Three clicks starting here will bring you to a very disturbing video shot by an Oklahoma woman as she stood a few yards away from her motionless husband while the police officers who apparently killed him accidentally based on a misunderstanding pretend he’s fine.  From her distance she continues to try to draw some response from him.  “Please, somebody tell me he’s alive.”

At this link is the latest development in the case of Justina Pelletier.  What the public knows, it discovers in pieces, around a court-imposed gag order, but it appears that when a young teenage girl who’d been receiving successful treatment at Tufts hospital in Connecticut for a debilitating, even deadly, disorder followed her doctor to Boston Children’s Hospital, some other doctor decided her problem was psychological, and the State of Massachusetts decided that her parents’ following Tufts’ advice amounted to child abuse.  The parents have had only brief visits with their daughter for a year, and the child is now going into foster care, not receiving the treatment that she needs.

Last week, I came across an account by a San Francisco techie who called 911 on behalf of somebody he passed in the street and found himself naked in solitary confinement overnight after a series of (let’s call them) aggressive misunderstandings by police and corrections officers.

I don’t relate these anecdotes to argue that government employees are necessarily any more prone to error and overreach than anybody else.  But three lessons should be drawn.

1. Working in government certainly doesn’t make people any less prone to error, overreach, and affronts.  For a stark indication, consider the suggestion that “the physical sexual abuse of students in [public] schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”
2. The nature of government, with its powers to confiscate property, imprison or even kill people, or otherwise render them helpless, is such that a wise society would severely limit its activities.
3. It’s reasonable to fear that access to such powers will attract people who want the ability to render others helpless, for one reason or another.