The uncivilized health care bill
Franz Oppenheimer famously pointed out that there are only two means of meeting one's needs: the economic means and the political means. The economic means is based on "one's own labor and the equivalent exchange of one's own labor for the labor of others" while the political means is based on "the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others." In other words, you can either produce value and engage in voluntary exchange or you can steal things of value produced by others. The state operates by the political means and feeds parasitically off of everyone who operates by the economic means. The economic means is peaceful, civilized, and life-affirming. The political means is violent, primitive, and destructive.
So my question to everyone who supported the recently-passed health care bill is this: Why did you have to choose the political means when you could have chosen the economic means? You could have donated to a charity that helps the uninsured and worked to peacefully persuade others to do the same. Hell, you could have started your own charity. You could have offered to chip in on a needy person's medical bill. But instead you chose to support violence against your fellow human beings. You asked a group of people (the state) to act in your name, going to your neighbors and threatening violence against them to get them to do certain things and not do other (peaceful) things and take more money from them.
Why did you choose primitive violence over civilized, peaceful cooperation?
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March 30th, 2010 - 00:32
Ignoring the question, but the same logic could be applied to the lawsuits against the recently passed health care reform law. A voluntary fund could be set up to fund the lawsuits on behalf of the citizens contributing to it. That would be better than forcing NC taxpayers (many of whom favor the new law) to fund a lawsuit against it.
March 30th, 2010 - 14:35
Very good point.