Non-Security related analogy: although it's being litigated, Obamacare is stating that it is in the people's interest that everyone should have healthcare. The gov't is implicitly saying this by fining (whether through taxes or otherwise) those who don't get it, thus encouraging us to get it. We say healthcare is in our interest both from an overt, people should be taken care of, but more importantly, because it's in the general interest for everyone to have healthcare: It is the uninsured that pose a significant externality upon the majority of people with healthcare since they lack preventative care that would treat most maladies in a more efficient manner. We are removing this externality by paying for it through Obamacare. Lets take this one step further, we are saying that it is in society's interest for people to be given regular physicals and check ups, pap smears and prostate examinations, because it makes it net-cheaper for the rest of society but also because we say people should just see a doctor. Thus, your precious liberals have already stated that they want people to see us naked because it's "whats best for us" and moderates have partially signed on because they think it's whats cheaper.
Security Analogy: If, by now, you understand what I'm hinting at (that is, the gov't is saying we should have doctors grab us and say cough because we think it's good and also because it might be cheaper for society at large) you are probably yelling, "I can choose not to get the healthcare" (and suffer the fine) or, "I don't have to get the physical or pap smear even if I'm paying for Obama care." Well, you can not only opt in to whatever search you want by the TSA, but can opt out of the search entirely by seeking an alternative mode of transportation. The searches that are protected by the constitution are not those that people can opt out of. You are free from the police taking you and forcibly searching you. On the other hand, the gov't has already created non negotiable searches in areas that are in the national interest: Can you opt out of a search when you enter a Court? What about the National Archives, US Customs & Commerce building, the National Gallery of Art, Military installations? Can you opt out of being searched when you enter Wall Street or any of the Federal Reserve Banks? What about when you enter the country? What about when the gov't forces sensitive industries (Power, telecom, Defense, Urban sanitation/water servicesm, etc) to incur increased costs (mind you, with no compensation) by mandating them to implace security procedures against terrorist and cyber attacks, should the gov't be allowed to hurt these firms this way? We/not rights extremists/society/America say yes, because we need to internalize the externality of security. This isn't a new thing and this isn't a pathway to dictatorship. If Russia does a denial of service attack, if China obtains industrial technology and produces same good without spending on R&D for it, or a plane explodes at a massive international financial installation, we all pay for it even if we aren't hurt/killed by it. It is better for gov't to intervene in this case and force either a limitation on our rights, a policy mandate, or a tax, in order for the majority to be benefited. The bill of rights was not intended for externalities of someone's use of their civil rights to infringe on others, it's not a blank check and never was meant to be.
Did I post this correctly Melkor? It seems like it's jumping into the middle of an exsting conversation.
ReplyDeleteAlso, has anyone tried to post pictures recently? I just tried to post a picture and get nothing but 'Server Rejected', no matter what kind of picture I try to post. I'll try again tomorrow.
I don't know about the pic issue, Bud-D.
ReplyDeleteDo you actually believe this Melkor or are you just trying to start conversation? I think this is a very thoughtful analogy and analysis. I could not state this as clearly as you can. It is a very interesting take. But I take issue with the very premise that you are starting from in the case of health care, let me try to state it in the terms that you did: that by people not buying insurance or having health care these people are forcing an external cost on society, or the "collective". Is this what you are saying: If I don't have health care then I am incurring a cost on society, so that the government needs to force people to have health insurance or pay a fine so as to internalize this cost to the individual as opposed to the individual externalizing this cost on society? (I won't address the fact that the health care bill is a disaster from the point of view that it addresses Melkor's issue.)
I do not accept the premise that society or the "collective" should be responsible for incurring this cost. I think that we should be going the other direction by reducing the government's role or function in the health care sector. I don't think the government should have ever allowed individual's health care cost to be externalized to the "collective". Note that the government helped to bring this about by getting people use to the ideal that another entity should bear the cost of their health care by making it mandatory that employers provide medical insurance to its employees. I think that people should have never given up their responsibility of providing for their own health care. Although that this is now the case under the current conditions. If we accept this premise and continue from this point, then I would agree with your stance that the government has a right to impose a fine or force people to buy health insurance. And this is the danger in accepting the above mentioned premise or starting point for this debate: this will eventually lead to the government being justified in controlling every aspect of our lives. Everything that we do affects our health. So if society is responsible for paying for our health care, then the government and/or society will be justified in controlling every action--eating habits, driving habits, sexual habits, what type of leisure activities we choose to do, drinking and smoking, and etc---by an individual that would incur a higher external cost through health care. This is the great danger in a people giving up the necessary responsibilities that are insepearable to freedom, of course their are two concepts of freedom that I won't discuss.
In reference to the security issue you brought up that forcing people to go through these security measures is not a path to dictatorship, I don't know if you intended this to refer to the health care issue but I will assume that it is. I do think that in the health care issue it is a slow and creeping march to dictatorship. When society wants to externalize what should be the individual's costs that should have never been externalized in the 1st place, this is a slow and creeping march towards a dictatorship of some sorts. This is why a people that doesn't want to bear the responsibilities that should be born by them as free individuals--providing for one's health and having to bear the consequences for one's actions etc--will eventually led to a situation where they will loose all of their freedoms and create conditions that will necessarily led to a dictatorship or a total control of their lives. But I agree that if people don't want to bear the cost of health care, then the government has every right to do what it is: controlling more and more of our lives to the effect of people loosing their freedoms. If you give up a responsibility then you give up a corresponding freedom. If this is the case then I would support forced physical activity and controlling people's diets and a dictatorship. Free people all throughout history have chosen to give up their responsibilities and freedoms for the sake of security.
ReplyDeleteMelkor: "It is better for gov't to intervene in this case and force either a limitation on our rights, a policy mandate, or a tax, in order for the majority to be benefited." I am assuming you are referring to the health care issue. Using the disguise of the "greater good" or the good of society or the good of the collective has been used to commit a lot of crimes against humanity. And in reference to the health care issue and to some extent the security issue, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of it's victims may be the most oppressive." C.S. Lewis. Also on your point, just about everything that an individual does incurs some cost on society as a whole. This justification for the government to do away with our freedoms when our freedoms incurs cost on society has no bounds and can in theory be used to completely control us.
On the security issue, I would agree that the government has a right to search individuals that are traveling by air. The question is to what extent? And do people really have an option to opt out of flying? I will try to address this aspect latter
Great response Jeff. Interesting that the liberal Melkor can't even make a post face to face.
ReplyDeleteI thought you nailed it when you said,"If we accept this premise and continue from this point, then I would agree with your stance that the government has a right to impose a fine or force people to buy health insurance."
The TSA issue is interesting (people are getting naked at the airport in protest). It is hard for me to see the analogy between the TSA issue and Obamacare. I know they both have to do with the government infringing on our lives but I don't understand where Melkor is going with his comparison of the two.
OK, it must have been them, not me, because I can post pictures now. Melkor, that looks like a rake in your hand. Doing the Fall cleanup?
ReplyDeleteMy opinion is that you can't compare the two because, in my learned reading of The Constitution, the Federal government has a right to do things that secure the country against enemies, foreign and domestic, but does not have the authority to tell me what to eat, or how often to get my colon probed or make me buy Federal insurance. That matter is left to the states. Whether federal experts, or the majority of people in the United States, or the majority of doctors in the AMA think I should get periodic checkups or eat right or not is irrelevent. The Federal government has no right to dictate these things to the citizens. There are lots of other things that we already do put up with that we shouldn't be putting up with either, probably, because, as you point out, so many people think they're good things, whether allowed by the Constitution or not.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the TSA airport scans & gropes, I think generally, this is within the scope of the Federal government's constitutional mandate of authority, and like it or not, we have to put up with what they decide: protecting us against enemies. In opposition to that though, we can say that we ('we' here means Citizens of the United States, not foreigners or legal or illegal aliens) have the right to be protected against unreasonable searches and seizures. It certainly can be argued that these gropings and body scans are unreasonable.
What most critics of the TSA procedures are saying is "look at El Al". How come the Israelis don't need to do this? The answer is clear: these gropes and body scans are being done purely in homage to Political Correctness, because using our brains to figure out who may be a threat to us is not allowed in the United States. We must stick our head in the ground and pretend babies and grandmothers are as big a threat as young Muslim men. This is the grounds that the new procedures can be fought on. Use the brain God gave you. Profile and quit punishing everyone else and playing into the ghost of Osama's hands.
I think Bud-D's point about the right of the government to not force people to buy health insurance or tell people how to eat is a valid one, but I think it is somewhat mute, sadly, since many of the things that the government has done and is currently doing are not mandated in the Constitution. This has come about in part due to people viewing it as a "living document" that needs to be continually reshaped and "brought up to date", this started with good old Teddy Roosevelt who said "to hell with the Constitution when people want coal". The interstate commerce clause and the general welfare clause being two parts of the Constitution that has been streched to expand the powers of the Federal government. (I am not an expert on the Constitution.)
ReplyDeleteI have also read that the new screening methods aren't that effective as they can't detect anything hidden in a body cavity. And that the Israel model won't work in America do to the fact that Israel is much smaller than America.
And on the overall security issue, it shows how America is becoming a police state although it is out of necessity.
I think the health care issue shows how that when a people are willingly to give up some of their responsibility, which is inseperable from freedom, for taking care of their selves that this eventually and necessarily leads to the establishment of despotism or tyranny. I agree with Melkor that if individuals by having given up a necessary responsibility required for freedom which results in that responsibility, and the cost associated with that responsibility, being externalized to the government and therefore the "collective, then the government does have a right and will eventually out of economic necessity be required to control more and more of individual's lives to keep cost under control. The people have a choice. Freedom and responsibility or security and tyranny. People can't have it both ways: having their health care provided for by the government and the "collective" and at the same time being able to keep their freedoms.
I do think that people have to some extent been coerced into giving up some of their responsibility by well-meaning and good-intentioned politicians and leaders.
Both the security issue and the health care issue are good indicators of where our nation is headed. A system of control, yes I know the phrase is simple, is being set up that can be used under the control of a despotic leadership to control a people." Such a benevolent system that provides for people's welfare leads to economic ruin. When such an economic system collapses while all of the administrative elements remain, who will be in charge of such a system that has such powers that our system in creating for itself?
As Hayek said in "The Road to Serfdom after Twelve Years", "the most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people. This is necessarily a slow affair, a process which extends not over a few years but perhaps over one or two generations. The important point is that the political ideals of a people and its attitude towards authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political institutions under which it lives. This means, among other things, that even a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that new institutions and policies will gradually undermine and destroy that spirit." This is seen in the people giving up or being coerced into giving up their responsibilities as a free people leading towards a cultural rot that will eventually lead towards a people moving away from freedom.
ReplyDeleteAnd "I have never accused the old socialist parties of deliberately aiming at a totalitarian regime, but" What I have argued in this book, and what the British experience convinces me even more to be true, is that the unforeseen but inevitable consequences of socialist planning create a state of affairs in which, if the policy is to be pursued, totalitarian forces will get the upper hand. I explicitly stress that 'socialism can be put into practice only by methods of which most socialist disapprove' and even add that in this 'old socialist parties were inhibited by their democratic ideals' and that 'they did not posses the ruthlessness required for the performance of their chosen task'."
We are seeing socialist planning occurring here in America today: health care, auto industry, finanice industry, and all of these being planned under the guise of the environmental movement.
I don't know much about the IMF, but I read this article http://mises.org/daily/4831 and it stated that the main founder of the organization was a known communist spy. I looked this up on Wiki and from a book I had. Another founder of it was Keynes. The IMF could be a good organization but I am a little skeptical about it considering its early foundations. Why is the IMF lauded as a good institution on this blog?
ReplyDeleteAlright, let me clear a few things up. This post was based on an email that I sent to a liberal friend of mine who is a crazy ACLU rights freak. I used the Obamacare analogy to equate something that she cares for "Gov't doing what's best for us" and the more moderate, "Gov't is saving us money" arguments in order to justify the TSA posts. I discuss the issue of externalities in order to frame what Healthcare and Security are in basic terms. the best way to avoid the externalities imposed by denying preventative care isn't healthcare, it's getting rid of the requirement that hospitals have to treat uninsured sick people.
ReplyDeleteWhen I referenced the road to dictatorship, I was pointing out where the federal gov't has specified what is a national security interest and has limited our rights in order to protect us (and nothing sinister has happened). Searching people who enter a court hasn't lead to dictatorship, nor has the arbitrary searching of those who want to look at the Constitution or Declaration of Inde.
Remember, no one's rights under the constitution are absolute. We have limited all of them so that one's exercise of one's rights doesn't infringe on someone else capacity to do the same; this being the principle Mill's Harms Analysis that is the pillar of Liberal Democracies.
Melkor said "Searching people who enter a court hasn't lead to dictatorship, nor has the arbitrary searching of those who want to look at the Constitution or Declaration of Inde.
ReplyDeleteRemember, no one's rights under the constitution are absolute. We have limited all of them so that one's exercise of one's rights doesn't infringe on someone else capacity to do the same; this being the principle Mill's Harms Analysis that is the pillar of Liberal Democracies."
True. The question is, where to draw the line between security needs and personal rights against unreasonable search & seizure. I think the government, generally, has the right to do what it's doing here. But, does it need to do it as it is doing it? I think it is almost purely PC-ism that is driving it to do it this way.