Coerced charity is better than actual charity? If I do good deed X at the point of a gun, I am a better person than someone who does it of their own accord? Really?
It's not about being a better person. Charity is not about being a better person. It's about helping people. And the purpose of government is to put systems in place that can give help to all the people who need it, as close to all the time as possible.
Larry Page is a fantastic man for doing this, OP is not disputing that. But it would be nice if children were guaranteed a flu shot regardless of whether a particular fantastic person decides they should get it. Charity is wonderful, but non-broken government is even better.
Any contractual obligation, any transaction, is implicitly backed by the threat of violence. If you believe free enterprise can be more effective than government assistance, you believe "coerced charity" is better.
The difference is that a person can opt-out of a transaction or contract in free enterprise. Don't sign the contract, and there's no threat of violence, implicit or otherwise.
On the other hand, there's no way for a person to opt-out of government coercion.
@Cushman History has shown pretty clearly that governments on the more-coercive side of the spectrum have caused more death and destruction than those on the less-coercive side.
A government coercing dollars out of a population by force and a society that is based on using products produced by people other than themselves are two different things altogether.
> History has shown pretty clearly that governments on the more-coercive side of the spectrum have caused more death and destruction than those on the less-coercive side.
I'm not seeing it. Absent governments in the third world cause quite a bit of death and destruction every year.
> A government coercing dollars out of a population by force and a society that is based on using products produced by people other than themselves are two different things altogether.
Until somebody steals something. Then you've got two options: Either you let them take it, in which case you're communist and don't have property, or you chase them down and make them give it back, in which case you're a despot and every transaction made is only made with your implicit consent.
Of course you can-- you can move somewhere else. But you'll be likely to find that places without "government coercion", i.e. government, are not as much nicer as you had imagined.
Many millions of people are materially dependent on individual corporations, with no meaningful ability to opt out. Not really seeing the difference here.
"Many millions of people are materially dependent on individual corporations, with no meaningful ability to opt out."
<sarcasm>Well then they can move somewhere else...</sarcasm>
What you're describing isn't free enterprise, so it's disingenuous to use it as an example as if it's the normal case. I could use North Korea as an example of excessive government, but I'm not because I realize it's not the usual case.
Correct. Government is not free enterprise. To govern a body is to take control of it to a certain extent.
We can quibble about how much control is too much, but that's the topic of this debate, not whether or not the government is controlling. I rather think "free enterprise" leads to horrible things when said "enterprise" begins to affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people, and I like that we build systems to manage those large-scale enterprises rather than leaving them up to individual whim. It would be nice if we had more of those systems – say, to stop children from getting sick and dying just because their parents couldn't find work.
The problem with that is that "coerced charity" through taxation is not a contractual obligation one willingly enters into. Did you sign something saying you would pay taxes for government assisted programs? I know I didn't.
Non-coerced charitable donations are more effective because individuals are putting their own dollars to causes they care about, and therefore have an actual interest in seeing their dollars be spent wisely.
By being born in the United States, and as a child of citizens of the United States, I became a citizen of the United States. This entitles me to rights, like the ability to travel anywhere I like across the continent without impediment, as well as to obligations, like paying taxes on my income or military service in the event of war.
The obvious implication of this arrangement is that I rely on the United States every moment of my life, I wouldn't exist in the first place without the United States, and I owe something back to the United States for putting that whole thing together for me. But, if that's just a bridge too far, the United States is reluctantly willing to wash its hands of the whole thing and walk away if I am-- all I have to do is live somewhere else.
I've never understood what makes this concept difficult or complex.
I don't think that is a difficult concept to understand, but the implication of it is that you don't actually have a right to own property. If you own a home, you are merely using your country's land temporarily. If you perform a job and receive wages, those wages are not yours - but instead they belong to the country.
What I believe is that people innately have rights, regardless of what government regime happens to preside over them. The best governments are ones that are set up to protect those innate rights. To protect rights by taking rights away is a concept that doesn't make sense to me.
I'd modify your "people innately have rights" to "there are freedoms which benefit both individuals and the communities they're a part of, which should be treated as innate rights." A bit wordier, but useful in defining what, specifically, entitles us to any particular right.
Personally, I think our right to health is more precious than our right to property or wealth. I'm not opposed to wealth by any means, and entrepreneurialism is a wonderfully fun enterprise, but they are lesser concerns than whether or not people are dying for preventable reasons. Ideally, a government encourages both health and entrepreneurialism by finding ways to pay people searching for more effective healthcare, then by rewarding the people who find it, but that's not what we're debating here.
The answer to "Should the government take my money to pay for somebody else's flu shot, if they cannot afford it?" is a near-unequivocal yes, for me, with the one condition being that I have enough money to afford that flu shot for them. Some people can pay for many more flu shots than I can, and I do believe that it's moral to request that they do so.
Are you universally dualist, or only when it comes to governance? It seems as if we only know these "innate" rights through the protection of government.
Theoretically, the government has an interest in seeing their dollars spent wisely, because if they don't, then people will get angry and vote them out of office. Currently, thanks to a generation of media exploitation, we have an ill-informed public and two parties which don't represent a healthy, balanced set of choices for American citizens – but I don't blame the government for that so much as I blame Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, and the 70s-80s paleoconservatives that spent decades building misinformation into our media.
Very few things in life are willingly entered into. You didn't choose to be born in the place that you did, to the parents that you have, in the race or gender or of the sexual orientation which are yours, in the economic strata that you did. Simply being a user on Hacker News suggests that you've had at least a streak of good luck in your life that's given you the know-how and the comforts that enable you to post on a forum, to know which forum you'd like to post in, to understand the subjects well enough that you've decided you want to participate. We disproved that the heavens rotated around the earth, much less any one specific person, a long time ago; and with it, we began to throw out the notion that any one individual is entitled to rights or to privilege that are not derived from the consensus of her fellow citizens.
This is the basis of all civilization, of every society that's ever been; and progress has been a process that involves making "fellow citizens" as diverse a group as possible. Right now there are arguments over whether we should consider economically disadvantaged people our fellows – while we all would like to say we think they're our equals, we don't seem to think they have the rights to things like flu shots with the rest of us are allowed to take somewhat for granted. And it's not "equal" to tell them they ought to wait around for good people to give them things, because frankly there has never been a society in the world in which good people are so prevalent that there has been enough charitable donation to go around.
Private citizens giving to charity is great. If you have the money for it, donate money; good on Larry Page for this. But people being good doesn't preclude government from being a good idea, and it makes sense to point out, as we laud Page for being such an upstanding citizen of San Francisco, that it's a tragedy how costly even flu shots are, how terrible it is that in the 21st century it's still possible for kids to die of the flu for reasons entirely beyond their control, and that we should all be thinking about how, perhaps, we might make this issue a permanent thing of the past.
yes, there is a contract. its Rousseau's social contract: Each of us places his person and authority under the supreme direction of the general will, and the group receives each individual as an indivisible part of the whole
Prices also often shoot up. Not to mention unintended consequences. Look at the whole birth control situation. A study of a contraceptive mandate in Hawaii back in 2001 ( http://hawaii.gov/dcca/ins/reports/2001_contraceptive_report... ) increased pregnancies as well as costs to all participating in the plan (even those that didn't want the coverage). I don't discount the good intentions of programs like these, I just think it's naive to think that simply throwing more money at these problems is a scalable solution.
It's bad for society to believe a problem is actually being solved by charity that only happens when you feel like it. That just amplifies our problems during recessions, in which those donations start drying up when they're needed most. It's like building a city behind a dam that won't be strong enough to hold back the next flood.
There's no such thing as "free" health care. Not to suggest that the solution to our health care problems is simply through the kindness and charity of those that can afford it.
Coerced charity is better than actual charity? If I do good deed X at the point of a gun, I am a better person than someone who does it of their own accord? Really?