I was listening to some discussion of Supreme Court Justice Stephens and his approach to the law and it got me thinking (what else is new?). According to the commentator, Justice Stephens is a supporter of abortion rights, but not because of the “Right to Privacy” that was in the original Roe v Wade opinion. A right to privacy means that the government should not pay attention to what you are doing in private. You could make the same case with the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. Law enforcement can’t come in to your home or car (or body) without probable cause of a crime. But Justice Stephens justifies abortion rights using the Right to Liberty. The government should not get involved in your activities unless you are infringing on the rights of others. Since the fetus is not a person with rights, abortion does not infringe on the rights of anyone and so the government would need a very significant reason to prohibit it.
In the case of abortion rights, both philosophies support the rights. But other domains are different. Take same-sex marriage. A Right to Liberty would support same-sex marriage because it does not infringe on the rights of others. Some say that just the existence of these unions hurts the institution of marriage, but there is no substantial evidence of that that I have seen. But the Right to Privacy says nothing about same-sex marriage. Marriage is a public contract. It is done before witnesses. It comes with legal benefits and responsibilities. So if you support same sex marriage, you must believe in the right to liberty rather than privacy (of course you can believe in both if you want).
So here is what I was wondering. Take a third domain: single payer health care. To make this work, we would have to tax those with higher incomes to cover a substantial amount of the health care costs of those with lower incomes. In general, progressive income taxes can be justified in a variety of ways. Richer individuals benefit more from the trappings of society, so they should pay more for it. They have more to lose in an armed conflict, so they pay more for national defense. And so on. But with a single payer health care system, this would not be the case. Everyone would be eligible for the same care and the same medical benefits.
So we would be infringing on the rights of the more wealthy to pay for the care of the less wealthy. This goes against the basic right to liberty. That is OK, if you can justify it with a different right that you believe in and believe that it is a stronger argument here than liberty is. But if you support same sex marriage, it means that a single payer health care system violates a right that you believe in. So if you want to support both of these issues, you need to think of a different right that supports single payer but doesn’t contradict your other beliefs.
Do you have one? I know many liberal/progressive individuals who support same sex marriage and single payer. But most of them I think are just making instinctive decisions about how they would like things to be. But when one issue that you support contradicts another issue that you support, either you are being hypocritical or you have a third belief that resolves the issue. I am not calling anyone a hypocrite, I am encouraging you to think about your beliefs and figure out how you resolve the conflict. Do you think it is OK to infringe on the rights of the wealthy, but not homosexuals? That doesn’t seem right (and what about homosexual rich people)? If you can’t think of anything, then . . . .
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Some rambling about dumbass government proposals
Anyone who knows me or has been following my blogs knows that I am a strong believer in open free markets as long as two things are true:
> people are given enough information to make informed choices
> there are no externalities that cause my free choice to harm someone else or
prevent them from making their own free choice.
My background in human factors also gives me a good insight into the predictably irrational (thanks Dan Ariely) nature of a lot of human behavior.
This combination often makes me cringe about the workings of government. I know that politicians are not also experts in things like economics or human factors. So I could excuse them if they, as individuals, didn’t understand some of the consequences of their proposals. But they had staffs loaded with people who can look this stuff up. They can call in experts from any field for advice, either informally or to testify at Congressional hearings. And yet, we still get these foolish proposals day after day.
I heard that Nancy Pelosi today decided that the solution to the health care crisis is a windfall tax on health insurance companies. I wish the term “windfall tax” would be removed from the lexicon completely. Profitability and success should never be a criterion for higher corporate taxes.
There is also the FCC’s drive for net neutrality. A good neutrality rule would allow bandwidth providers to charge based on the bandwidth used by the content provider, but to do it anonymously (hence the “neutral” part). But to say that they can’t differentiate on price in any way is simply ridiculous.
The Supreme Court has some important issues on its plate this term as well. My free market principles tell me that government should not ban any activities without a very good reason. So what about Chicago’s ban on handguns? I think there are reasons for some kinds of gun bans. Even though “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” there is very little reason for someone to have an assault rifle, even for hunting. So banning these seems like it is worth losing a little freedom for the great benefit of getting these off the streets. But to ban all handguns in the entire city? This might be going a bit too far.
And there is also the case regarding the government ceded a small bit of a park to the VFW so the cross can be maintained without violated the separation of church and state. This seems pretty underhanded to me. The government gave only the few square feet of land under the cross to the VFW and only on the condition that they keep the cross there and do whatever maintenance is required. The rest of the park is still government territory. But because the government now doesn’t own the land, there is no first amendment problem. If this is permitted, the government can get around just about every limitation on government action there is, just be privatizing some piece of the process. I usually don’t buy the slippery slope argument, but this would scare me a bit.
Finally, there is the new evidence regarding the NY city law about having nutritional information posted in restaurants. I have blogged about this before, and now we have a real life example of what I have been talking about. It turns out that surveys of NY eaters say that the posted information does affect their choices. But not how you might think if you haven’t read my other blog posts. Just as research has shown, people order main courses with fewer calories. But then they reward themselves for their good choices by ordering more high calorie side dishes, drinks and desserts. So the net change is minimal, or even higher calorie in total. Oops. But the people who may be helped by this are people who really care about their nutrition who can now make truly informed decisions. They eat less because previously they had no clue just how bad some of those meals are. Maybe that’s an OK tradeoff.
> people are given enough information to make informed choices
> there are no externalities that cause my free choice to harm someone else or
prevent them from making their own free choice.
My background in human factors also gives me a good insight into the predictably irrational (thanks Dan Ariely) nature of a lot of human behavior.
This combination often makes me cringe about the workings of government. I know that politicians are not also experts in things like economics or human factors. So I could excuse them if they, as individuals, didn’t understand some of the consequences of their proposals. But they had staffs loaded with people who can look this stuff up. They can call in experts from any field for advice, either informally or to testify at Congressional hearings. And yet, we still get these foolish proposals day after day.
I heard that Nancy Pelosi today decided that the solution to the health care crisis is a windfall tax on health insurance companies. I wish the term “windfall tax” would be removed from the lexicon completely. Profitability and success should never be a criterion for higher corporate taxes.
There is also the FCC’s drive for net neutrality. A good neutrality rule would allow bandwidth providers to charge based on the bandwidth used by the content provider, but to do it anonymously (hence the “neutral” part). But to say that they can’t differentiate on price in any way is simply ridiculous.
The Supreme Court has some important issues on its plate this term as well. My free market principles tell me that government should not ban any activities without a very good reason. So what about Chicago’s ban on handguns? I think there are reasons for some kinds of gun bans. Even though “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” there is very little reason for someone to have an assault rifle, even for hunting. So banning these seems like it is worth losing a little freedom for the great benefit of getting these off the streets. But to ban all handguns in the entire city? This might be going a bit too far.
And there is also the case regarding the government ceded a small bit of a park to the VFW so the cross can be maintained without violated the separation of church and state. This seems pretty underhanded to me. The government gave only the few square feet of land under the cross to the VFW and only on the condition that they keep the cross there and do whatever maintenance is required. The rest of the park is still government territory. But because the government now doesn’t own the land, there is no first amendment problem. If this is permitted, the government can get around just about every limitation on government action there is, just be privatizing some piece of the process. I usually don’t buy the slippery slope argument, but this would scare me a bit.
Finally, there is the new evidence regarding the NY city law about having nutritional information posted in restaurants. I have blogged about this before, and now we have a real life example of what I have been talking about. It turns out that surveys of NY eaters say that the posted information does affect their choices. But not how you might think if you haven’t read my other blog posts. Just as research has shown, people order main courses with fewer calories. But then they reward themselves for their good choices by ordering more high calorie side dishes, drinks and desserts. So the net change is minimal, or even higher calorie in total. Oops. But the people who may be helped by this are people who really care about their nutrition who can now make truly informed decisions. They eat less because previously they had no clue just how bad some of those meals are. Maybe that’s an OK tradeoff.
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