• Britney Spears, 39-year-old singer and songwriter worth $60M, remains under 13-year conservatorship. She cannot manage her own money or her own career, get married, or even decide to remove contraceptive.
• Millions of homeless persons, at least half of whom are drug addicted and/or mentally ill, cannot be removed from streets, given medical care they reject, or even prevented from relieving themselves in public.

Either one of these reports, taken alone, should raise eyebrows.

Is the nanny state so powerful that it can force a grown, successful woman to use contraceptives and do other, equally intrusive things to her for uncertain reasons.

Or is the state so weak that it cannot force homeless persons into safe housing, give them needed medication, or even bathe them and stop them from soiling the streets?

Either report alone would raise important questions. But taken together they reveal inconsistency and self-contradiction of cosmic proportions. You’d have to be nuts to accept both reports without asking yourself what kind of country America has become.

   

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