If you plan to take your chances on libertarianism, leave mine on the table. I'll take them later
I think we’ve all learned an important lesson from John Roberts and the rest of the non-evil Supreme Court justices. In the future when conservatives say something is a tax, instead of going into denial, we liberals should say, “Hell, yes, it’s a tax. We like it like that.
The whole argument against making people pay for health care has been that it violates their right to take a chance on needing health care and not being able to afford it. If someone wants to do that, why should the government stop them?
Let’s break this down. I don’t want to pay for insurance that covers me against being swept out to sea. Since I live my life so that I’m unlikely to be swept out to sea, I’m willing to risk it. I’m even willing to go so far as say that if ever, by some bizarre string of circumstances, I am swept out to sea, the government need not send a boat out to fetch me. I’m willing to drown for my freedom.
A couple of centuries ago nonsmokers who enjoyed freezing cold wouldn’t pay for a fire department. Now and then their houses would be struck by lightning and catch fire. But, they’d figure, that was just the return on living. You’d take your chances.
This is the argument of extreme libertarians like Ron Paul. We all know the argument doesn’t always work. In the example just given, it worked pretty well until people started living in cities. Then it stopped working. The trouble was in the taking of chances. The chances you chose to take weren’t just your chances anymore. Now they were everyone else’s chances, too.
This sort of thing actually happened: the Fire Department would show up to the scene of a fire and the house burning was the house of the one guy on the block that didn’t pay the quarterly fee for fire protection. So they’d let it burn. Trouble was, it was real hard to let one house burn without it causing all the other houses to burn. So everyone else’s house on the block burned down because the fire department wouldn’t rescue the libertarian’s house.
Or, they’d save the house of the guy who didn’t pay the fees for the sake of the rest of the block, and they’d try to bill him, and he wouldn’t pay.
Between 1880 and 1910 American cities got dense enough that the houses of single libertarians were lighting up blocks everywhere routinely. Several reforms were instituted. For one, you couldn’t build wood houses downtown anymore. Building codes were introduced. Along with that, zoning was invented, so you could still build a wood house if the housing wasn’t so dense. But nobody in the major cities could get away with not paying for fire protection.
This led to unintended consequences. The idea of zoning and building codes eventually meant you couldn’t paint your house pink because the neighborhood association objected. It meant you couldn’t live in a hovel anymore; that caused homelessness. The libertarians mostly complain about not being able to paint their houses pink.
Have we nailed the concept down yet? No. Why? Because there’s still people out there who will say they shouldn’t have to pay for coverage they don’t want. I can’t bring myself to say that the libertarian argument is always wrong. There has to be a limit to the commonwealth argument. I say that limit is reached the day I die.
You’re all going to pay for my burial.
I’m not kidding. I’m not buying a burial plot. I’m not arranging for my own funeral. I don’t want one. I don’t care if I rot in the street. I won’t be around to care. I’m making arrangements for a memorial service, but I am personally going to be litter, and someone’s going to have to do clean up, and I’m not paying for it, because I don’t want to.
That’s my stand for the libertarian principle.