DST: Use the Disruption, but Also the Resentment

At Fox News, Bill Korman, who spent 20 years in the U.S. Navy, explains why "I'm the only man in America who wants to keep daylight saving time." (DST)

While his attempt to defend the twice-yearly government-mandated resetting of clocks is thought-provoking and makes some interesting points, his selective focus on the good Korman realizes from DST conceals its bad and its ugly aspects.

Korman is correct that what he calls "controlled adversity" presents an opportunity:

There are 168 hours in every week. The time shift is the one moment each year when the entire country is prompted to re-examine how those hours are spent. It is, quite literally, a blank slate. Audit your mornings. Kill a bad habit. Add a workout. Reclaim an hour from doom-scrolling. Growth rarely happens in comfort, and comfort is exactly what routine provides.

Yes. Disruptions can prompt self-improvement, although Korman undersells the advantages routines offer when he implies that comfort is some kind of enemy of self-growth.

I strongly disagree: "comfort," or at least a degree of predictability is a necessity. (Complaisance is the enemy here.) Man, as a rational animal, plans ahead best when there is some degree of comfort and predictability. Indeed, as a fellow former naval officer, I would like to indicate that affording these to a society is the whole purpose of government.

Have fun planting crops, building a business, or making the next great breakthrough when you can't enforce contracts, criminals act freely, or foreign powers show up to enslave you or steal what you own. The courts, the police, and the military -- when restricted to their proper scope -- are good and necessary things. Ordering us around, no matter how small the matter, is outside that scope.

Before I finish my critique of the above, let me note that it is Korman's strongest point. His other points are that the time change is a symbolic boundary, and that it is, as a shared ritual, a unifying "agreement" for our society. (What about the changes of the seasons? What about fireworks on Independence Day? What about the Declaration of Independence?) Korman's other points might also sound good to many people, but they are the key to understanding the ugly of DST.

But before we do that, let's briefly remember the bad of DST, which I summarized some years ago in a RealClear Markets column:

"But the science --" you might say, as did I. Here, the Senate is only half-right. Switching does cause heart attacks, workplace injuries, and traffic fatalities.

But, according to a peer-reviewed 2020 position paper by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, permanent Standard Time is where we should land, because it's closer to our biological clocks. Over time, a mismatch can contribute to problems like obesity, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, and depression. [bold added]

You say that's bad, but that sounds ugly to me, Gus! I can hear you saying.

What's ugly here is that these needless increases are caused by our government's immoral and impractical intrusion into our routines. Contra Korman, who asks us to regard DST as a "gift" and as "permission" to "step into a higher-output version of ourselves," let me counter that our government exists, not to shower us with "gifts," give us "permission" to do things, or regulate our "output," but to protect our freedom to to live our lives as we each, as individuals, judge best.

It is bad, but unavoidable that anyone has health issues or dies, but it is ugly for the government to not only fail to protect our freedom to do something about those things, but to abridge that freedom and cause more misfortune in the process.

That is a steep and unacceptable price to pay for the small advantages that this unnecessary intrusion presents even when viewed as an (easily-replaced) prompt, symbol, or ritual.

As an American, I find the notion of the government sculpting me to be patronizing and offensive on a personal level, and dangerous to the fabric of our country.

While I salute Korman's attempt to use this government-planned adversity as a cue to improve oneself, I say he doesn't go far enough on that score. The regular intrusion of clock-switching in our lives should, like the income tax, prompt us to work to reclaim our freedom from the nanny state, rather than meekly accept its Leviathan reach or, worse yet, perpetuate it.

-- CAV