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So your position is that if someone who isn't the government locks you in a room, your liberty hasn't been diminished at all? That's using the word in a way that makes no sense at all.
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Nobody, govt or otherwise, is inhibiting one's liberty here. Nobody is being "locked in a room," or told they may not purchase something. Somebody (the market) is failing to provide a product someone else wants.
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It's a little hard to tell, but I think what you're arguing here is that there is a meaningful deprivation of what I call liberty when the market doesn't give you meaningful choices, but that you advocate a system of legal rights in which the government should lack the power to do anything about it.
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There is no deprivation of liberty when the market doesn't give you choices. I'd like a Rolls Royce for $20k. Market says? (Insert Richard Dawson
Family Feud voice here.) "No." I want to buy a Tom Ford dinner jacket in day glo argyle. Market says: "No, again." Etc.
And the govt has the power to do something about a market that does not provide a service it deems important. It may provide that service itself.
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It's hard to tell why, since having argued above that we mean different things when we talk about "liberty," you just rely on the word without explaining what you mean.
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I've explained it exactly. It means you have the right to not have the govt unreasonably interfere with your activities. It is a negative right, and let's not pretend you don't know exactly what that means.
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I'm asserting a view of liberty which is about preserving freedom for individuals, including the freedom to make meaningful choices.
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That's an expansion which sounds nice, but is more utopia than liberty. It also leads to absurd results, as the limitations on what one could demand the govt compel others to provide him under the argument it is necessary to give him "meaningful choices" are illusory at best (if any could be argued to exist at all).
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So let me try to make it without using "liberty." My point is that if regulated in the way you propose, healthcare markets will not let insurers offer certain kinds of insurance, will not let consumers buy that insurance, and will reduce mutually beneficial transactions between willing counterparts (e.g., doctors and patients). All of these parties are worse off in materially obvious ways. In what way do you think they are better off?
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They are worse off. Citing the eminent philosopher and super-rationalist, Warren Zevon, "Life's terminal." You don't, under the concept of liberty, or rights, or anything else, get to tell the world it must provide you with "meaningful choices." That's nanny-statism on a truckload of steroids.
This is not an ideological point. This is based on recognition of the fact that innovation and dynamism are sapped, and society starts a rapid march to bankruptcy, when it starts thinking the state should make sure everyone has something like "meaningful choices."
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Dude, once again I am responding to something *you* said in *this* exchange. If a few hours have passed and you no longer wish to describe yourself as libertarian, just say so.
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I did not say I was a 100% Libertarian. I lean that way on certain matters, but socially, I'm possibly more liberal than you. Fiscally, I'm all over the place. I'd gut defense and shrink the govt to almost a size Grover Norquist would like. But I'd also support surgically wise interventions like Medicare expansion. I also loathe the Libertarian argument that our corrections can be better outsourced to private parties. I shift issue by issue.
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Why? Many people believe that markets do a better job of allocating resources and providing many goods and services than the government does. (I would have put you in that category.). E.g., the government buys fighter jets from Boeing et al. instead of building them itself. That's not scary.
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Sometimes they do, sometimes they do not. But that misses the point. The proper course for govt here is to expand Medicare to provide the services the market fails to provide. Compelling people to not only participate in a market, but also purchase certain policies, and insurers to provide certain policies, demands citizens engage in privity of contract with certain private parties. If you think there's no difference between the govt taxing a person and using those funds to purchase a fighter jet, and the govt telling a person he must contract with a non-govt entity for purchase of a certain product, you've lost sight of a necessary bright line between govts and corporations.
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Oh, come now. There's a world of difference between defining objective criteria that health care has to meet and saying that you need to buy it from any private party that meets those criteria, and having the government pick winners or losers in other markets (hotels, shoes, etc.). Calling that a slippery slope suggests you can't draw a principled distinction.
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I think we should be vigilant against both. And I'd argue being exercised about Trump milking the office for personal gain while supporting a law directing people to buy certain products from private insurers shows an inability to distinguish problematic one-off events from troubling systemic developments.
