Food/Safety Regulations, Govt. Duty, Morality, & Health Care: Inte

[corristo]

Hello guys. I am currently having a little debate with a friend of mine via a facebook note and I was curious if you guys could help me out with this argument because I am pretty weak at arguing this kind of thing specifically and I am interested in a more in-depth Objectivist take on such things.

I took the TIA Daily article e-mail I received today and since I liked it so much I put it in a note (and gave proper credit btw) and a friend of mine debated me on this:

Here is the article for anyone that is curious that doesn't get the TIA. Since it is long I will help with that by putting it in a quote box:

TIA (The Intellectual Activist) Daily is an Objectivist Newsletter distributed via e-mail every day. If you would like to check it out please visit: http://www.intellectualactivist.com/

TIA Daily • October 6, 2009

FEATURE ARTICLE

Morality Ends Where a Gun Begins

Without Liberty, There Is No Morality in Politics

by Robert Tracinski

Editor's Note: Regular readers of TIA Daily will recognize the main title of this article. It was the subtitle I used for Part 2 of a series on how we can win the War on Terrorism. In that article, Ayn Rand's principle that "morality ends where a gun begins" was used to explain (among other things) the Iranian regime's catastrophic loss of moral legitimacy among its own people. But this principle is much wider, and the article below applies it to domestic politics, analyzing the alleged moral arguments in favor of socialized medicine.—RWT

Oddly, it has taken until recently—when they are growing increasingly desperate—for the advocates of President Obama's health-care plan to begin arguing for it on moral grounds. Washington Post blogger Susan Jacoby, for example, recently started a debate on the issue, asking: "Why has it proved so difficult for advocates of real reform, including President Obama, to convey the profoundly moral nature of this issue to the public?"

That is an interesting question, isn't it? For all their blustering about how insurance companies are "evil" and opponents of government-run health-care are "evil-mongers," it seems that the left is not so confident after all that it occupies the moral high ground.

And it shouldn't be, because the left is actually opposed to the application of morality to the health-care debate.

The little debate started on the Washington Post blog is instructive, because it is producing a lot of "moral" arguments for government-controlled health-care that are similar to a response I got to one of my essays at RealClearPolitics. In explaining why Obama's proposals would destroy health insurance, I had written that "Health insurance companies refuse to cover pre-existing conditions for the same reason that you can't insure your automobile after you crash it. Insurance is a form of financing for the unexpected and unpredictable. It is not a mechanism to force somebody else to pick up the tab for expenses you have already incurred."

Here is the reply I got:

This is insanity. How can you compare an automobile to a human being and their needs for treatment for illnesses? I think this shows a total lack of compassion. I could name some of the most productive and brilliant members of society who have pre-existing conditions that they could never afford to pay for without health insurance. Are you really that cold and uncaring or are you just insane? I think your commentary is despicable.

Notice that none of this refutes my basic point about the nature of insurance. Rather, it declares that point—and any other argument—irrelevant. People have needs, very important needs—and therefore it is monstrous to waste time debating about how we are going to pay for the care we need, or what economic and legal principles might limit our actions. We should just go out and force someone to provide for us.

The basic outlook is: when it comes to our really important, life-or-death needs, to hell with thinking and logic. Which means: to hell with principles. This is amorality disguised under moral posturing.

The most profound answer to this view of the role of morality was offered by the pro-capitalist philosopher Ayn Rand when she wrote that "Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins."

Note the connection Ayn Rand draws between morality and thinking. The moral posturers on the left appeal to emotion—the benevolent emotion of compassion, as cover for less presentable emotions like envy and resentment—and they regard the intrusion of reason and logic, of economics and legality, as cold, heartless, despicable.

But doing whatever you feel like, because you feel like it—demanding whatever you need, because you need it—is the opposite of morality. Morality requires the subordination of one's momentary urges to basic principles and a consideration of long-range consequences.

Consideration of long-term consequences means more than just narrow issues like whether a mandate to insure those with preexisting conditions, along with a pile of other new regulations, will drive up the cost of health insurance and make it unaffordable, which it will. It also goes beyond legal questions like whether it is permissible to impose a tax on insurance premiums from which you exempt favored groups.

Serious moral thinking about public policy requires, first and foremost, a consideration of what happens when we replace persuasion with coercion as the guiding power in human affairs. It requires that we begin by grasping the role of liberty and individual rights in keeping a civilized society civilized.

The basic moral principle that limits the actions of government is the fact that other people's lives and livelihoods are not yours to dispose of. If you want someone else to provide you with a good or service, you have to be willing to offer something of value in return, in a voluntary trade. And if you can't afford to pay for what you need, then you have to ask politely for charity, knowing that the other person has a right to refuse. He has that right because his time and his money are his.

To act otherwise—and acting otherwise is the whole essence of the case for further government intrusion—is to turn a civilized society into an uncivilized war of all against all. When the basic principle of government control is stated in individual terms—I need something, so I'm going to use force to take it from you—it sounds like what it is: a criminal act. So most people try to dress it up by stating it in collective terms. "We as a people decide what social benefits will be provided, what taxes people have to pay, and what terms insurance companies will be allowed to operate under."

But this is actually worse. What this means is: the group has a right to dispose of the life, liberty, and property of the individual. That's a criminal act, too. The sacrifice of the individual to the collective is the basic atrocity committed by some of history's worst criminal regimes.

This is the full meaning of Ayn Rand's dictum that "morality ends where a gun begins." A concern for morality in politics has to begin with the decision to renounce the use of force to dispose of the life and effort of others. Otherwise, all we have is a society-wide version of smash-and-grab, and the only debate is about who gets the loot and who ends up being the victim. Which is precisely what all of the current wrangling in the Senate amounts to.

Susan Jacoby opened her debate by saying that "I genuinely don't understand why ordinary people…seem largely unmoved by the moral dimensions of this issue." Perhaps that's because, as the tea party movement has demonstrated, so many of us are moved by a moral issue that Jacoby doesn't even seem to be aware of. Perhaps the "ordinary person's" idea of a "moral dimension" includes the principles of individual rights and liberty—and the fear that the left's rejection of those principles will destroy all constraints on the power of the state.

When it comes to morality in politics, the state of the art is still the radical moral vision of the Founding Fathers: the subordination of government to the principle of individual rights. Anyone who pretends to talk about morality in public affairs without reference to that principle is perpetrating a monstrous fraud.

COMMENT SECTION:

Chris W Robinson

I respectfully disagree with the author of this almost entirely.

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Ryan Bell

In what way? The disagreement hardly matters if you don't explain why your disagreeing.

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Chris W Robinson

moral: of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior

"The basic outlook is: when it comes to our really important, life-or-death needs, to hell with thinking and logic. Which means: to hell with principles. This is amorality disguised under moral posturing."

That is his opinion.

His basic outlook is: when it comes to capitalism and the needs of the economy, to hell with the basic needs of people. Which means: to hell with principles and morality.

That is my opinion.

"The basic moral principle that limits the actions of government is the fact that other people's lives and livelihoods are not yours to dispose of."

This is true, but we are not talking about the disposal of life, were are talking about the moral principle which is the duty of government to protect and save it's peoples lives.

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Chris W Robinson

In my opinion if the government had done their job of protecting the American people from capitalist corporations they wouldn't have half the health problems they do. Look at atrazine, PCB's, trans fats, deadly prescription drugs (in some cases), carcinogens, thimerosol, bavarian growth hormones, etc... all substances that required/require government intervention as the companies pushing these things put their profit margins before the well being of the American people, and all people across the globe. Look at Monsanto, Bayer, Nestle, Coca Cola, Caterpillar... A constant history of human rights violations, false "scientific" reports, false "independent" studies, and intentionally suppressing information about the potential side effects and health hazards related to their products, thereby putting consumers at risk.

As mentioned, I respectfully disagree with the author of this article. I have many reasons, but very little time to express all of them.

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Anyone want to help me with this? I find its easier for me to get a better handle on these things and debate them better myself later if I can get into a debate or get help with one (as I am now) on areas or topics I am less familiar with or what have you like I am right now.

I appreciate any help with this. Thanks fellow Oists.

[2046]

Ask him to be coherent first. "That's just your opinion" is not an argument.

I can't really decipher what he is trying to say aside from "That's just his opinion, which is arbitrary and meaningless, but my opinion, of course isn't -- because I feel it's true, but that's not amoralist or subjective at all, like Tracinski is saying. Why? Just because." in the first part and a general "capitalism leads to unsafe products" in the second part (which has what to do with this, I don't know aside from his naked assertion that half of the health care problems are because of unsafe products.)

The response to that is that the government's job is to protect rights, not to regulate people's affairs. So if a company sells a product as being of a given level for safety, and it is not; then the purchaser has a right to demand legal compensation, and a company must pay for the damages it incurs onto others. Any rules a government sets are necessarily detrimental because it has unintended consequences (due to a government monopoly over making safety decisions, preventing individuals from acting in their own self-interest, which causes malinvestments and market distortions) and is immoral: an individual has a right to decide what he wants to put into his body or what he wants to do with his own life, even if others disagree with him and no man has a right to coerce his decisions on others by force or fraud.

Private forms of safety certification, unlike an inherently coercive socialist monopoly would be moral, and more efficient due to the fact a company who produced unsafe products would lose out to the competitor who sold safer products, (unless enough people voluntarily preferred the unsafe products) rather than a single entity controlling whether or not a product is officially declared "safe." Which also means any victims of fraud would have greater options and recourse against theives in the free marketplace, than they do presently against corrupt government officials and mixed-economy socialist profiteers.

The idea of regulation is based on a collectivist notion of the "public interest" being something apart and above an individual's own rational self-interest and the premise that consumers are idiots who cannot make decisions for themselves, therefore they need a ruler who is selected by other idiots to force decisions onto him because they know what's good for you better than you do, which is to say they are saying they know something that they obviously don't (ie., I know what I want, you don't, so get the hell out of my way.)

Again, I don't know what that has to do with his claims about health-care, but that is the general response to the safety regulation question. As far as how total capitalism would affect health care, well, I copy and paste this from ARI:

Individuals pay for their health and its care. You are free to search out the best, most affordable services from doctors, nurses and other producers, who are free to offer and charge for them. There are no government restrictions on the supply of medical professionals via licensing laws–just laws prohibiting medical fraud and malpractice. For example, a nurse trained in healing minor broken bones is free to start her own practice for lower-income customers. There are no “free” health care programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid, or government-imposed collective “insurance” plans to artificially drive up costs. The government cannot mandate that employers offer health insurance. Instead, individuals pay for their own care, perhaps through a combination of direct payment for anticipated expenses and the purchase of catastrophic insurance for high, unanticipated expenses—or some yet undreamed of, superior solution the market comes up with. (The result of a real market in medicine would be the same as in the market for computers: over time the same dollar would buy better and better products and services.)

It is not the duty of the government to murder, enslave, or steal in the name of "saving the lives of its people." Morality ends where the barrel of a gun begins. I have a feeling he is trying to say the job of a government is whatever "the people" want it to be, and morality is measured by whatever "the people" or whoever is claiming to represent them want to do, simply because they want to do it. I can't think of anything more subjective than that, or to put it another what "that's just your opinion" but mine, based on the objective moral principle that I have a right to exist free from physical force, is that if "the people" decide their good is somehow served by murdering, enslaving, or stealing from me, then to hell with them and their government.

[Eiuol]

"A constant history of human rights violations, false "scientific" reports, false "independent" studies, and intentionally suppressing information about the potential side effects and health hazards related to their products, thereby putting consumers at risk."

Those are clearly examples of fraud. Well the last one I'm not to sure about.

Some people simply don't care about risks they take in finding cheap food. So they'll buy the stuff that with a little bit of research that could easily cause disease. (Kinda cool how he threw in thimerisol aka vaccines cause autism...). Besides a company that would outright lie about the data of their products, no force is involved.

I don't think the best thing to say is that the government's job should be to protect its citizens. It would be better to say that it should be to protect rights. To say protect would lead him to think of protecting people could include being their watchdog, i.e. both preventing companies from making the most dangerous products and inform consumers when there are moderate risks. That absolutely does protect people. But it isn't "protecting rights".

This person is clearly a collectivist though, so arguments about role of government won't work to change his mind. And his standard of rights is human rights, which is really just "positive rights". You're talking of "negative rights", so at best you'll be talking past each other.