akuma587 said:
Sqrl said:
Whether or not someone is selfish is a subjective assessment at best - being selfish is after all different from demanding a say in how the fruits of your labors are used. Someone might be more than willing to share, for example, provided they are choosing to share and not being forced into it by a government mandate.
What is objective is that people have the right to be selfish as, legally speaking, we are gaurunteed the rights to life, liberty, and property. But no rights to healthcare are mentioned.
But even if the constitution had stipulated health-care specifically as a right afforded to all people the argument for a government control and payment of this right is quite weak anyways.
Unless you also wish to argue that the government must provide a gun to anyone wishing to exercise their 2nd amendment rights or a weekly newspaper column for their 1st amendment rights. You might have a right to access something but it does not mean you have the right to insist the government provide it for you.
This is notion of a right to be given healthcare is confiscatory - you want things confiscated from others (violating their rights) to supply rights to another. This of course does not have any basis within the constitution as you have a right to keep and bear arms but you do not have the right to confiscate guns from the gun shop to that end. Nobody has a right to confiscate the goods and services produced by another person because each person has a right to their property which both goods and services qualify as. I can no more demand drugs for the hypothetical right to healthcare than I could demand a gun or ammo from gun shop for the right to keep and bear arms.
What I do not understand is why liberals push for the government to legislate what is so clearly an ethical and moral issue. I mean the entire argument being made is that it is amoral and or unethical to ignore a person who needs care. Obviously nobody wants a man to die who could have gotten care - even if its a financial issue. What I fail to understand is why suddenly its acceptable for the government to legislate that moral and ethical position when things like abortion are tantamount to treason in the eyes of those promoting this cause. How can you advocate moral relativism while arguing that healthcare is an absolute moral right?
None of this even gets into the issues mentioned previously of whether or not national healthcare is any good to begin with (the evidence is pretty overwhelming that it is downright awful - to put it nicely).
More than any of that though I would ask how anyone can advocate
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You are misframing the argument for healthcare reform. It just as much relies on the fact that the private market is not providing resources efficiently and is dragging down the entire economy as a result.
A lot of it has to do with fiscal responsibility and the health of the overall economy as well. The proposed healthcare reform will do a great deal to reduce the amount of money the government will spend on healthcare through programs like Medicare and Medicaid in the future. Are you against the government spending less money?
Furthermore, the healthcare sector of the economy is growing at an unsustainable rate. Its on track to become 25% of our entire GDP while other countries are looking at half that number while giving better healthcare to more people. How is that an efficient allocation of resources?
Shouldn't capitalists want the market to be as efficient as possible, even if that means the government gets involved? Should private citizens have to defend themselves from attacks for foreign countries simply because some people will benefit more from national defense than others? Should private citizens have to pay for their own police protection simply because some people will benefit more from police protection than others?
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I'm not misframing it in the slightest - I'm highlighting the part that concerns me the most, namely the agenda being pushed by liberals for nationalized healthcare. I would certainly agree there is more to it than what I covered but I wasn't done (as I mentioned in the "(snip)" excerpt) and I don't have to talk about the whole issue to talk about some of it - that rule wasn't in the memo anyways.
In any case, capatalism and free markets are not about peak effeciency at all costs, that would be centralized government planning. Its about acheiving effeciency through natural selection - a process whereby you might experience enefficient forms and periods but by allowing the market to choose the path forward you acheive effeciency again while avoiding the pitfalls that come with allowing an agenda to shape the market.
This is why the auto-bailout is an affront to capatalism and free markets - the people and the market voted with their dollars to say NO to these corporations and the bailout declares that vote null and void in the name of "saving jobs". And then the same people decry capatalism - see they had to save those jobs! It doesn't work! No - you had to let those jobs go away and let the market set the direction is what you needed to do.
