(no subject)

[unnamed525.livejournal.com]

Comments

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

I doubt Hugo Chavez is a very inspiring figure for the future,
but I guess there is a good idea in there.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Like a broken clock, even an egomaniacal ass can be right a couple times a day. That quote is certainly dead-on.

[pacotelic.livejournal.com]

Except none of those things are human rights.

[joshthevegan.livejournal.com]

Health care isn't a human right? Fascinating.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

How is it a human right?

[joshthevegan.livejournal.com]

Because dying because you can't afford health care is fascist at best? In what world is not dying not a human right?

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

How is speech a human right?

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

"Rights" are described and defined by those that describe and define the term "rights."

[zanganito.livejournal.com]

Like a broken clock, even an egomaniacal ass can be right a couple times a day. That quote is certainly dead-on.

True. He also had a hilarious sense of humor. I think my favorite is the story he told about the time he almost pooped his pants on national tv. lol (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmZ8GWfX6DQ) (It's only in Spanish, sorry)

Also: his opinions on Fox News (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vNOBBB5FgY) are pretty accurate.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

The Fox News thing was funny.

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

Rand Paul says if Healthcare is a right that police can come to his house in the middle of the night and demand he be a slave to the needs of the sick!

"Healthcare is a right"=SLAVERY

[oslo.livejournal.com]

I have been thinking lately about how we need to get past a kind of reflexive avoidance of the possibility that there are, after all, things that are good for virtually everyone, opening up the possibility that it makes sense to provide for these universal goods through the state. Getting past the fear of "nanny-statism," in other words, and all that epithet implies.

For example, it is certainly true that everyone needs food, shelter, and a basic level of personal security. We may not know that there's a best diet, or a best form of shelter, or a best level of personal security, which holds for anyone and everyone, and perhaps on those questions we should not endeavor to use the state to choose for us. But it's unavoidably clear that everyone needs those things in some form, so it's odd, I think, that we should infer from the difficulty of choosing a universal "best" that we shouldn't even provide for what's universally required.

The same goes for healthcare. Certainly, for all but the simplest of health issues, any healthcare decision is going to involve the balancing of risks with the probability of benefits, so it's never going to be clear for everyone with, say, leukemia, that there's a "best" course of treatment. But one thing I think we can say for everyone is that (i) everyone is going to need to call on the services of a healthcare professional at some point in their lives in order to address a health-related concern that impinges upon their quality of life (if not their life itself) and (ii) the complex decisions that people need to make, when they call upon those services, are almost never well-served by adding the consideration of cost to the equation. From this, I think we can start to say quite a bit about how we might provide for even these most basic of healthcare-related needs, without worrying that we are somehow infringing upon anyone's legitimate "freedom" - i.e., their "freedom" other than to act against their most basic interests.

[pacotelic.livejournal.com]

There's a difference between "needs" and "rights".

[oslo.livejournal.com]

Fascinating insight, which of course helps us not at all here.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

[pacotelic.livejournal.com]

Are these "rights" the wants of the Eloi, or actual rights as endowed by our moral sense of right and wring as old as the species itself?

"Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" are rights that cost nothing and gain much. They were novel at the time, in that most governments didn't grant them at all. However, a state could opt to grant those rights, and declared its intention to do so. For which we are suitably proud.

"Health Care, Education, Water, Electricity, and 802.11n wifi" are all technological innovations of the last centuries or millennia that have indubitably made out lives better while increasing our dependency. They call cost money, either by the public or private sector, and they can all be delivered shittily, excellently or not at all. They tend to be delivered better when they are seen as market goods, not the free birthright of all 7 billion of us.

I'm pretty sure I couldn't farm myself alive for the next year, much less hunt and gather. So be it. That's the perquisites of civilization. To call these things rights is an corruption of the term. Not only that, it guarantees they will not be delivered to many.

Do you work for free? Do you give stuff to people for free? If a dozen people asked you to carry 3 gallons (24 lbs) of water to them a mile every day, how long would you do that for free? What of they insisted that it was their right?

Lots of things get delivered better, to more people, and more cheaply when they are seen as goods deserving of fair pay than as "rights" deserving of no pay just because. That they are free is a dangerous fantasy.

Its perfectly OK to advocate for "Goods" without resorting to calling them "Rights"

[unnamed525.livejournal.com]

Rights aren't "granted" by a moral sense. They logically follow from the categorical imperative.

[oslo.livejournal.com]

Are these "rights" the wants of the Eloi, or actual rights as endowed by our moral sense of right and wring as old as the species itself?

There's quite a bit packed right into this sentence. Where to begin?

First - "actual rights" - as opposed to, what? Nothing about the Eloi's situation suggests that they didn't have a "right" to some of the benefits they received. Indeed, our modern discussions about animal cruelty in industrial farming - especially in terms of animal rights - provide a convenient demonstration for why your invocation of the Eloi is as inapposite as it is irrelevant. So let's just set it aside and squarely address the strawman you're trying to get me to defend, which is this notion that we can't suppose that we have a "right" to some basic level of material sustenance without also accepting that we have a "right" to have every one of our material desires satisfied forthwith. Well, I haven't said that, and if you think that something I have said implies it, you'll have to explain how.

(I also haven't said that I think we do have a "right" to healthcare; I've just supposed that there's no reason why we shouldn't try to collectively address some aspects of our universally-shared healthcare needs.)

Second - what are actual rights, how do we know them, and whence our capacity for knowing them? Your initial sentence asserts a dubious moral ontology, a dubious moral epistemology, and then throws in some quick evolutionary psychology that is easily refuted with a basic familiarity of moral philosophy outside of European thought after the Enlightenment. And even in that tradition! There are Kantian and utilitarian arguments we can provide in favor of a "right to healthcare."

There are also legal precedents. In Anglo-American common law, we have "rights" that amount to the seizure and use of another person's labor or property. Depending on the jurisdiction - you may have the right in emergency situations to use another person's property for shelter or safety; you may have a right to call upon another to rescue you from a life-threatening situation, if they can do so with little risk to themselves; you may have the right to life-saving medical care.

But as long as we're being sentimentalist about it: The right to steal a loaf of bread to feed a starving child is, as far as I know, unacknowledged in the common law - but few have ventured to refute the existence of such a right by objecting to the possibility that one might steal candies for a well-fed child.

[Various modern goods all] cost money, either by the public or private sector, and they can all be delivered shittily, excellently or not at all. They tend to be delivered better when they are seen as market goods, not the free birthright of all 7 billion of us.

This is a false dichotomy. Ensuring that every person has a certain basic, subsistence-level welfare does not require rejecting the usefulness of "the market" for distributing limited resources, nor does it require conceiving an entitlement to such welfare as a "free birthright." And anyway, it seems rather strange to argue against the existence of certain purported "actual rights" on the basis of their practicality. If I were to argue that conceiving of "liberty" as an "actual right" actually produces more costs and harms than you've acknowledged, would you accept such an argument as even relevant [bracketing for now whether such a valid argument could be produced] to the question of whether "liberty" is an "actual right"?

[oslo.livejournal.com]

Do you work for free?

Well, I apparently do, since I never really see a third of my income but as line items on my paycheck stubs. But I'm left to puzzle over your selection of the evocative image of carrying pales of water for a dozen people. It's just so conveniently self-serving, and bears little resemblance to anything anyone seems to be suggesting for the provision of healthcare in our society. I might not consent to subjecting myself to the all-day subversion of my productive life to the water interests of people who outnumber me 12-to-1, but if we were talking about requiring each person who fetches a pale of water to set aside a third of what they bring back to a collective pool accessible only by those who are too weak or infirm to fetch their own water, what you'd be proposing would be far less bleak or unacceptable.

The rest of your comment just repeats the point about rejecting healthcare "rights" on the basis of healthcare being somehow better-distributed when people are priced out of its market, which I've addressed. above.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

They tend to be delivered better when they are seen as market goods, not the free birthright of all 7 billion of us.

That's an opinion, not a fact. Since electricity, gas and water were privatised here they've gotten more expensive, less efficient and less reliable. Why? Because you have to create a false market with unnecessary duplications because these services are all natural monopolies. Markets don't always serve better than central planning, *especially* if there is only a real need for one provider.

And then there's telecommunications; again, more expensive and worse since privatisation, and that's not necessarily a natural monopoly.

I want the free market types to start backing up their claims that the private sector doing things better than the government with some real examples, because it always seems to be just ideological rhetoric to me.

[mudryikot.livejournal.com]

In practice a governmental agency generally tend to be pretty bad providers of non-public goods.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

[citation needed]

Real life examples please, not some theory from an economics text book. Privatising monopoly industries here in Australia has led to less service for more cost; including a fire that killed hundreds of people and caused billions of dollars of damage because the private company wasn't as stringent on maintenance. That company didn't pay those billions, the community at large did, making us all worse off even considering the money we made from selling the company.

The only way a private company can run a monopoly industry better than a public company is because we're willing to accept higher levels of incompetence from private companies. Politicians tend to overspend running companies because they don't want to have to answer to the electorate when their lack of maintenance burns the whole damned state down (they have to pay for their negative externalities at the polling booth). With the private company no one lost an election, the company still runs the system, some middle managers got fired and there's a class action against them that will cost a fraction of the true cost to the public.

[mudryikot.livejournal.com]

Firefighting and to some extend fire prevention is exactly a public good. So I don't see your point.

As to real life examples of governments and its agencies being incompetent in provision of non-public goods one needs to go no further that to look on the ongoin decay in the quality of education provided by governmental schools anywhere.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

OK, but I wasn't talking about firefighting, I was talking about services. The fire was a consequence of maintenance of the electricity network.

Finland has the world's best education system, arguably *because* they don't have any private schooling. I'm glad you brought up education, as all the best education systems in the world are largely or entirely public. I'm guessing you're thinking US public education and extrapolating that out to be public education, but that's not a failure in government, that's a failure in the US government. This is pretty common; people who believe the government can't do things believe so because the US government can't do things. I agree, the bureaucracy in the US seems to be incapable of managing anything, but that seems to be a uniquely American/developing nation problem. In modern, wealthy economies the norm is the opposite.

[mudryikot.livejournal.com]

And who decides what is a human right?