[maxharris]

"Letting" someone not get treated because they can't afford it is no different in terms of my obligation than "letting" someone not have a new car, a new TV, an education, clothing, food, or anything else they need to live.

None of us are born in hock to the needs of others. If we were, that would be moral slavery.

[wpietri]

You need a new TV to live?

All of us are born incredibly dependent on others. After a long period of investment, we can function on our own. (Well, if by "on our own" you mean "without being directly dependent, but requiring a rich and complicated society where other people take care of most things for us".) Most of us choose to pay that forward by contributing to the maintenance of society and the species.

If you don't want to, godspeed. There is no law preventing you from being a selfish ingrate. You are allowed to opt out at any time and move to a country that is less interested in, say establishing justice, promoting the general welfare, or securing the blessings of liberty for the citizenry current and future.

For example, I hear that the tax rates in Somalia are very reasonable. Do start a blog! And maybe we can start a pool on how long you'll last in a place where helping others to survive is seen as optional as having a new TV.

[maxharris]

All of us are born incredibly dependent on others.

"Others" as you use it is far too imprecise. A person is born dependent on his parents, who have an obligation to raise him once they've chosen to carry a child to term. That obligation does not extend to people that didn't make the choice to bring the child into the world.

Also, you're attacking a straw man. I'm not an anarchist.

Sustaining a rich and complicated society requires that people act as traders. That entails producing things that are valuable to others, in exchange for things that are valuable to you, quid pro quo. And that requires a government, whose sole duty is to retaliate against people that try to bypass that process by force or fraud. A market cannot exist without an objective arbiter that keeps the peace (which can only be accomplished by having a monopoly on force - private armies, courts, police forces would lead to war) and enforces laws.

[wpietri]

Yes, that's the fundamentalist libertarian perspective. Like most fundamentalisms, it is hermetically sealed: you can never convince a Freudian it isn't all about sex, or a bible thumper that it isn't all about God's word.

I always find that a little depressing with libertarianism, as there's enough useful material there that I hate to see fanatics turning people off to it. There's a giant difference between "an important function of government is" and "government's sole duty is". The latter is appealing to people looking for simple answers to complicated problems, but is actively off-putting to everybody else.

I understand you don't think you're an anarchist, and, for a different reason, I'd even agree. I think the step-over-the-dying school of libertarianism would turn out, in practice, to be indistinguishable from the sort of chaos that people who don't know any actual anarchists think when they say "anarchy". (The interesting sorts of anarchism, like what the anarcho-syndicalists were pursuing, depend upon a human moral sense. Which, bringing this back, include compassion for the ill.)

The reason things will fall apart lies in another gap in your thinking. Parents are the most obvious thing a child depends upon. But try telling a teacher or a grandparent or a cop or a social worker or a neighbor or an aunt that they don't matter, that they don't have an impact on the kids they deal with. It takes, as they say, a village. Or, if you'd like a richer society, a lot more than that. You'll of course wave that away as inconsistent with your chosen theoretical framework. But that you can't perceive the value in something doesn't prove that it's valueless. It only shows you haven't bothered to really understand it.

[anonymoushn]

Why is "If you don't like it, get out" perceived as a reasonable response to only a very narrow set of ideas? It seems very strange to me. Nobody says "If you don't like your neighbor owning guns, move to Canada," "If you don't like the small size of your future social security payouts, naturalize in some country with larger entitlements," or "If you want to sell cars directly to consumers rather than to dealerships, just do it in Europe," because of course it would be completely unreasonable to say these things. Instead, for most ideas, people will bother to agree or disagree, knowing that both society and the law tend to change over time based on the views of people.

[wpietri]

I think if somebody is saying, "I fundamentally disagree with the foundation of our society", then "try someplace else" is a reasonable answer.

In this case, though, I'm not expecting anybody to move to Somalia. I'm pointing out that places with no effective social contract or taxation system are hellholes. It's not a literal recommendation; it's a reductio ad absurdum to show that the poster's views aren't thought through.

[maxharris]

You need a new TV to live?

You're making the mistake of defining "life" as only the things you need to for physiological/material functioning. But there's more to life than metabolism!

A human life also includes art, music, fine cuisine, fresh cut flowers, travel, and an almost endless number of other things, depending on whose particular life you're talking about.

Think of someone that loves movies. He definitely needs a new TV to live, and he's got a right to it as long as he's earned it.

[wpietri]

This seems like a further attempt to muddy the waters. There is a vast difference between "let's make sure people don't die from easily treatable disease" and "let's give everybody free TVs". I understand why, rhetorically, it's convenient for you to pretend they're the same, but the approach mainly persuades me that you're not serious.

[bane]

Let me know how that works for you the next time you don't pay your taxes that fund the Interstate I take to get to work.

[maxharris]

This does nothing to answer me. I was making an ethical point, not a political one (although it does have political ramifications).

I don't advocate that people not pay taxes. That's just a good way to get fined and/or go to jail. But I do advocate that people fight to abolish taxation, and especially the ethical ideas that support it.

[bane]

Oh, I get it, you're one of those guys that thinks all roads should be toll roads and you should only be protected by the police and the military if you can personally pay for that protection and all schools should be private -- wanna learn? gotta pay.

Yuck. Never mind I'd rather not debate this with you.

[maxharris]

No, that's not what I'm saying at all.

I'm not an anarchist. We need a government! Without creating the conditions necessary for a market, that market cannot exist. What are those conditions? The only fundamental one is to retaliate against anyone that initiates physical force against another. (Examples of this include murder, theft, fraud, assault, etc.)

[summerdown2]

I suspect you need a lot more than that. You need a police force to enforce it, for example, courts to try and prisons to put away offenders. Then you need communications so people know what the penalties are, and somewhere they are compiled, and a system for changing them and keeping them current.

And then you'll need a financial system to pay for it, which means you will need some sort of currency combined with laws to regulate counterfeiting and some sort of contract law to let people make deals. Oh, and it might be an idea to have a boundary so people know where the law is valid, as well as a language in which the law is written, which means it's a good idea to educate people in that language.

Then what happens if someone doesn't initiate force against another, but just abandons them - eg a mother abandoning her child. Has she committed a crime? What about international fraud? Better have inter-country arrangements in place. But then you might need diplomats, and maybe an armed force just in case.

I could go on. My dream if ever a libertarian paradise comes to fruition is to buy up a one mile strip of land fully enclosing a village and refuse everyone the right to cross it - food delivery, immigrants, emigrants - everyone, trapping the people inside and letting them starve. After all, I can do whatever I like with my property, and the only law we need to implement is property rights, correct?