A quick rant on health care reform...

I'm irritated with our government and media. I'm almost always irritated with them, but this week I'm more annoyed than usual.

Let's say we all agree that it would be nice if we could supply everyone the health care they need.
Let's further agree that our insurance companies and the laws that currently govern them are often "bad" and they leave some people lacking in care.

Now, the question is what do we do about this situation, if anything?

I think there are a number of things we could do to help the health care cost situation including the importing of drugs and tort reform. We can go more into that later.

I haven't read the bill and I have no intention of trying. Nobody has read the whole bill, with the possible exception of senate pages who may have been forced to read the thing on the floor of the senate while nobody was listening. I've read enough of whats in the bill to be annoyed with our government for having passed it though.

Right now I'd like to rant about how annoyed I am with the media saying the following or it's equivalent over and over: "this bill will make health care more affordable for everyone."

This is such complete bullshit. It's mind-boggling how people in government and the media can even think such things.

I'm particularly annoyed when they use the word "everyone." They are putting a tax on high priced health insurance...which by definition will make health care for those people more expensive. So, right off the bat we can't say everyone.

Next, there are some obvious flaws with the ideas in the bill.
The insurance companies like to avoid covering the sick...particularly those with pre-existing conditions. I'm not saying this is moral or that I like the insurance companies, but it's obvious that this is good for their business. Now, we're going to force insurance companies to cover all the people they wouldn't take previously. Why didn't they take them before? Because they were too damn expensive! So, the assertion is that this bill...which forces the insurance companies to cover all the costly sick people they have been trying to avoid or charge and arm and leg will somehow make premiums for the rest of us go down. This is back asswards. When you add a bunch of expensive people to the insurance rolls, all the healthy people have to subsidize their costs. Adding sick people will mean increased premiums.
Now, the hope is that insurance companies will lower their administrative costs and cut executive pay and such and this will help keep costs in check. There are a bunch of carrots in the bill to get them to try to do this and penalties if it doesn't seem like they are. Pardon me if I'm skeptical that the morons on capital hill could write a bill that would even come close to performing this task correctly and keep a highly profit motive based industry from wanting to earn more profit.

I think I'll also write some about the constitutionality of this absurd mandate to buy health insurance. It would be possible for congress to pass a law that does what this "mandate" does and have it be legal, but the way they wrote it, it is almost certainly unconstitutional.

Go government! Go Media!

Be Nice II

Next, let's address the supposed inconsistency criticism. This second type of criticism focuses on the difficulty of determining who exactly initiated force in many real-life conflicts.

First of all, the difficulty in determining who is the transgressor should not dissuade us from engaging in that process. So, right off I think this is a bad way of thinking. Don't do something right because it's hard? Can you offer me a moral rule that is easier to understand than the non-aggression principle?

Secondly, this type of argument often gets bogged down dealing with property rights issues and who owns what.

For instance people might criticize the people of Illinois and say we stole our land from the native Americans. To this entire line of thinking, I reply that the issue is not with aggression or use of force, but rather that we have entirely different definitions of what property is.

A proper definition of property also clears up a lot of issues like the "tax the rich to feed the poor" type issues we run into from consequentialists.

I'll leave a full exploration of property rights for later, but for now I'll say that most people have a horrid idea of what property rights are or should be and that if you adjust your views on property to be more in line with my own, you then avoid all sorts of silly criticisms of the non-aggression principle.

Next, comes the ambiguity criticism. This idea attacks libertarianism and the way an individual interprets the non-aggression principle. In simple terms, it points out how some see taxation as a form of government aggression and thus the only consistent way to follow the non-aggression principle is to be an anarchist, while others will say that the non-aggression principle is fine in a minimal government situation.

Some people say taxation isn't a form of aggression due to social contract reasons. To me, that's nonsense. I'm currently subject to social contracts made by others, sometimes hundreds of years ago. I have no realistic means of getting out of these so called social contracts. I could move to another country, but in that case I'm essentially choosing between social contracts. It's almost impossible for any individual to even hope to read the entire legal code that one is agreeing to for any country in the world and it's actually hard to emigrate to many countries. I could also get a boat and float around the oceans, or maybe hide in Antarctica, but I don't see those as realistic options. I don't consider it much of a contract when the best I can do is choose between nearly impossible to understand options that other groups will force upon me. I tolerate our government, and I even think our constitution has some great ideas, but I don't think it's a moral government.

For myself, I simply advocate for a stateless society and avoid the criticism. This would be the most moral thing to do. It would, if done where the individuals attempting it understood the idea, be ideal.
Some people see the idea of a stateless society as being extremist, and I can understand why, but that doesn't mean it isn't the most moral possible situation of all. Stop and think about it. What I'm talking about in the non-aggression principle world is that we all live in peace and nobody is aggressive to anyone else. Doesn't that sound nice?

There are possible criticisms to the stateless society, but we will deal with those another day. For now, I just think it's enough to think about how nice the world would be if people were all striving to follow the non-aggression principle. Imagine there's no countries, it's easy if you try.