Libertarian Discussion Thread II - Don't Thread on Me

[Great Minarchistan]

wow yes the market feature of an insurance system is surely party-biased, thanks for your insightful input

The Republicans seem to favor healthcare staying in the hands of insurance companies so yes.

and how is that an issue

[Genivaria]

The Republicans seem to favor healthcare staying in the hands of insurance companies so yes.

and how is that an issue

People dying because of the cost of healthcare with or without insurance is an issue.

[The Liberated Territories]

wow yes the market feature of an insurance system is surely party-biased, thanks for your insightful input

The Republicans seem to favor healthcare staying in the hands of insurance companies so yes.

What would government covered insurance look like? How would the government decide who gets covered for what?

If I have a pre-existing condition, let's say I am obese, would I get covered at the same rate as a non-obese person would?

[Genivaria]

The Republicans seem to favor healthcare staying in the hands of insurance companies so yes.

What would government covered insurance look like? How would the government decide who gets covered for what?

If I have a pre-existing condition, let's say I am obese, would I get covered at the same rate as a non-obese person would?

Ideally.

[The Liberated Territories]

What would government covered insurance look like? How would the government decide who gets covered for what?

If I have a pre-existing condition, let's say I am obese, would I get covered at the same rate as a non-obese person would?

Ideally.

So let us say this is the US, where a lot of people are obese, would healthier people then have to pay for the increasing costs (as an average) of the obese, instead of forcing the obese to subsidize their own unhealthy lifestyle?

[Great Minarchistan]

and how is that an issue

People dying because of the cost of healthcare with or without insurance is an issue.

and you are aware that subsidizing insurance costs is a way to fix it right

[Duvniask]

I'm not even sure what you're saying at this point.

Unless you're one of the lucky few, you have to work for capitalists to gain access to any such luxuries. If you're unemployed and barely scraping by, you aren't living the high life, buddy. I'm not sure what's so hard to understand about that. Those luxuries are earned via work, yes, but it is exploitative work, and you don't really have much of a choice in terms of wanting to do it or not.

Those who are not working are not entitled to luxury, so it is not an issue. An increasingly small number of people are fully blocked out from enjoying basic comforts.

But you don't actually believe that. Because why, then, are you defending capitalism, a system where the property-owning ruling class, per definition, relies extensively on unearned income and rent-seeking?

Beyond whatever supervisory work a capitalist performs and whatever else they do in the production process, the left-overs, the profits accrue to them solely by virtue of ownership, not work. To quote Joan Robinson: "Owning capital is not a productive activity". Owning stock somewhere is not work, it is just passive income accruing to you because, as a legal matter, society has determined that it belongs to you.

"I'll pay you only if you suck my dick"
"Wtf, you're just exploiting my need for money to gain sexual favors!"
"You have an incentive to suck my dick. It's incentive-based, so I'll even pay you better if you do it well. By choosing not to suck my dick you're not losing anything that's rightfully yours anyway."

You see how unhelpful this line of reasoning is? OF COURSE you can be exploiting someone while still giving them incentives to work for you. It is precisely the incentive that makes exploitation that much more successful. People wouldn't work for others if they got absolutely nothing out of it. Even a slave master has to feed his slaves and keep them alive, otherwise they can't keep working for him (they will die). The whip with which he strikes the slave is another incentive - pain; "if ya want the pain to stop, best pick up the pace!". The most important difference is that the worker has some semblance of rights and gets to choose his master; but he must choose a master, lest he wants to starve. It has been my contention so far that we should do away with such master-servant relationships, even if the present-day form, thank goodness, is milder version of it.

Are you implying that some individuals' skills are limited solely to prostitution?

No.

I am illustrating why your reasoning isn't very sound by applying it in an exaggerated context. Admittedly something I love to do, even if people tend to misunderstand. The point is that it doesn't matter if you're given something in return, it doesn't matter if there's incentive; it is still exploitation.

And as for the gun analogy I came up with, you are spared your life (or spared from harm) in return, so you definitely have an "incentive" to obey.

[1]The capitalist incentive is mutually beneficial, [2] while the slave can never advance beyond keeping themselves alive if their master wishes so.

1) The slaver's incentive is mutually beneficial too. You get a roof over your head, presumably, and you get to have access to food, etc.

2) Honestly, everything I've ever heard about labor conditions prior to the rise of organized labor is pretty similar. Doing factory work in the 1800s wasn't very fun. The only reason labor conditions are that much more tolerable is because of labor movements and those who had foresight enough to stall their emergence through reform. Even so, all the evidence I've ever seen points to social stratification still very much being a fact of life in all societies, including my own, which is one of the most equal (income-wise, at least) on the planet.

Ultimately, there is nothing stopping you from growing your own food, becoming self-employed, or joining a commune.

I'm not interested in utopian escapism, because I care about having a good, just and moral society.

As for the self-employment thing, I'll refer to this past post of mine. It's not fully related, but it addresses the point, I think.

There is nothing that makes you deserving of food for no work.

I for one think that people who can't work should be able to live on. In the event of post-scarcity of food, I find it a matter of moral utility that everyone gets a right to food.

It's a relationship that shouldn't exist in the first place, and the gross inequality of it, along with the way it is systematically used to extract undue labor from others, is what makes it exploitative.

There is no such thing as undue labor.

Then why are you here calling for slavery to still be illegal? You're even willing to let it harm the ability to make contracts, which libertarians admittedly tend to regard as a staple of freedom. Consider why that is, and maybe you'll see that I'm only taking it a step further.

Cooperatives, while still capitalist by their very nature, show that an egalitarian economy is far from impossible. You don't need people to be equal in all respects for it to work; besides, equality is a vague political goal

Equality is undesirable compared to meritocracy.

"To each according to his contribution" is literally an expression of merit-based reward.

Cooperatives have yet to compete with traditional businesses in any meaningful way, rendering an egalitarian economy small in scale.

I would think part of this comes down to the perverse incentives cooperatives have when it comes to competition. On the one hand, they can prioritize maximizing the gains of all its members, or they can maximize exploitation (call it what you want: money used for investment and expanding into new markets, it doesn't matter), which kind of goes against the intentions of those who found them and tends to result in "selling out". I think that helps explain why cooperatives are often limited to the margins of capitalist society.

And when you have one boss that acts foolishly, you're all fucked.

This is less likely to occur when bosses rise through merit, as they do under capitalism.

This is kind of your word against mine, but over the course of my life I've heard both my mother and father complain about incompetent bosses. My father's worked at the same place for 30+ years, and he's by no means an incompetent guy. He even has patents to his name. I believe he loves his work, but he definitely dislikes management. He's not even a leftist, he's a right-winger who doesn't mind referring to black people as "negere", and I don't think I need to explain what that means.

And if I or someone else happened to murder you or kick your out of that cave, it's now ours. It's not property in any meaningful sense, and certainly not something where your "right to it" means anything, for who is to determine that it was rightfully yours in the first place in absence of any state with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force? It's more like simple possession. There's no legality to your ownership of the cave, nothing to back it up except whatever personal strength you yourself can muster.

Furthermore, if you admit property only exists with the use of force, then it must also follow that property rights are positive rights, because they place obligations on others (society) to help maintain the rightful ownership of said property (with force), especially if you can't defend it only by yourself.

All rights are backed by force. I would not deny this because rights are not tangible things, and this applies to laws as well. However, property rights are not positive if I can defend my property myself or with hired help.

And those going up against you can hire outside help too. Now what? Your right to said property will still be meaningless. If you must take this approach, where might makes right, then the state must be the natural arbiter of property rights, because it tends to be the mightiest actor of all. The state is the institution that protects your property from would-be thieves, enforces your right to it as well as other things such as crack down on those who do not uphold their legally-binding contracts. It was one of the first, if not the very first, functions of the state and social contract: mutually beneficial security to protect property, to develop laws, etc. You are not an an-cap, which I take to mean you actually do know this, in one way or another, perhaps without realizing it.

Society may agree to recognize each others' rights, but this does not mean that freedom of speech is a positive freedom because the state backs it.

Free speech does have a positive dimension in the sense that, without it, no one is required to give you the ability to speak. There doesn't have to be any place where it's allowed, if, say, someone buys all the land as their private property and says "nuh-uh, you aren't allowed to do that on my property". As far as I can tell, things like protests require public spaces to be feasible.

It's only being consistent because your ideology is crap. I mean, it's to limit a "choice" about limiting your own choices. Indentured servitude is basically slavery, and more specifically a form of debt slavery. Allowing people to enter into such temporary slavery is destructive to liberty for essentially the same reasons that wage work is destructive to liberty.

But leave it to the libertarians to argue for the legality of indentured servitude.

I would assume that no one becomes an indentured servant if the end result did not leave them better off than before, whether in being freed from debts or given an area of land.

Historically, indentured servitude could be very harsh and result in death before the contract was completed. There's a reason it has been outlawed as a form of slavery.

Libertarians are by no means against humane treatment of such workers.

Yet they tend to oppose the measures which actually guarantee it, or action to bring about a society where it is the norm, because it inconveniences property owners.

[Duvniask]

People dying because of the cost of healthcare with or without insurance is an issue.

and you are aware that subsidizing insurance costs is a way to fix it right

Cutting out the middle-man means we don't have to compensate people whose raison d'être is to turn a profit from sickness and death.

[Great Minarchistan]

and you are aware that subsidizing insurance costs is a way to fix it right

Cutting out the middle-man means we don't have to compensate people whose raison d'être is to turn a profit from sickness and death.

yes duvniask, because clearly being an insurance company doesn't involve the whole mush of risk management

[Kowani]

Ideally.

So let us say this is the US, where a lot of people are obese, would healthier people then have to pay for the increasing costs (as an average) of the obese, instead of forcing the obese to subsidize their own unhealthy lifestyle?

You realize that you do that already, right?

[The Liberated Territories]

So let us say this is the US, where a lot of people are obese, would healthier people then have to pay for the increasing costs (as an average) of the obese, instead of forcing the obese to subsidize their own unhealthy lifestyle?

You realize that you do that already, right?

Only because of Obamacare.

[Kowani]

You realize that you do that already, right?

Only because of Obamacare.

No, you’d do that anyway.
Out of curiosity, do you know what happens when someone who isn’t insured comes to the emergency room?

[Rojava Free State]

Only because of Obamacare.

No, you’d do that anyway.
Out of curiosity, do you know what happens when someone who isn’t insured comes to the emergency room?

They basically stabilize them, send them home and then hit them with a bill so costly that even bill gates is gonna say enough is enough and not let you anywhere near his charities

[Antityranicals]

No, you’d do that anyway.
Out of curiosity, do you know what happens when someone who isn’t insured comes to the emergency room?

They basically stabilize them, send them home and then hit them with a bill so costly that even bill gates is gonna say enough is enough and not let you anywhere near his charities

That's because of insurance itself. Health insurance is a stupid concept to begin with, because insurance companies not only have an interest in driving up prices so that they can charge people more, but the power to do so by negotiating higher prices with health providers. Of course, this is only possible in the hyper-regulated state which the American health industry has been in since the Great Society, in which very, very few healthcare providers are actually approved to do business. As a result, the remaining providers have monopoly privileges, and are willing and able to collude with health insurance companies to raise prices across the board. In addition, a lot of why healthcare prices are so high also has a lot to do with the simply ludicrous cost of complying with the very same regulations which allow essential monopoly privileges. The worst thing to do to try to solve this problem would be to nationalize the damn thing, because that creates a full, complete monopoly and puts it under the control of bureaucracies, which are even worse about wasting money on nothing.

[Genivaria]

Cutting out the middle-man means we don't have to compensate people whose raison d'être is to turn a profit from sickness and death.

yes duvniask, because clearly being an insurance company doesn't involve the whole mush of risk management

Considering one of the biggest contributors to the absurd healthcare costs is that drug manufacturers can charge whatever they want, price controls on drugs would lower that cost dramatically.
(sorry for the late response, I had a migraine and took a nap)

[Genivaria]

Ideally.

So let us say this is the US, where a lot of people are obese, would healthier people then have to pay for the increasing costs (as an average) of the obese, instead of forcing the obese to subsidize their own unhealthy lifestyle?

To this I'd point out that a large reason WHY there are so many obese people in the US is because of the lack of health coverage and don't get regular check ups like they need to because of fear of costs.

[Duvniask]

Cutting out the middle-man means we don't have to compensate people whose raison d'être is to turn a profit from sickness and death.

yes duvniask, because clearly being an insurance company doesn't involve the whole mush of risk management

Your point being?

[Genivaria]

yes duvniask, because clearly being an insurance company doesn't involve the whole mush of risk management

Your point being?

That you're objecting about something that both systems are guilty of to a degree.

[Great Minarchistan]

yes duvniask, because clearly being an insurance company doesn't involve the whole mush of risk management

Considering one of the biggest contributors to the absurd healthcare costs is that drug manufacturers can charge whatever they want, price controls on drugs would lower that cost dramatically.
(sorry for the late response, I had a migraine and took a nap)

yes you could take the extremely damaging route of decreeing price controls instead of opening up for competition, overhauling FDA's regulatory timeline to approve drugs, open up to intl trade of pharma and so on

NB that although pharma profit margins -are- high, a much larger share of medical care expenditures goes to labor compensation of medical staffing (which is insanely well paid in the US relative to the RoW), which isn't actually surprising due to the apparent undersupply of doctors + long period of training + high labor intensity inherent to medicine. If my math isn't off, considering that consumption expenditures with pharma is 500bn a year, zeroing profit margins would only save 100b a year, while taking down staffing pay by 10% would have the same result.

Also, add it up to the fact that the US population is terribly unhealthy, be it due to the opioid epidemic, rampant obesity or shit eating habits as a whole

[Great Minarchistan]

yes duvniask, because clearly being an insurance company doesn't involve the whole mush of risk management

Your point being?

there's an implicit risk premium in sectors whose whole job is composed of risk, duh

[Duvniask]

Your point being?

That you're objecting about something that both systems are guilty of to a degree.

I don't see how that is, because public, universalized health care isn't profit-based. There aren't a bunch of people trying to squeeze money directly from those needing treatment and doing so above and beyond what is "necessary" in terms of costs, if at all. Both systems spread financial risk, but that doesn't entail profit.

Your point being?

there's an implicit risk premium in sectors whose whole job is composed of risk, duh

It would help if you weren't being so overly cryptic.

[Great Minarchistan]

It would help if you weren't being so overly cryptic.

I'm not being cryptic at all? Do you understand the notion of risk premia (take a look at it)?

[Rojava Free State]

Tfw the libertarian discussion thread is confrontational and hostile lmao

[Great Minarchistan]

Tfw the libertarian discussion thread is confrontational and hostile lmao

very dont tread on me-esque environment

[Northern Davincia]

Tfw the libertarian discussion thread is confrontational and hostile lmao

We libertarians are a contentious bunch.