Expressing outrage at the idea of asking permission of government
to disable air bags in our vehicles, J.L. Hermann asked in a Nov.
26 Viewpoints letter, "What happened to our individual freedoms?

Are we no longer allowed to make any decisions for ourselves?"

Fortunately, we no longer need hazard a guess in response. David
Kessler, recently retired director of the Food and Drug
Administration, has supplied the answer. In an article in the New
England Journal of Medicine, he wrote: "If members of our society
were empowered to make their own decisions... then the whole
rationale of the (FDA) would cease to exist. To argue that people
ought to be able to choose their own risks, that government
should not intervene... is to impose an unrealistic burden on
people."

Deciding questions for ourselves, even life-and-death questions,
is considered by the government to be an "unrealistic burden" on
its people. How convenient that an increasingly centralized and
tyrannical authority remains ever ready to remove the few
"burdens" of liberty which still stand.

To answer Hermann's first question: They have been stolen while
we slept. As to the second question: apparently not.

Wayne D. Holt
Houston