In comments to my post on different notions of liberty and the health care debate, a person called “Person” disputes that there’s more than one meaningful type of liberty. She or he is arguing from the tradition that recognizes the importance of “freedom from” but not “freedom to.” That is, Person emphasizes negative liberty to the exclusion of positive liberty:
The truth is that statists – Liberals and Conservatives – do not believe in liberty at all. If they were honest about it, that would be fine, but they’re not. The Liberty to which I subscribe is this: That is is unethical for Person A (or a group) to aggress against the person or property of Person B, so long as Person B has not previously aggressed against others. More government in Health Care sounds like such a great plan and it is well-intentioned. But it won’t work, and even if it could would be unethical and against liberty.
Why? Because people living under a system of liberty are free to do what they want with their own property; coercion of any kind is wrong. To fund heath care the government must first tax, which is directly and undeniably antithetical to liberty. If I earn money by voluntarily working for another person (or firm), it is mine. It would be obviously wrong for a person on the street to pull out a gun and take the money from my pocket. While Liberals and Conservatives agree with that statement, they disagree that it is wrong for the government to do the exact same thing. Taxes are not voluntary; if you do not pay you will go to jail at the point of a gun, just ask Wesley Snipes. Of course, I have no problem with people who want to set up a VOLUNTARY system, to which you or anyone else could contribute as much money as you want. But to COERCE people to forfeit their rightful property is theft, plain and simple. I don’t think theft is an element of liberty.
Person’s argument, unless I misunderstood, is that *any* form of taxation is an infringement on liberty. Period. I agree that both liberals (in the present-day sense) and conservatives see an important role for government (though they practice different forms of redistribution) and therefore stand in opposition to Person’s position, which – if I’ve understood it correctly – is radical libertarianism. If I trace out the implications of Person’s position, federal and state funding for education would be equally illegitimate. That would hold true for K-12 as well as higher ed. And in fact, many, many Americans do object to paying higher taxes to finance the education system – as schoolkids in several central Ohio districts and, more locally, the Federal Hocking schools can attest. These districts are seeing school closures, cutbacks in basic classes, and the complete eliminations of “specials” such as music and art.
Myself, I see education, along with police and fire services, public libraries, and yes, health care, as crucial to positive liberty. If we are illiterate, in poor health ill, and/or terrified of crime, we can scarcely exercise the duties of citizenship, much less reap its benefits. We’ll be unable to perform work that contributes to our individual betterment, as well as the advancement of society. Elevating people above the level of ignorance, fear, and ill health contributes to the liberties of each individual, and to my mind this easily justifies the infringement on liberty that taxation necessarily represents. The same argument applies to the payroll taxes that finance Social Security and Medicare.
Seen from this angle, taxation isn’t aggression. It’s a trade-off of one liberty (freedom from seizure of property) for another (the freedom to be able to live one’s life without avoidable impairment of health). The latter is crucial if one is to work and earn money; taxation is irrelevant when disability results in long-term unemployment. In addition, lots of individual initiative is stifled because health insurance is prohibitively expensive or unavailable on the individual market.
Personally, I could afford to teach as an adjunct from 2002 up ’til fall of 2008 only because my husband’s insurance covered me. Had that not been the case, I would have been forced to seek out other work. Locally, that probably would have meant a secretarial job at the university. (I’m assuming Wal-Mart wouldn’t have me, and there aren’t many other games in town.) This would have seriously restricted my liberty to work in the field for which I’m trained. And while I was a darn good secretary back in the day, it would have prevented me from contributing to society in the area where I believe I have the most to give. It would also be a waste of many years’ training, much of which was subsidized by generous, privately-endowed grants.
My story repeats itself throughout our economy millions of times over. The present system creates perverse economic incentives for people to stay in jobs just for the insurance, and to avoid striking out and taking risks. This, too, stifles liberty. Entrepreneurship becomes well-nigh impossible when you literally risk your life by entering the individual insurance market.
Finally, the current system already does impose a de facto invisible tax on everyone who pays health insurance premiums. Emergency room doctors are ethically obligated to treat all comers, regardless of their ability to pay. Those who are insured subsidize ER patients without insurance. I’d much rather taxation be open and aboveboard, instead of smuggled in through the back door.
Update, wee hours of 9/23/09: Ballgame left this in comments, and oh my goodness you have to watch it if you won’t get in trouble for LOLing at work! Go Somalia! Go go go malaria!!
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
Person does acknowledge “freedom to”, as in:
“Of course, I have no problem with people who want to set up a VOLUNTARY system, to
which you or anyone else could contribute as much money as you want.”
But this sounds like a view espoused by those in a position to make such contributions. We talk of “enjoying liberty”. In the kind of free society which Person would seem to be advocating, would those brought low by bad luck or market forces be regarded as a triumphant demonstration of liberty in action? “I’m proud to be free to live in homelessness, poverty and disease” doesn’t seem to me a very likely personal credo. So this would seem to be a view of liberty embraced by the comfortable, understandably anxious to safeguard what they have at all costs from the grubby little fingers of the less deserving. It might be said of this brand of libertarianism, as Person says of Statists,
“If they were honest about it, that would be fine, but they’re not”.
Person continues:
“But to COERCE people to forfeit their rightful property is theft, plain and simple. I don’t think
theft is an element of liberty.”
In a democracy, taxation is supposed to represent the collective will of the electorate. In that sense it should not be coercive. If we find that it is, that is where our grievance lies, not in taxation as coercive Per Se.
Imagine for a moment a society in which we paid only for those things which we found agreeable. My charitable giving might be restricted to those whom I deemed worthy, while those less worthy might incubate a pernicious plague which wiped out both me and mine.
If I chose only to fund highways that went to places to which I wished to go, (why should I pay for what I do not need?), I might one day find that an urgent and unexpected journey was rendered impossible by a highway made impassable by years of unfunded neglect by those exercising their freedom to neglect it.
Of course, surrendering power to large organisations, State run or otherwise, is inherently dangerous. The position of a few powerful US “Health” insurance companies in relation to their “beneficiaries” eloquently demonstrates such dangers. But, in terms of intervention by a democratically elected government, I consider myself free to think those risks worth taking, for the sake of the common good, a concept presumably anathema to hard line libertarians.
In a society which chooses to exercise compassion collectively, rather than merely through the philanthropic acts of individuals able to do that, we may not only feel easier in our minds and able to sleep at night, we will also be less haunted by the fear of what might happen to us should we be struck by some random disaster. This is my version of freedom of choice.
I think that virtually all Americans experience some aspect of taxation as coercive. I really don’t like to see my taxes squandered in hopeless overseas adventures, nor do I appreciate their going to fund the “drug war.” But I recognize that a system of taxation results in a more just society, and thus a society that’s less brutal to the dispossessed and less dangerous for those who are better off.
This line of thought really goes all the way back to Thomas Hobbes. He would shrink in horror at most of my political convictions. However, he laid the theoretical basis for a strong state when he wrote that government could properly be established to elevate people out of barbarism. Otherwise, life in the state of nature (prior to government) would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
Also, most Western countries tried to exercise compassion through voluntary philanthropy up until about a century ago. The results were squalor in the streets, the incarceration of innumerable people in an equally squalid Poor House, and the spread of contagious disease. We’ve run that experiment, right down to the pernicious plagues Reg mentions – TB, anyone? – and it was an abject failure, not just for the poor but for the rich who lived with the worry that the poor might revolt.
What a short-sighted, ridiculous argument Person makes.
Taken seriously, it means that I can do what I want with what is mine, regardless of the effect that has on others.
So if I feel like it, I can buy a home, refuse to pay for sewage service so that I just dispose of my own waste in the yard, refuse to cut the grass (because I don’t like stepping in my own excrement), host dozens of feral cats that I feed occasionally and do not seek medical care for, and blast music at all hours of the day and night.
And all of that’s OK because the house, and the lawn, and the cats, and the stereo, are “mine,” individually. My private ownership of “things” trumps any collective investment or sense of ownership from my neighbors in the neighborhood, and it trumps their right to be free from my destructive, stupid behavior.
Person recognizes no rights but the right of property. That is a very limited and limiting right. Society has every right and every obligation to provide its more responsible citizens with freedom from Person’s foolishness and selfishness.
My dad used to like to expound on how one person’s freedom ended when it impinged on another’s. I can’t quite square this with his penchant for burning his trash whenever he can get away with it. But the principle is a good one. It’s sometimes tricky, though, to balance those competing freedoms. Clearly, piling trash and sewage in one’s yard would constitute a public health threat, and it would be perfectly reasonable for you to call the authorities and ask them to enforce laws that this neighbor is violating.
So radical liberatarianism – if it encompasses the freedoms you describe, Holly – isn’t even consistently in favor of property rights, because your neighbor’s actions would be lowering the the market and use value of your property.
Living in a college town, I’ve experienced many of the behaviors you describe. On top of the late-night noise, we’ve got a rental house on the corner where bindweed is once again in full bloom, bestowing its seeds on the whole neighborhood. It’s not so much the student renters as the landlord who’s to blame.
At any rate, the gift of bindweed just keeps on giving, and I’ve spent dozens of hours of my times trying to beat it back from my property. I have a strong opinion about whose liberty is being violated here, but I’m not exactly in a position to be objective!
It really does come down to Property vs. Democracy, with Libertarians siding with the former.
At any rate, don’t know if you saw this. (h/t celluloid blonde.)
And of course there’s always this.
Hi ballgame! I’d seen the second clip, and it’s brilliant. I hadn’t seen the first one, and it made me laugh like the deranged woman I actually am, so I decided to add it as an update to the original post. I especially love the shots of the airport in Somalia … self-interest at work, woohoo!