Government spending:

The National Institute of Health spends 10 percent of its budget on women's health issues and 5 percent on men's health issues. (1)

Cancer:

190,000 more men are diagnosed with a cancer than women each year. (10)

29,000 more men died of cancer in 1992 than women. (2)

Prostate cancer:

Prostate cancer is almost as serious for men as breast cancer is for women. 44,000 women die of breast cancer while 41,000 men die of prostate cancer each year. (3)

Every twelve minutes a man died of prostate cancer in 1997. (4)

334,500 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1997. (4)

"Since 1992, the number of American men diagnosed with prostate cancer has risen from 132,000 to 317,000." (3)

"The National Cancer Institute directed $1.8 billion toward breast cancer research and $376 million to prostate cancer research projects." (3)

"The government spends $250 for each man diagnosed with prostate cancer and about $2,000 for each death, according to the American Foundation for Urologic Disease.  It spends $3,000 on every woman diagnosed with breast cancer and $12,000 for each death." (3)

The Department of Defense spent "about $20 million for prostate cancer research and $455 million on breast cancer research from 1993 through 1996." (3)

[....]

Even the Dept of Defense spent more on women?  The people who do what the Defense Dept is there to do are mostly men.  But I digress.  Herein lies an example of why the cause of men's rights is inseparable from the cause of limited government.   

Most of the money that pays for the above research is taken from men, without our permission.  Then the government spends it unequally on women, because women have the most political clout.  We notice this, and we point out that they are spending far more on women than on men.   We should point this out, but should we also attempt to make them spend the health budget equally?  Is this how we can best improve men's health? 

The govt dresses itself as Robin Hood and takes our money, supposedly so it can help those in need.  Once they do this, they lessen our ability to give to whatever charities we choose.  If one of us discovered that a charity was giving unequally to women, he might choose a different charity.  But in our situation, we can't choose a different charity.  The money we can spare is taken and given only to one, and we have little control how they distribute it.  In response to this, we can demand that they distribute it fairly, but if we do this, we set ourselves against women who demand that they distribute it unfairly, and in women's favor.  Women naturally hold their hands out and demand support from others, whereas men are naturally self-sufficient, so we wind up in a contest in which we must do what is contrary to our nature, and we must do it better than those to whom it comes naturally.  We must out-beg the beggars, and we can't.

In contrast, suppose they don't take our money from us, and we can choose which charity to help, or simply to help ourselves.  Then the government is incapable of helping men or women, and in this situation, we have the natural advantage, because we instinctively support ourselves, and they instinctively look to others.  We can keep this advantage, or give it up of our own free will.  We can ensure that people have enough money to study prostate cancer, and we can find out why men die seven years earlier, because there's no one hanging on us.  If women want research done on breast cancer, they can damnwell pay for it, or we can help them, if we want. 

Unfortuately, the latter situation is not our situation, because we have allowed governemnt to get too big and too powerful, so those who can make the most noise are coddled at our expense.  The only way to stop this is to take away the government's ability to coddle, not to demand that it coddle us too.  We're not the ones who need coddling.  We can help ourselves and other men, if we aren't involuntarily saddled with the burden of helping women too.