prevent suicide among the elderly. "But, but," you might sputter, "it's unreasonable, illogical, comi-tragic." Yes, it's Oregon.