Laura Bartz, Chapter 3, Question 5

 A passage that struck me as particularly interesting was when Wheelan asks the question "Should government protect people from themselves?" Before reading this chapter I would have said yes on things like making drugs illegal and taxing cigarettes and alcohol simply because letting people do what ever they want can lead to them dying and nobody wants that. But after reading this chapter I now know that governments shouldn't merely save people from themselves because having a lower mortality rate is a good thing, but because those actions that the government is forbidding or making it harder to do don't just affect the person who is doing them, but they in fact negatively affect people around them and even people around the world. Smoking a pack a day of cigarettes doesn't just affect the person who is smoking them, it affects everyone around them. People who breathe in the second hand smoke, insurance policies going up, and even killing wild life from eating the cigarette butts. The government isn't merely saving you from yourself, they are in turn saving everyone else from you.