veiled4allah: Imagine the America you want to live in #6

Al-Munaqabah said:

Total comments: 996

Subject: Re: Imagine the America you want to live in #6

Perhaps I was sloppy in what I wrote or trying to be too clever, in which case I must apologize again. I certainly did not intend my post to be taken as a complete philosophy of government.

Congress, as the branch that makes laws, will be responsible for setting up any national health care system. That is why I focused on it and did not address the larger question of how our government is structured. The point I was trying to make (obviously poorly) is that in order for a national health care system to be passed, its supporters would necessarily have to form a majority of Congress. Theoretically at least, this means that supporters of the plan also form a majority of the population. And one of the basic ideas of our government is that the majority can make decisions for the whole and those who don't agree with the decision are nonetheless expected to abide by it. If you are saying that even in such a situation, it is wrong for people to be forced to do what they don't want to do, then you would seem to have a problem with one of the basic assumptions of America's governmental system. That's why I wandered off into talking about anarchism (or anarco-capitalism, if you prefer).

Also, the reason I mentioned taxes is that a national health care program by definition is funded by taxes. I assumed that it was the coercive nature of taxation that you didn't like, since you have been arguing that people should only pay for what they want to have and not pay for what they don't want. Taxation takes that choice away from them.

I want to stress again that I am not touting national health care as some kind of ideal. I have dealt with my share of bureaucracies and I have no love for them (although I have to admit that my experiences dealing with some very large corporations is not much better). I have said repeatedly that I think it is the least bad solution. It has drawbacks, definitely, but to me they are fewer and less severe than the drawbacks of other systems. I would certainly be willing to wait if it meant that I had health coverage. Getting it late is better than not getting it at all. We can easily get caught up in arguments about what is better and what is worse for people who already have health care. But for me the main point is to get health care for people who don't currently have it. As I said, getting it late is better than not getting it at all.


I'm now going to stray off topic again, because I hope that it will explain better where I'm coming from in talking about these issues.

You mentioned that taxation was a form of theft. If somebody stole your property, would you consider it theft for you to take it back? Or does the thief have no legitimate right to the property because he took it by force and therefore the use of force in taking it back is permitted? Usually, we do consider it wrong for the victim to take it back directly, but we permit him to use the police and the courts to get it back and for these entities to use coercion in doing so.

What I'm trying to get at here is that property rights have a moral basis. In terms of wealth, we have a right to our money because we earned it. If we took the wealth by force or fraud, we do not have a right to it and it can justly be taken from us and restored to its rightful owner.

I don't know how familiar you are with geolibertarians or Georgists. They believe that since no one worked to produce the land, the land cannot be rightfully owned by any individual person. To do so would be to take it away from others who have just as much right to it. The geolibertarians/Georgists believe that if a person does want to have exclusive control over a piece of land, they must compensate those whom they are taking it away from. The money would be collected by the government and distributed to the rest of society as a dividend or it could be spent by the government on things that society had agreed that it should be spent on. In the latter case, this is basically a form of taxation.

So geolibertarians agree with you that taxation on wealth earned by labor is a form of theft, but they allow taxation on wealth in the form of land. Basically, they feel that because ownership of land is not fully legitimate, taking some of it away in the form of taxation is legitimate.

I would take it a step further than that. Money that we earn is the result of our labor, but it is also a result of other factors beyond our control. I could work for many years on some project, only to have it wiped out by a natural disaster or other ill luck. Or I could stumble by chance upon something and need to put very little work into it at all. If it were completely under my control, everything that I was willing to work hard for would always come to pass. It doesn't. That's how life is. A religious person (as I am) believes that these things happen by the will of God and that our wealth is a gift from God. If He did not choose for us to have it, events would occur so that we did not have it (as in the natural disaster scenario).

In any case, under this argument, even wealth from labor is not fully and completely ours. There is always a degree to which it is unearned. And that is a degree to which it can be justly be taken without being theft. As a religious person, I bring God into the discussion, but this is not necessary, anymore than it's necessary in discussing land taxes (as a religious person, I believe that the land was produced by God and as such He would be the rightful owner).

We can make a purely secular argument like the geolibertarian argument about land. In regard to earnings, we are not taking away anybody else's right to anything so we would not necessarily have to give the money to those people. But overall, the same argument does apply. Wealth can be legitimately taken from what is earned by labor and spent on such things as society would like to spend it on just as it can legitimately be taken from what is in the form of land and spent on such things as society would like to spend it on.

I don't expect you to agree with me about this; you have given me a moral argument and I want to explain the moral basis for my own views. It's an attempt to explain rather than persuade.


I've already gone on long enough (yes, I tend to be long-winded at times) but I wanted to address one more point that you made. You said that if a majority of people really wanted to spend money on health care for the poor, they would already be doing so.

As any Econ 101 textbook will tell you, it's not that simple. There are a lot of things that people would like to do and are even willing to spend their money to see done, but that don't get done. Most often, they don't see how their own individual contribution would bring about any change. My econ text refers to these as transactional costs, the costs of arranging an agreement or contract or exchange of goods or money. If the transactional costs appear to be greater than the anticipated beneft to the individual, that person will not take action, even though they would be willing to.

You may be right, but it doesn't necessarily follow from what you said.

I haven't addressed all of your points, but I think that this comment is already too long as it is. Thanks to everybody who had the patience to read through the whole thing.