[CryptoPunk]

>>We form governments and associations, and have them set rules, in order to accomplish more than we can accomplish separately.

One more time: you are arguing against a strawman. I've already shown I am not opposed to government intervention in principle.

>>This means relinquishing some individual freedom of choice and prioritizing our use of resources.

No, the existence of government and the pursuit of common goals through it does not require restricting any one's right to freely interact with other consenting adults, or depriving them of their private property.

>>but living in a society means accepting that you can’t just do whatever you want, everyone else be damned.

Living in a free society means being able to engage in voluntary interactions with other consenting adults, the judgment of others be damned.

[otterley]

Sorry, buddy. You just can’t hire a willing veterinarian to do surgery on you. Good luck convincing the world that that’s ok.

[CryptoPunk]

I will keep making the case that violating people's right to engage in voluntary interactions with other consenting adults, is always wrong. The Quakers spent centuries arguing against slavery, and were in the extreme minority for most of that period. Progress sometimes takes time.

I think healthcare would benefit from legalizing the provision of medical service by un-certified individuals, as well as providing more than one tier of certification, where people who can't afford fully certified practitioners, but would like the assurance of some certification, have that option.

Instead of making it illegal for individuals who don't possess full certification to practice medicine, the law could instead require medical practitioners to disclose their level of certification, and any warnings the state provides in relation to that.

So for example, an uncertified doctor/nurse may be required to disclose not only that they are uncertified, but also the warning that the state strongly advises against using uncertified medical practitioners.

Why providing these options is critically important is that sometimes the prescribed institutions fail, and an escape hatch is a life saver. Take this case of a woman in Canada who had to wait two years to get a test that diagnosed her with cancer, because of a shortage of state-licensed doctors:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/doctor-shortage-cancer-video-...

Society has imposed heavy regulations on the most important industries, and the result is that the most important industries are the most dysfunctional:

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-3...

Look at what regulations have done to healthcare in the US for example:

https://www.athenahealth.com/knowledge-hub/practice-manageme...

>>Here's some food for thought: The number of physicians in the United States grew 150 percent between 1975 and 2010, roughly in keeping with population growth, while the number of healthcare administrators increased 3,200 percent for the same time period.

*

>>Supporters say the growing number of administrators is needed to keep pace with the drastic changes in healthcare delivery during that timeframe, particularly change driven by technology and by ever-more-complex regulations. (To cite just a few industry-disrupting regulations, consider the Prospective Payment System of 1983 [1]; the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996 [2]; and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Act of 2009. [3])

[1] https://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Medicare-Fee-for-Service-Paymen...

[2] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-reg...

[3] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/h...

[otterley]

It takes a lot of nerve to compare the morals of anti-slavery to the right to swindle people and take advantage of our most vulnerable members of society.

[CryptoPunk]

You are crudely generalizing an entire class of ostensibly voluntary interactions, as "swindling", and prohibiting them all on that basis, and then handing out exemptions from that prohibition on a case by case basis, upon a party receiving approval from a centralized gatekeeper.

What you are effectively advocating for is a massive limitation on people's rights to freely interact with others, and using their safety - as if you know better what's best for them - to justify it.

[otterley]

I’m not personally doing any such thing. The people who make the rules are ourselves through the democratic process, guided by a set of morals and tenets that we take reasonable measures to protect the weaker and less powerful or capable among us.

Now you may disagree with those tenets, and that’s of course your right; but people should understand why we make such rules based on history and have at least some amount of respect for what came before, imperfect though it may be.

Ideological purity doesn’t serve anyone well, because the world is a messy and complicated place. Every rule has exceptions; there are shades of gray; etc.

[CryptoPunk]

>>take reasonable measures to protect the weaker and less powerful or capable among us.

Those measures, which you support, are what I described:

crudely generalizing an entire class of ostensibly voluntary interactions, as "swindling", and prohibiting them all on that basis, and then handing out exemptions from that prohibition on a case by case basis, upon a party receiving approval from a centralized gatekeeper

And yes, democracy can support laws that violate of human rights. Democracies instituted slavery for instance, often justifying it with claims that it was to protect the slaves from the dangers of freedom.

>>but people should understand why we make such rules based on history and have at least some amount of respect for what came before, imperfect though it may be.

I am definitely open to hearing about the arguments for those restrictions, but I have looked quite a bit, and what I've seen is those restrictions inflicting massive harm on society on the balance. Again I am open to seeing what evidence you have of the contrary.

And this is consistently the case when I look at different industries, and the reason I believe it's a universal effect is due to basic organizational dynamics: a free-er system has a larger range of options, and thus is more likely to discover, through trial and error and the natural tendency of people to seek out mutually beneficial configurations, superior processes.

I described what I see as strong indications of that with respect to healthcare in earlier comments. I've seen the same thing when I look at venture capital fundraising:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29756193