In a counterpoint to Brother Grimm’s bad argument for socialized healthcare I would like to point out that the reasoning behind his bad argument are flawed. First of all Government should be minimalist and all of the Libertarian flaws that he points out regarding affordable roads and police forces are foolish. In is an inevitable fact every family will become more wealthy over time. I must qualify that “family” is meant in the Asian sense of the word to mean the entire clan, not just a mother, father, and immediate children. When wealth is pooled across an entire clan it is possible to afford private police forces and private road repair. Just look at many Asian communities and you will find private policing and private funding paving roads more often than the government does.
Back to the story of paying for other people’s health care there are many reasons why the government should not get their grubby hands on our clan’s money to pay for some other clan’s problems. First is the feasibility issue. In a clan structure you are indebted to your relatives to chip in where they chipped in for you. For example, if your 3 uncles helped pay for your college, then you need to chip in to help pay for their children’s college. Since you have no control over how many children they have had you might be chipping in quite a bit. You also have to look at the cost of private nursing when your elders become too old to take care of themselves. That is quite a burden on the individual and I’m not quite sure how one can afford to take care of their own family, pay for private police and roads, contribute to charitable causes and pay higher taxes to cover people that aren’t related to you and who aren’t going to be contributing to the success of your family.
Military Generals must make life and death decisions every day. CEO’s must decide what is worth it to the business. As an individual you are a General and CEO for your immediate family and if you are among your elder council you are the Board of Directors for your entire clan. Socialized medicine has no place in a world where you can ask The Board for help with your medical expenses. In addition as CEO of your household you have the responsibility to decide on the proper course of action. In the case of Tyler, his parents chose to engage in deficit spending based on human emotion and hope that things would end up ok. They ended up losing in the end and have a huge debt burden to cover now. How is this my problem? Is it my uncle’s problem? My 5 year old 1st cousin’s problem? No, we aren’t related to the family in question, therefore we owe them nothing unless it is out of charity. As rulers of the household the parents could have came to the conclusion that there was no ROI to be had by spending money on treatment after the first round. Perhaps they may have opted out of treatment entirely or tried holistic medicine. Sometimes the responsible thing to do is say that treatment is not worth the burden it will place on our checkbook and our relative’s checkbook. Responsible does not always equal kind or fair, but life isn’t fair. Get over it.
Grimm is totally off base when he says it is time to step up.
If we are the nation that we all say that we are, it is time to step up, pitch in, make sure your friends and neighbors aren’t left to the tender mercies of Social Darwinism and come up with a solution. Insurance companies aren’t going to do it. Doctors and hospitals aren’t going to do it. We have to do it as one nation, under God (or Allah, Buddha, Vishnu, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Insert the deity of your choice here), indivisible, with liberty and justice for all, not just those who can afford it.
Darwinism is a necessity that human society has attempted to eliminate. The animal kingdom has gains and losses and attempts to tamper with the balance have resulted in the need to cull the herd. Deer populations have exploded with the elimination of natural predatory forces. As a result we have licensed slaughters of deer referred to as hunting season. Don’t think that communist countries magically solve all of society’s woes. Government run homeless shelters sometimes overflow leaving some people out on the street in the cold. What happens when you have too many people to take care of? In the Eastern Bloc communist party youth sometimes took to setting homeless people on fire to reduce the consumption on the system. That may not happen in America literally, but it shows that once the system is overloaded measures must be taken to bring it back into equilibrium. This may mean reducing coverage or creating a shortage, meaning long lines for critical care. The latter means that the government would deliberately create a shortage so many people would die off before money is spent on their treatment. That would be the same as figuratively setting people on fire, so you can say we’re a bit better off than the USSR was. In modern China the people have to buy their own insurance because the government coverage is useless. There is minimal government coverage for general practitioners and if you need a specialist you have to cover that yourself. That’s modern socialism for you. With economic theory the opportunity cost is what you give up to get something else. What socialized medicine does is it takes free will out of the individual’s opportunity cost analysis. There is no reason to give up some of your family’s wealth and comparative advantage to assist someone else. This is especially true when the world is facing a population crisis. We need more Darwinism and other population controls, not less. By maintaining the status quo we are maintaining an environmentally friendly platform. Most liberals are perfectly fine with abortion, but want to expend tons of resources once the child is born. Conservatives on the other hand are likely to take the opposite approach and expend tons of resources protecting an unborn human, but spend little on its development after it is born. We need to mesh both of these philosophies to reduce the population before it goes up and to get rid of some of the population that is here.
There comes a time it is not possible to justify the costs associated with a particular situation, no matter what that situation is. A company will not expend millions of dollars on a losing venture and will stop funding the effort once it is apparent that no amount of money thrown at the problem can turn the situation around. Insurance is referred to as a vehicle of Risk Transference. What is left over is residual risk; however, many people choose not to quantify those risks and choose to spend themselves into oblivion without stopping at a hard number. Socialized health care will result in shifting that decision out to a government bureaucrat who will be making those same life and death choices for you based on how much money is left in the pot. The situation is exactly the same after introducing socialized medicine. Since the situation will be exactly the same in the end, except that personal liberty will be reduced, and that we will be fighting against Darwinism when the human race is overpopulating the planet, there seems to be no reason to switch philosophies regarding the care of your fellow man. Therefore I believe it is ok to say, “Tough Shit” unlike Brother Grimm. That’s not to say I wouldn’t be swayed in the future. Check back in with me when we reduce the planet’s population by a minimum of 200 million.