Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
(Post 506710)
We get the markets that emerge based on demand. The government then steps in and regulates them.
|
No market emerges without a government already involved. If you buy and sell something, you do it against a backdrop of law and enforcement that makes the market possible. The idea that you can somehow have a "normal" market that doesn't involve the government is a fiction.
Quote:
Rights and liberty are inextricably intertwined here, if not synonyms for purposes of this discussion. To suit you, I'll go with "liberty."
|
They may be intertwined in your mind, but they are different things. If you are locked up in a room, you are not at liberty to do much. You may or may not have a right to get out, but you don't have liberty. If you're locked up in a federal penitentiary, your rights under federal law are very relevant. If you're locked up because your brother locked the basement door and went to the movies, those rights are less important. Either way, though, you lack liberty.
Quote:
You have the liberty to purchase what you like.
|
Here is the crux: That "liberty" is utterly specious if the market gives you only one choice. It really isn't a liberty. It's a right -- a meaningless, useless right.
You are the guy, shipwrecked on a desert island without food or water, who says, this is great! I am finally free of onerous FDA regulation!
https://www.oen.org/wp-content/uploa...land_opt-1.jpg
Sebby at liberty to eat and drink whatever he wants,
and buy any sort of health insurance he pleases.
Quote:
in fact, it's a perversion of the concept of liberty (hence, I described your argument as sleight-of-hand earlier) to suggest producers of a product must create bespoke offerings because certain people want them.
|
Whose liberty? If you have a market that's going to tip, no one really has the ability to offer products that other people want to buy. That's not liberty.
Quote:
Take your concept of market "liberty" to its ends. Where does this "liberty" to compel the market to provide you products cease? You can claim infringement on your liberty because there's not a mortgage available for person with 560 credit, or there isn't full tort auto insurance available to a person at limited tort rates, or that there must be a new class of airline ticket between the current tiers.
|
Ah, the old slippery slope argument. Like the many, many other things that government does, deciding these questions involves balancing different, often incommensurable interests and reaching a compromise.
Quote:
You're advocating for exclusively consumer liberty, with removal of producer liberty.
|
Again, you are not reading what I'm saying. If you get rid of the requirement to offer maternity care (for example), insurers will not be able to offer it, because the only people who will buy it are the people who need it. The producer can't offer it, the consumer is less likely to be able to afford the care, the doctors and hospitals won't be able to provide as much care, and so on. All of those people are harmed in a real way that you are blind to.
Quote:
Taxes are an exception. The correct way to provide the consumer "liberty" you advocate is by increase of taxes to provide a Medicare expansion to provide insurance to people with pre-existing conditions.
|
This is pointless intellectual gamesmanship. You see a harm from having to give money to another private party, but not from paying the government? Fine, we'll set up a government broker that you have to use when you buy insurance, so the money goes only to the government. OK, so that's more gamesmanship. We'll set up single-payer, where the government provides the insurance itself instead of using private markets. Under your cramped concept of liberty, we are all freer without the option of using something like the current system, and being forced into socialized medicine to get maternity care. More "correct," more rights, but fewer choices and less actual liberty.
For the person who wants to buy meaningful health insurance, your concept of liberty is nonsensical.
There are some nice things we can't have without government regulation. For example, national defense, air travel, and Social Security. Good health insurance too.
So we could get healthcare reform by saying that if you want to drive on public roads, or use public water or electricity, you have to buy a certain health insurance. By your way of thinking, not a problem for libertarians because all of those things are "privileges."
Quote:
I didn't say I liked it, but the govt can exercise control over the use of that which it builds and owns. And note -- it does not require those without cars to subsidize the car insurance risk pool by nevertheless purchasing insurance. Nor does it require all of those insured to purchase maximum coverage policies. It allows the entirety of the marketplace to purchase cheap policies which extremely limit their benefits in the case of injury. Not unlike catastrophic health insurance plans.
|
The government certainly subsidizes those who drive cars by building and maintaining paved roads, which other people don't need. But that's not really the issue -- the point is, you're not even trying to defend these various rules for cars as libertarian. Once they become well established, you become blind to the things the government is doing and accept them as part of the background. In that way, you're conservative -- you don't object to much of what the government does, you just object to changing it.
Quote:
As to selfishness, you're right. Libertarianism is selfish. But considering the Left has ballooned our debt by making unrealistic promises and seeks to create a more robust welfare state which will sap dynamism, someone has to be selfish.* Yin, meet yang.
|
In this, too, you're a typical conservative. Instead of defending libertarianism, you attack the Left, which we weren't discussing.
Quote:
And all ideologies are incoherent. Yours -- something I suspect would resemble a European welfare state -- would wreck this country.
|
I don't think I have an ideology. I'm pretty pragmatic. I believe that markets usually work pretty well, and that government intervention is warranted when they don't. I also think that institutions produce better results when they make decisions with input from a variety of viewpoints -- that in itself is anti-ideological.
