fuck thousands for a coffin. or hundreds for an urn. can i legally be burried in butcher paper?
can i donate my body to science and skip burrial all together?
i want my final action to be a big middle finger to the funeral industry picking on people in their weakest moments.
Most states have laws indicating you must involve a funeral director to ensure the.body is disposed of properly, and then define the licensure requirements for a funeral director to include the types of disposal they can oversee.
It means they don’t need to define every type of burial you’re not allowed to do, and there should be a qualified professional to ensure whatever you’re doing is okay before you do it.
The libertarian impulse to say that if it doesn’t hurt anyone it should be legal butts into the reality that every time we have that policy for body disposal things tend to go funny in unexpected ways.
No, I understand the need for laws around it, for people’s safety.
But the restrictions seem excessive, since it seems likely that there are only a few options for disposal that a funeral director can be licensed to do, rather than training them on what makes something un/safe and letting them use their judgement.
And strange that they basically made laws that say you must use this private industry. If you’re going to legislate that a particular service must be used, then that service should be a public service. But now we’re getting off topic lol.
The laws are usually amongst the oldest ones in a state and only revised pretty infrequently if someone has a particular issue. The dead person constituency is pretty weak, so the matter doesn’t get a lot of attention. Basically once they wrote down that embalming chemicals can’t be explosive (to prevent the coffin torpedo and general miguided insanity) there hasn’t been much need to update them.
In a lot of ways the funeral industry is better than others, regulation wise. You don’t need to do business with anyone. You’re dead. It’s illegal to act as a funeral director without a license, and the regulations are entirely imposed in the director. If you’ve got a body to get rid of, you don’t have to pay a funeral director. The government will take care of it pretty quickly if no one else will.
We’ve got similar restrictions on barbers. Except for the government giving you a haircut if no one else will. They don’t particularly care if you’re hairy.
I do agree though, a lot more basic functions of society should be fundamentally provided by the public. “Doctors” would have been a better, but less funny, example above.