TM
Then someone please explain to me how the statement Danoff made also happens to be completely false... Maybe, just maybe, it is possible that his logic is not 100% perfect or rational. I reject it even metaphorically, for reasons I have explained already - but please don't try and tell me that his statement is true because he has proved it so via logic - if so, that says more about his logic than it says about my understanding of what a factual statement is.
Who do you think will be forcing me to pay for everyone else’s healthcare? And what do you think they’re using to do so? I have explained this several times, but I will explain it more thoroughly this time and you can tell me where you think I am off-base.
At some point, someone – you know who you are, voted for a politician who promises to enact or expand socialized healthcare. Perhaps the politician is President Obama, perhaps it’s a congressman, perhaps this politician is in England, perhaps he is in France, whoever it is, that politician was elected in part out of your (the voter’s) support for socialized healthcare. You gave him a task – pay for healthcare using tax dollars. This is your action when you vote.
That politician heads off to Washington (or Parliament) to carry out your instructions. He or she raises taxes (or raises the deficit, which effectively raises taxes) to pay for the plan you elected him or her to pay for. That money comes from somewhere – there is no alternative here. Someone must pay for the plan. Doctors, nurses, and MRI machines are not free. The people who pay for that plan are called “taxpayers” of which I am one.
Let’s suppose I choose not to pay for the socialized healthcare and withhold that portion of my taxes at the end of the year. I file the rest of my taxes with the IRS (or whoever you have in England – Her Majesty’s Treasury?), but I leave out the part covering healthcare – because it is my right to choose whether to give my property to others. The IRS notices the shortage and sends me a bill and a fee. I refuse to pay it. I get another bill and another fee. I refuse to pay it. At some point someone visits me, but I still refuse to pay. The IRS attempts to seize my assets electronically but I have none. I have converted all of my money into food and ammunition in recognition of the coming battle with the IRS. A police team begins a stakeout/siege of my property preventing me from trading. I last longer than they expected. Eventually they send in tear gas and try to enter my property. I have a gas mask and I shoot anyone who attempts to come on to my property. One officer is hit. Others fire back, I am killed.
Who killed me?
Well, in the most concrete sense the officer who shot the bullet at me. But he’s a soldier. He’s following orders. He doesn’t know me, he doesn’t know the history of my case, he doesn’t know the validity of my argument. He’s doing his job. I’m not saying he’s not culpable, but in some ways he’s the least culpable. If I were in the wrong, then I killed myself and he’s done nothing wrong. If I was in the right, then the IRS is more culpable then he was because they were in a better position to ascertain whether my case had merit. But the IRS does not write the law. They’re handed the law by a joint act of Congress and the President. So in many ways the lawmakers are more culpable than the IRS for this act. But in a sense the lawmakers are soldiers – carrying out orders. Whose orders are they carrying out? Voters. It is the voters that ordered/authorized/mandated that the government use potentially lethal force to violate my rights. Yes, there were many people along the way who could have refused, but the intent to violate my rights comes from the voters. It is up to you whether you ask your government to violate human rights.
If I pay a hitman to kill someone, did I kill them? Yes. Did I put a gun to their head? Yes. Am I physically holding it? No, but I’m just as guilty of the violation of their rights as the hitman. If I pay someone else to hire a hitman to kill someone does that matter? The number of people in the chain makes no difference. They’re all involved in the crime, of course, and share the guilt, but laundering the crime through a number of other people makes no difference – the person who requested the crime be done will continue to be responsible.
Now, at this point I will assume that I have sufficiently explained why voters are responsible for the immoral acts that the government they vote into place commits – provided that those acts were requested by the voters, of course, and were not solely the decision of the elected politician. This is all I need to show to demonstrate that anyone requesting my government take my property and give it to others is, quite literally, putting a gun to my head. They aren’t holding it, but they are requesting that others hold it – and so it applies. If you request that someone put a gun to my head, it is valid for me to state that you are putting a gun to my head. It is immaterial whether you are physically holding it – you caused it to be there, and that is all that is necessary to make that statement true.
Assume for a moment that I committed murder. The use of force against me is justifiable, as I have violated the rights of others. But that does not change the fact that force is being used against me. Even if you think the force was justified in being used against me, the gun is still there. So if voters were to elect a congress that passed a law banning murder, as they have, I would have a gun to my head preventing me from murdering. The threat of force, placed there by voters, is just as real and tangible for that breach of the law as any other.
So when I say that Joey is putting a gun to my head by voting for a politician who promises to seize my property, I am quite correct.
You do not have to agree with my position on healthcare or human rights to see this. All you need to see is that voters are responsible for the policy they vote for. And being responsible for the action is the moral equivalent of committing the action. The statement I made about Joey, I could have made about anyone who voted for socialized medicine. I can even say, for example, that I have a gun to Joey’s head forcing him to not murder innocent people. It is true in every way that matters.
So even if you believe healthcare is a right, you still must be aware that the threat of death is used to enforce it. It might be difficult emotionally to think in these terms, and I know nobody wants to get their hands dirty, but this is government at its most fundamental level. Government is force, and when you are in the voting booth, you are directing that force, quite often at the people around you. This can be a justified thing – but it needs to be weighed carefully. I want everyone reading this to imagine themselves enforcing the laws they are voting for with a gun in their hand. It is what you are doing whether you realize it or not, and it is something you need to have thought about very carefully.
I asked all of the socialized medicine supporters that were actively commenting on the healthcare thread (Biggles, TM, Joey) to imagine themselves in a morally equivalent scenario but with the middlemen removed. I asked you to make the very same decision you profess to support, but to do it in person. Namely, I asked you to use the threat of violence to seize the property of your neighbors, friends, co-workers etc. to give to someone who is dying of illness and whose life can be saved by this act of violence. I think it is quite telling that nobody was willing to say they would do it. This tells me that there is no disagreement here about what is right and what is wrong. Human rights are obvious to all involved here. Only the veil of anonymity that the voting booth provides enables the illusion of morality for these acts.
At its core, socialized healthcare is the violent seizure of property from an innocent person in the name of another’s need. Even healthcare supporters must admit this. If you are not willing to do the deed yourself, then I ask you to apply that principle to what you are requesting your government to do and refuse to vote in support of it.
If you are unwilling to come to my property armed and force me to give you my money (regardless of who you would turn around and give it to), then stop voting for others to do so.
TM
I believe that it is a principled and moral stance to pay my taxes, in return for the services I and others benefit from in one way or another, and I remain strongly in favour of the fact that the country where I live provides basic welfare in part return for those taxes. I can't state it any plainer than that either. I'm sorry if this attitude strikes you as immoral or offensive - but that's my reality and I'm happy with it.
Let’s not pretend that you and I exist in alternate realities. We exist in the same reality, and whether you are happy with it is immaterial to me. I know that many people are happy with reality. As has been stated many times on this forum, when you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can always count on the support of Paul. Luckily Peter’s rights are not dependent on how happy others are to violate them.
I understand that you see this as a very personal thing. You vote for your socialized services, you pay for your socialized services, and you receive your socialized services. This all makes a great deal of sense, and there are in fact no moral compromises made if this is the full extent of the story. You voluntarily agreed to pay for services and they were provided voluntarily. There is no problem there. So if you thought that I was going to disagree with this statement, or thought that it would change my mind, then you misunderstand my point – because I agree wholeheartedly with the notion that you have not been wronged and I am aware that you have nothing to be unhappy about. But this isn’t only about you – because these laws don’t only apply to you.
The question at hand is whether you have a right to force others to pay for your services, or to pay for yet another person’s services. If we go back to my original hypothetical with you, your friend, and a homeless ill person, what you are telling me is that you are happy to give the sick man your $50 because he has agreed to give you $50 when you are ill (or whatever he promises to give you – even if it’s just a sense of satisfaction). This is a voluntary contract, and there is nothing wrong with it – but it changes nothing about whether you can point your gun at your friend should he refuse to enter into the same contract and thereby refuse to provide the other $50 the sick man needs. I’ve seen you make this argument repeatedly, and it never makes any sense. This has nothing to do with how happy you are to help the poor, or how happy you are to pay taxes. This is about whether you can force someone who is not happy about it to do it. Pointing to your contentment with the system is of no help in this matter – please stop doing it. No one is advocating that you stop helping others.
There is nothing you can do to escape the dilemma you are in (and will always been in). You have a gun (your control over your government). You can use it to steal that metaphorical $100 from your friend and give it to the needy, or you can use it to defend his right to make that choice for himself. I know you very badly want to call an ambulance from somewhere outside of the situation, but none exists. In my hypothetical, your friend
is the ambulance and the people who funded it. Either you trust your fellow man to help on his own, or you violently force him to. Those are the only two ways and you’ve made your choice.
TM
Not necessarily. If there is a conflict of rights, then the use of force in violation of one in order to enforce the other is not only justifiable, it is unavoidable. As I stated before, there are issues of conflicting rights, depending on which criteria you choose to define rights of course.
The concept that there can be a conflict of rights nullifies the existence of rights. What you are saying when you claim that rights can conflict and that when that happens one must be sacrificed for the other, is that rights do not exist. Human rights are “inalienable”. They are untouchable. They are rights. Entitlements. Guarantees. They are the list of things you can demand from a moral world. Rights do not know nationality, they do not know language, they do not know religion. They are what allows me to say that the Taliban are immoral in their treatment of women – despite the fact that the Taliban do not agree with me. They are what allows me to say that Hitler, and every other genocidal figurehead, are unequivocally immoral in the slaughter of innocents – despite the fact that Hitler had the support of the masses. Rights are inflexible by their very definition – by the nature of their derivation. They can be ceded, but they cannot be violated justly and they never conflict.
I don’t know what this concept is that you seem to be calling rights, but they are not rights. Perhaps where you are, the word “right” means “desire”. Perhaps it means “luxury” or “necessity in order to have a comfortable life”, that seems to be how you are using the word. I would not apply the word “right” to anything that is not considered “inalienable”.
Property rights are certainly not the end-all-be-all of rights. They are simply inalienable. Freedom from coercion is the most basic of rights, and property rights are derived from that. The abridged version is that men are objectively equal, and as such cannot justifiably use force against each other. Property can be crudely thought of as labor, and so the theft of property constitutes coerced labor. This is the basis for property rights. Please explain to me the basis of this:
TM
- Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment
- Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
This is a laundry list of things that must be provided by others and, therefore, they are not rights. It is not possible to derive a right to a job in the manner I’ve outlined above, and such a right directly conflicts with the most fundamental tenant. If “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”, then how can we force one man to give another man employment? That’s not freedom, that’s not equal rights, that’s slavery, that’s theft, that’s coercion. It violates the most fundamental of all rights. It makes a mockery of the word “free” in that sentence.
How on earth does one go about deriving a right to housing? I exist, therefore I deserve a house? How does my existence entitle me to
anyone’s productivity – let alone sufficient productivity to make a shelter for me. This “right” defeats the entire basis of rights – that men are equal. It instead asserts that men can be subverted to fulfill the needs of others. What this does is place “need” as the measure of a man’s rights. The needier the man, the more rights he has. But I see no argument establishing need as an objective method for valuing one man above another. I see only the concept that men are equal, and cannot be valued above each other.
The temptation by all of the socialization advocates here is to rely on the notion that these are opinions. They are not opinions. These are facts. They are derivable, objective, universal facts. They apply to all human beings regardless of whether those people agree or disagree. The whole concept of rights
requires that they be inalienable, undeniable, universal facts. Otherwise one can argue we have a right to anything, and as long as enough people agree, it becomes so. That’s not morality, that’s the tyranny of the masses.
Human rights exist because men are not objectively superior to each other. Government exists because human rights exist. The function of government is to protect human rights. Human beings have an inalienable right to their lives, their pursuits, and their property. And they have a right to defend those rights. This is what libertarianism is based on, and it is not an opinion.
There you really are flat, plain wrong. If you can't understand why you're wrong then we might as well throw logic out the window altogether. And if you're trolling then by god you're doing a good job. I'm sorry if you don't want to be wrong, but this is life and being wrong from time to time is part of it.
Whatever.
HMRC collect the money. HM Treasury is the department that decides where the tax money goes 👍
