"We demand a high level of scientific rigor to accept a medication, but we don't demand the same high level of scientific rigor to accept government meddling" that seems like fairly rational behavior right given one could be life threatening and one is a low level irritant that we feel like we can address at the next ballot box if we feel so strongly?
...and one is a low level irritant that we feel like we can address at the next ballot box if we feel so strongly?
But this is no longer true, for two reasons.
First, Congress has abdicated much of its power to regulatory agencies, which are where the actual regulations' details are determined. These bodies are not elected, so we can't vote them out. While it's true, in principle, that we could use the ballot to get Congress to claw back its power, or at least to influence the details, this would (a) take a really long time, and (b) is far too broad a brush to paint with. Being able to cast one vote every 2 years for my Representative, and one every six years for my Senator, is many orders of magnitude too gross a control to be able to influence specific regulations across the whole realm of governmental interest (suppose I hate the way the FDA is handling one thing, but love the way that the DOT is doing something else, etc.; how am I to influence all those factors with just two rare votes?)
Second, we're no longer able to determine with certainty what our government is doing, in order to exercise control over it as necessary. For example, just yesterday afternoon there was a story [1] on HN covering the government's efforts to actually rewrite the records of a court proceeding, so that we wouldn't know what had actually transpired in the court. And surely I don't need to go into detail about Snowden, FISA courts, National Security Letters, etc.
