Italy is getting creepily close to the death panels Sarah Palin warned us about in 2008.  The idea is that old people be allowed to die so younger people can use the medical resources (ICUs, ventilators, hospital beds) that the oldsters would have taken up.

This strikes me as contradictory.  The Left's Malthusian scarcity thinking should favor the elderly over the youthful.  The younger you are, the longer you will be using scarce government services, eating scarce food, drinking scarce water, burning scarce gasoline, using scarce electricity, and extending your already overlarge carbon footprint.

Society saves resources by letting you die young.

Or should that be "by seeing to it that you die young"?  You know, the thinking that undergirds abortion.  Kill 'em young, and they don't get to use bennies or otherwise suck up life force, leaving more for the rest of us to gorge on.  Older patients will probably die soon anyway, so they won't suck up as much life force in the long term as younger patients.

The apparent European mania for euthanasia complements this approach to social management.  It will eventually be decided, for the greater good, that only perfect babies (carefully defined by statute) will be allowed to reach age 10, at which time they will undergo I.Q. testing (weighted for diversity, sex, eye color, etc).  Those testing below 100 will be allowed to die (made comfortable until they starve to death).  Among those who survive, euthanasia clears the boards off at 60.

Simple.  Clean.  Scientific.  And no "death panels."  It will be written into law so that no one person has to bear the awful guilt of killing several hundred thousand humans deciding who dies every year.  That just wouldn't be fair.