So the past couple days I’ve been in a few debates online with some closet Socialists.
The argument came when I defended Ron Pauls rejection of the 911 first responders health care bill. I did so on ground of freedom of association and private property.
So the debate is between those who favor the passing of this bill, and me (the only one) who could see reasons for not passing it.
Me:
While I can certainly see the argument for the passage of this bill, I also understand why individuals such as Ron Paul would be against this legislation.
The government doesn’t have any money. It must first steal it from the private sector. So from a purely property rights stand point, any kind of taxation is arbitrary theft regardless of the merit that it’s suppose to fulfill. Of course we may try to persuade an individual to donate to the charity providing relieve (in this case the Feal Good Foundation), however stealing their property through ultimately what evolves into physical coercion to give to another is a violation of property rights.
Second, governments are inherently inefficient. Private business and charities do much better than bulky bureaucratic governments at providing the goods and services the economy needs. Who exactly will reieve the government money? Those who meet the necessary requirements according to arbitrary rules. Private charity knows how to allocate the money more effectively. Governments do not.
An analogy is suitable. Do I agree with the KKK or Back Panthers? Certainty not. Will I fight tooth and nail to allow them to have freedom of speech? Absolutely. In other words, do I agree with those who choose to look the other way while their fellow brothers and sisters are getting sick and dying? Do I respect people who choose to neglect those who sacrificed their own lives to help others? No. Will I fight to allow these same people to do with their property what they wish without arbitrary coercion and confiscation? Yes. I have to take this stance because of my believe in property rights.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with private charity providing for health coverage of the sick and dying.
I’m not being a hypocrite here as I myself donate to the Feal Good Foundation whenever possible.
With all this said, I will concede to the fact that 911 is a unique situation in which I can see the strong arguments for the passage of the bill.
Socialist 1
So many things wrong with your argument that I don’t know where to start:
any kind of taxation is arbitrary theft …
No it is not! I pay my taxes willingly knowing that a large portion of it is spent on services that I take for granted on daily basis (roads, clean water, fucking electricity… I do have many problems with how it is wasted on wars and spying and torturing people though. But that is a different story) The government provides a framework within which the private sectors and charities mentioned in your post can exist and thrive. And to do that it needs money. Taxing, if done properly, is indeed a very effective mechanism for individuals to ensure that the government is properly funded and able to function properly.
Private business and charities do much better than bulky bureaucratic governments
Wrong! private businesses and charities usually work in smaller scales, that is why they have less bureaucracy. Once you move up to a national scale, bureaucracy becomes inevitable in order to keep checks and balances. You really don’t think NASA could run more efficiently by individual donations?
You mentioned Feal-Good foundation. I have great respect for these individuals, but I doubt enough money for treating even a handful of 9/11 cancer cases can be raised by individual donations. Again, it is about the scale. We are dealing with hundreds, maybe thousands of 9/11 first responders who are facing a variety of health problems, including cancer, which is very expensive to treat. And that is exactly why we need the government to step in and make a plan for treating these heroes. Yes, allocating millions of tax $$ paid by people like me and you is going to be part of that plan. Your local charity is not going to do it.
I could get into details, but for zealots of the Libertarian craze (including Ron Paul, though I respect him for his anti-war and personal-freedoms stance) I’d just suggest living in Somalia for a few weeks – a libertarian heaven: no functional government – and see how those glorious free market principles are working there.
Me:
Certainly if we are to approach this topic logically and intelligently we must stay consistent with our arguments. This is something which I will try to do.
After reading your reply, you seem to be implying throughout that my statements above implied an Anarchistic society of some sort with no formal state. While I do have sympathy for an Anarcho-Capitalist system, this is not something which I feel comfortable associating myself with. Personally, I view government as a necessary evil. In this regard, you could call me a Minarchist.
Now deducing from this, I too believe a formal government can be entitled to provide the services of roads, water distribution, ect. Being taxed for this purpose is, for me, ok. However this does not eliminate the fact that when the government “taxes”, the funds will be at the mercy of a sole arbiter. One single organization which in all it’s wisdom and altruism knows how best to use it. In this regard, I believe the case for an Anarcho Capitalist system should be taken seriously.
The fact that you agree to be taxed for roads and electricity doesn’t mean that your neighbor down the street concedes to it. You could say that well if he had a sense of morality or responsibly he would. This however is besides the point. The fact is, his right to voluntarily associate and make contracts with whomever he wishes is being violated. In short, his property is stolen. Like I said above, this idea of privatizing things like roads, electricity, water, ect is all closely examined in the Anarcho-Capitalist literature and I recommend you look at it if you’re curious. There’s a wonderful book by economist Dr. Robert P. Murphy called “Chaos Theory”.
Business in a free-market conducts their action based on profit and loss. If NASA was a private firm, it certainly would be more efficient. If it was not, it would go out of business. Governments don’t have to worry about going out of business. They are not subject to the profit and loss system. NASA doesn’t have to worry about pleasing anybody but themselves, not to mention competing with anybody else. Keeping this in mind, a body set up to distribute the funds to dying 911 first responders won’t be subject to possible consequences when it’s found that the money in its entirety doesn’t always “make it” to the final recipient.
You say you suspect not enough funds could be raised by private charities. I highly disagree with this. Did you know that in 2008 Ron Paul raised millions of dollars for his campaign? This all came from private citizens, chipping in to help their fellow brothers and sisters in a cause they believe in. Peter Schiff did the same just recently in his run for Senate. I entirely reject the idea that a private charity couldn’t raise the necessary funds. We all are adults here, we don’t need the government to be our daddy.
As for Somalia, according to Michael van Notten in his book “The Law of the Somalis” Somalia has vastly expanded their exports since 2001, their telecommunications industries offer competition in serving the citizens, it’s economy is in fact stronger than it’s neighbors Kenya and Ethiopia, and, most importantly, the Somalian shilling has become far more stable in world currency markets leading to a strong foundation for future economic prosperity.
This whole subject boils down to this. We all agree on one thing: Those first responders affected on 911 by the unhealthy working conditions need medical assistance. The part we disagree on is how this assistance should be given. I personally believe it could be done voluntarily without resorting to coercive government taxation and could be done very effectively if awareness of organizations like the Feal-Good Foundation was sufficient.
You could certainly state that the very people who caused the illnesses in the first place by saying the air was safe to breathe (EPA), should be forced to pay out compensation for their lack of insight or even purposeful neglect of analysis. I would agree with this. But instead of forcing the government to tax it’s citizens, why don’t we sue Christine Whitman and her advisers instead? Remember that the White House put pressure on the EPA to delete cautionary information about the air quality in their reports. We can sue these people as-well for their fraud and what essentially is murder. This solution is not a violation of property rights, and is a free-market approach to solving our problem.
You could argue that the above process would take precious time we don’t have in helping give assistance to the dying. I will concede to this.
Socialist 1
There are several topics, and if we want to get serious, we should narrow the scope of our discussion a bit. Here they are:
(By the way I did not down-vote you comments. I think this is a very healthy discussion).
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You agree that government is some sort of necessary (evil or not), but your objection seems to be that those in charge have too much power in deciding how to allocate the funds (from taxation or whatnot) to various causes. I think that is the whole point about democracy and government oversight: so that we the people can have a say on how the tax money is being spent. To make things more complicated, majority of individuals have limited technical knowledge of economy, science, engineering and medicine; at some point we’ll have to rely on the opinion of experts on different fields on how and what to spend the money on. I hope we both agree on this.
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You argue that since my next door neighbor doesn’t want to chip in for the road, electricity and water, he should not be taxed. I think you are missing the point about the basic untold agreements that exist among people living in a community. When my neighbor reaches his phone to call 911 in a medical or fire emergency, he knows fully well that people like me and you have chipped in to make the infra structure of fire departments and emergency rooms possible. This can be only done efficiently in a scale beyond the abilities of a single private entity, where reliability and responsibility take precedence to monetary profits.
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I mentioned NASA exactly because they don’t make profits, and they can’t run on donations. The kind of profit we get as a whole is a long term prosperity for us and future generations, and no private company would be willing to spend billions on basic research in order to advance science for the humanity as a whole. This is a point that a lot of Libertarian crowd tend to miss.
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The Ron Paul campaign example you gave: I really hope you don’t think this is something that can be practiced on daily basis. Just think of the enormous amount of man-hours spent to mobilize an army of people knocking on doors, writing letters, making ads, the blimp… You really think this kind of operation can be done on daily basis for all kind of national emergencies? Ron Paul campaign was “exciting” for many people, especially the youth, and that is why they were able to collect millions. I assure you that the images of dying first-responders are nowhere as exciting, so even if we had enough volunteers, we couldn’t raise as much cash as was done for RP, although the need is much higher. Besides, the public has a short attention span, and you can’t run two such operations at the same time. There are so many other flaws with this model that I hope you won’t consider this example as a standard protocol.
To get back at the main issue discussed in this thread: I agree that our main disagreement is that I don’t believe addressing issues of national scale, such as 9/11 responders, can be or should be dependent on voluntary work, both for moral and technical reasons – although I agree voluntary work can be a part of it. I believe it’d be a perfectly legitimate decision that the tax money collected from all of us (including those Libertarian or Republican brethren who wouldn’t chip in otherwise) be spent for treating 9/11 responders, or addressing similar emergency or non-emergency issues. I am glad you are partially open to this idea, based on the last sentence in your comment.
Me:
First I want to thank you for maintaining civility in your second response, I feel it allows for a healthy discussion like you mentioned. Also I want to say that the stance I have right now on this issue is that 911 could certainly be considered an exception to my views of private property and freedom of association. However just because I take this stance does not mean that other individuals who think like me (libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, minarchists) hold the same views. I want to state that I reject the idea of being labeled anything. I am an independent thinker, that is all.
Unfortunately I do have a couple things to say about your first point regarding Democracy. The US is not a democracy despite what mainstream writers, media figures, and politicians propagandize. The US was founded as a Republic. The founding fathers like Madison were strictly against a Democracy, as Madison puts it:
“Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
To quote Jorg Guido Hulsmann,
“Democracy does not work. It can not work, because every man is free. He cannot transfer his inalienable life and liberty to anyone or anything outside himself. When he tries to do this, he tries to obey an Authority that does not exist.”
We The People do not have a say in how our tax money is spent. We can see this empirically in the last 10 years especially. You seem to contradict yourself in your first point. You seem to imply that Democracy is right because it gives a voice to We The People, yet you concede in the next sentence in saying that We The People actually do not possess the intelligence to comprehend the important issues. If this is the case, why allow We The People to vote? Certainly if we don’t have enough brain power to make intelligent decisions ourselves, We The People cannot possibly be smart enough to vote in the right politician, especially if we don’t understand the issues.
“the basic untold agreements that exist among people living in a community”
Here’s where I think we disagree. You seem to imply through this statement that by the very fact of existing in a community, or being born into one, that there exists implicit contracts between said community members. The point I want to make here is that when did person A decide to “join the community”? Or better yet, when did I decide to join the US government “club”? The problem comes when deciding whether or not you have a choice of “quitting the club” or “quitting the community.” For the sake of argument I’ll use an example from professor Walter Block. Lets look at slavery. Slavery wasn’t all bad right? You got your gruel, you had your shelter and security, it was a “gig”. The problem with slavery is that you couldn’t quit. If you could quit, it wouldn’t be considered slavery.
Sure when your neighbor calls 911 he knows very well that the 911 services are made available by the US Government club. I would argue that he should have a choice of whether or not he wants to use the US Government’s services or not. You make the point that it is only through a scale larger than a private firm which these services could be provided effectively. I disagree with this. Government services, unlike private business, is always undergoing restrictive measures. To give an example, take city water. Government in some cases ensures individuals do not “exceed their water consumption”. This is the exact opposite in the free-market. You would never see a business telling their potential clients to restrict the consumption of their product. They would in fact search for new methods of production upon seeing demand for their product increasing.
I reject the idea that NASA or a similar space program couldn’t be run on private donations and private charities. You state that no private business would be whiling to provide billions of dollars to support it. Who’s to say it would need billions of dollars? Certainly there isn’t a gun pointed to the head of potential donations. People could voluntarily choose to donate what amounts they felt necessary. Even if we concede to the idea that private charities would not be enough to sustain an organization like NASA, who’s to say that it needs to be? Remember, government has arbitrarily decided how much money to be spend on NASA, not individuals. If NASA was a
private firm relying on donations, it would progress at the pace in which individuals in the country deemed satisfactory. Just because we spend billions now doesn’t mean we would have to in the future. Also, if the income of NASA were to fall dramatically because of reduced private contributions, economically we could see what would happen. Prices for factors of production such as steel (or whatever metal they use), technician wages, glass, tools, nuts bolts, all of these things would be reduced in price because of the decreased demand. Therefore it would actually benefit the space research.
I don’t assume that the Ron Paul campaign could be sustained daily, or would it need to be. Monthly, quarterly, or annually would work fine. You seem to be making the point that there exists a difference in the motivation of people to donate to a political campaign as opposed to a national emergency situation like sick first responders. I see no difference myself. Why should there be one? In fact I would say that providing health care for all of the first responders trumps a Ron Paul campaign in certain regards. The pictures of dying first responders are not “exciting” in the same sense of electing a freedom loving president, of course. However the pictures of dying first-responders are very emotional and generates great motivation to help those in need. This can be said about people wanting to sacrifice their life to help innocent victims of war. The idea of dividing a line between “motivations” is arbitrary. I personally become very motivated to donate and help first responders when I see pictures of them and hear about their struggles, and do so regularly.
I feel there is a great deal of hypocrisy within people who voted for this bill and yet have not donated a single penny in the past 9 years to actually help the sick and dying. I’m not implying of course that you are one of them, but I’m sure that there are many shady politicians who this does apply to, and are only voting for this bill in order to receive baseless praise for their sick and twisted endeavors to win popular attention, not to mention votes.
Socialist 2:
Regarding healthcare it really comes down to whether you feel an individual in an advanced society such as ours has a right to healthcare. I personally do and that being the case we could provide universal coverage and probably spend less money and certainly not more than we do now. Estimates of 4-5 billion dollars Per Year for administrative costs is just not money well spent. In addition there is an inherent conflict of interest in for profit insurance companies deciding on how to provide healthcare. Of course if you don’t believe that we have a right to healthcare then I guess it doesn’t matter. However, remember a very large percentage of bankruptcies in our country are a direct result of healthcare and by people who thought they had good insurance.
Me:
A couple reasons why I must object to your reply.
We both agree the US can be considered an “advanced” society however vague that notion is. Lets assume for sake of argument that you mean economically advanced.
The US became economically advanced because of Capitalism. Capitalism is characterized by private ownership in the means of production, we must keep this in mind.
Through the centuries the people of the US worked hard, accumulated capital, and invested this capital to produce more and more capital goods. These capital goods allowed our ancestors to be more productive in their labor output, resulting in higher wages and declining prices for consumer goods. This process increased the standard of living of everyone involved, and was initiated through savings, hard work, and sacrificing present consumption for that of the future. This was all made possible through the preservation of private property rights, and the highlighting of individual liberty in regards to ethics.
This is economically how we became an advanced society.
Now I reject fully the idea that individuals under any system has a right to the goods and services of others. This is a direct violation of the law of association and amounts to the extorting of other peoples property through the barrel of a gun. Allowing one group to gain at the expense of everyone else is ethically wrong in my opinion.
If we assume, as it seems you do, that individuals in an “advanced” society have a right to health care, why don’t we extend this and grant everyone the right to high quality food? After all, being under a proper diet can be considered a health choice. If we want to care to everyone’s health, why don’t we give everyone this access? Why stop there? Let’s give everyone the opportunity to travel the world. The world is such a aesthetically beautiful place, it would be a shame if everyone didn’t have an equal opportunity to excavate and explore themselves.
The point is, is that someone must pay for these goods and services. The socialist idea of “equal access to health care” is inviting on the surface, however the argument collapses as soon as you investigate it further.
Economically, if everyone had access to health care through a government organization, the quality of health care would plummet drastically as the demand exceeds supply. In a rush to try to service everyone, quality must be sacrificed for quantity. This is exactly what you see in places like Canada.
A real solution to the health care problem in the US lies in freedom.
Economic professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe suggests four simple steps.
- Eliminate all licensing requirements for medical schools, hospitals, pharmacies, and medical doctors.
- Eliminate all government restrictions on the production and sale of pharmaceutical products and medical devices. (Eliminating the FDA)
- Deregulate the health insurance industry.
- Eliminate all subsidies to the sick or unhealthy.
Socialist 3 Responds to my above reply:
Let’s give everyone the opportunity to travel the world.
Please, 
Health care and food are essentials. We are not going to agree - ever. No worries.
The question here is: Do you think the the taxpayers should pay for the medical costs of the first responders? I do.
Me replying to Socialst 3 above:
The point I was trying to make is that if you want to redistribute wealth for health care, why not for universal world travel or universal access to high quality food?
If you do concede to universal health and food, then be brave enough to say you favor redistribution of wealth, because that’s what it is.
Socialist 3:
You betcha. The corporate fascist, terrorist government we now have is a result of deregulation. the elimination of the “fairness doctrine”, media and corporate consolidation, which has resulted in the biggest transfer of wealth in history.
Without government regulations, that is the inevitable result. Free, unbridled capitalism is Fascism.
Me:
So you do favor redistribution of wealth? You kind of switched topics there.
Fascism is violent restriction of individual liberty.
Free market capitalism is voluntary association under the division of labor. Individual freedom.
Socialist 2:
Yeah I know how this country developed and now the mature companies we built on the backs of the US work force have outsourced our jobs to slave wage countries. Not democracies with long hard fought saftey, pollution, honest wages, regulations, just mass population centers where anything goes. So don’t preach to me about Capitalism. You may think the system is about an exchange of goods and services but the economic model really exists for the oligarchies plain and simple. The bad news is they won’t need the masses much longer. Less than 50 years IMO. What if China grows it’s permanant workforce to 200 million, a fraction of their population, who’s going to compete with that? India just behind them. Under the current system with respect to the current population there will never be enough jobs. Something will have to change the system or the number of people. If we were to scrap the economic model and build a better system with everyone making real contributions to society then yes we could most likely work a couple of days a week and have good food and travel the world. Think of all the human energy going to waste everyday, think of all the wasted energy we all put forth each day that has no real value to humanity. The truth is the elite doesn’t want you to know what is really possible because they want to live like kings and queens as they always have. The beauty of our democracy was that the average guy could obtain some real opprotunities and have a pension, a vacation, send his kids to college, even be the sole breadwinner. This was the short lived miracle which is evaporating quickly. I don’t think we are ready anytime soon to create a new system, but I do think if we don’t move in that direction then the market solution handed out by the elite won’t be pretty.
The sports team hats we buy in the mall for $28 have a labor cost of $.14 that’s 14 cents each in Bangladesh. The people who earn the 14 cents are starving and feel their problems would be over if only they could earn about 28 cents. This is an example of capitalism in today’s global form.
Me:
All of these things you mention which are supposedly defects of Capitalism are in fact because of government interventionism. The free-market is not to blame.
There is no such thing as “not enough jobs”. As long as we live in a world of scarcity and in a world where we want more, there will always be work to do.
“Think of all the human energy going to waste everyday, think of all the wasted energy we all put forth each day that has no real value to humanity. The truth is the elite doesn’t want you to know what is really possible because they want to live like kings and queens as they always have.”
This is nothing but Socialist propaganda. If this is what you truly believe then I humbly suggest, as-well as the poster above, you openly state that you’re in favor of redistribution of wealth and the public ownership of the means of production. You say that the elite don’t want us to know what’s possible? Well it seems like you’re the omniscient Socialist dictator which knows precisely how all of society should be structured, lets hear your utopian plan, sir.