There but.

[roadrunnertwice]

I don't talk about politics as much as I should. I stay more or less informed, I read blogs, and I'm more or less constantly angry about what's going on around here, but I don't spend enough time interacting with my acquaintances about it all. Not here on the LJ, and certainly not in person. It's uncomfortable; I'm really not a debate-team sort of person. I can fake it well enough, I suppose, but it takes effort.

I'm going to talk about politics right now.

So this is what I've been seeing in the feed reader, today. President Bush wants to make cuts in a program that provides health insurance to kids whose parents cannot afford it. The Democrats want to keep the program healthy and expand it, because it's a wild success in protecting kids who would otherwise be thrown to the wolves by a merciless and broken healthcare system. So the Democrats put together a radio address by a 12-year-old kid whose family was saved from destitution and ruin by the program in question.

You've connected the dots here, right? Now the family is getting harassing phone calls and workplace visits from right-wing bloggers, Rush Limbaugh is accusing them of being wealthy government sponges, and, oh, aides to Republican Senators are sending emails to reporters making the same made-up accusations.

They got in a car wreck. They make a combined $45,000 a year. Private insurance would cost more than their mortgage. But you know what, the actual numbers are almost beside the point here, because they would have gone after anyone the exact same way -- show me a family of six living in a cardboard box, and I'll show you a right-winger sneering about their prodigal extravagance. No -- what the Republicans Against Crippled 12-Year-Olds caucus wants to get across to you is a particular mode of thought. They want your support in withholding help from anyone who doesn't "deserve" it (spoiler: you can never actually deserve their help). They want you to not think about the precise medical bill that would send your family to the poorhouse. They want you to believe that what's yours is yours, and that you absolutely got it simply by being virtuous and hardworking, not by having the luck to stay healthy, the luck to have parents who could send you to college or protect you from working three jobs at age 16, the luck to be smart, the luck to be white and of an acceptable sexual orientation. They want selfishness, and nearsightedness, and callousness, and miserliness, forever and ever amen.

Here's Digby, because it's a bit that deserves a verbatim blockquote:

And then the sanctimonious right wing vultures will determine whether they "deserve" to eat at Applebees once a month with their four kids or whether they are "cheating" the benevolent tax payers by having a television set or a cell phone since their catastrophically injured kids need help from the government. They will say that Mom and Dad should work two jobs or maybe they shouldn't have had kids in the first place or started their own business. There will be no sense of "there but for the grace of God go I" or no recognition that sometimes life throws you a curve ball and that you need the help of others to get you through.

---

That was the easy kind of talking about politics. Here comes the kind that I'm not so good at.

Debates over government entitlement programs, especially middle-class ones and especially the ones that move us toward socialized healthcare, tend to bring out a class of very civilized and reasoned libertarian arguments, all based around the very simple principle that what's mine is mine and should not be taken from me and given to others. It's persuasive and seductive, and it kind of breaks my heart whenever I see an obviously good-hearted person deploy it, because those arguments are the thin and inoffensive leading-edge of the wedge whose fat end we saw in action today.

It's that last sentence of Digby's that crystalizes why I resent Libertarianism. What's yours is yours because you got lucky, and believing otherwise is self-flattery. Determination and hard work and skill are real and important; they also do not mean jack shit if you get hit by something you don't have the resources to handle. The social safety net matters, goddammit.

What the Republican hard right are doing to that kid and his family is disgusting on a nice visceral level, and it's easy to recognize that it's wrong. It would be a lot easier to make it fucking stop if more people recognized that there but for the grace of God go all of us.

Comments

[jonsonite.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if you want to be argued with. If not, just delete this and don't read it.

1. Just because you got lucky doesn't mean you don't have a right to what you've got. Usually people who "got lucky" took more risks than those who didn't. The gambler deserves his winnings just as much as the worker deserves his wage. You can replace "gambler" with "entrepreneur" and it's still true.

2. I guess you could say that I'm "lucky" that I had parents who could put me through college. But the reason my parents could put me through college is that they and their parents worked their asses off and took crazy risks going all the way back to coming to some dangerous backwater continent instead of staying in Europe. So I don't have a lot of sympathy for "privilege" arguments.

3. I am more sympathetic to the argument that sometimes people's bad luck is outside their control (the car accident is the perfect example), but the fact that it isn't their fault doesn't magically make it my fault, or even our fault. So I'm happy giving them sympathy, and even giving them charity. But I'm not happy having my property taken by force, and it seems odd that people would expect me to.

4. Sorry for being the inoffensive leading edge of dickery. But resenting a principled philosophical position just because some people who share the view do dickish things just leads to resenting every position that isn't yours. Because some supporters of every philosophy do dickish things--it's just easier not to notice when you agree with their basic position.

[froborr.livejournal.com]

1. Why does the gambler deserve his winnings? Imagine two gamblers playing a game. They have led virtually identical lives up to that point, and they both have large life savings and no safety net. They each draw a card; Joe gets Bob's life savings. Now Joe is a millionaire, and Bob is headed for the poorhouse. How can Joe be said to deserve a life of luxury while Bob deserves a life of privation? They've both done the same thing, so why is one more deserving than the other?

2. You did nothing while your parents and grandparents worked their asses off -- you didn't even exist yet! So why is it fair that you benefit from it? Would you consider it fair if you went to jail for a murder your grandfather committed? Why, then, is it fair for a child to be hungry and sick because his parents were lazy?

3. Turn it around. Why should 12-year-old Graeme Frost be denied the medical care he needs when a few cents from every taxpayer in the state would cover it? Okay, so there are thousands of kids like him, so we're talking a hundred bucks or so from everybody in the state. Now, for some people, having a hundred bucks less means they have to choose between eating and having a roof over their heads, so we don't take anywhere near as much from them. For other people, losing a hundred is the difference between buying a stereo next year and not; we're not talking serious suffering here. By buying a stereo instead of giving the money to kids like Graeme, they are increasing the suffering in the world by just as much as if they were actively hitting kids with their cars. So yeah, if they don't give the money up of their own free will, we take it by force, just as we'd stop them by force if they were driving cars into kids. The less money you have, the less we expect, because you can't be required to help another at the cost of harming yourself.

4. You have my absolute and total agreement on this point. My disagreement with both dickish and non-dickish libertarians is based on differing assumptions, reasoning, priorities, and viewpoints. My disgust with dickish libertarians is based on their dickish behavior, and has nothing to do with my disagreement.

[jonsonite.livejournal.com]

Sorry for taking so long to get back, I've been really busy.

1. They both deserve what they got because they freely chose to take a risk that could have either result. If none of us deserve what we've gotten because of the risks we've taken, it seems hard to find any justice in any system of private property and free enterprise.

2. It isn't fair to punish people for the acts of their ancestors or associates. But part of the right to own something is the right to assign ownership to someone else, including your offspring. Part of being a successful human is imparting the tools of success to your offspring. So if my parents earned it, they should be able to pass it on to me if they see fit. And I shouldn't have to feel guilty about it. Hopefully I do well enough in life to make my kids "lucky" too.

3. There are a lot of people around the world who are worse off than we are. If we (following your logic) eschew luxury items in favor of giving our money to those who need it more than we do, nobody will be buying stereos at all. Are you in favor of a stereo-free world in the abstract? It's a reasonable position, assuming that going stereo-free would save people from going hungry. But you seem to be not only in favor of such a world, you seem to be in favor of enforcing that through government coercion. I hope I'm not off-base when I impute this to you: If I'm spending my money on a stereo instead of somebody else's healthcare, that's immoral. In fact, it's the equivalent of actively hurting them. In that case, are any of us moral? Do you own a stereo? Does your mom?

4. The only reason civilized debate is possible is because enough people subscribe to your position on this.

[boopsce.livejournal.com]

What do you think about Rawls and his Veil of Ignorance approach? I imagine you must be critical.

[jonsonite.livejournal.com]

I actually wrote a paper on this very topic. I don't want to go into it in depth, but the problem with Rawls' assumptions about our behaviour behind a veil of ignorance is that he assumes absolute risk-aversion, when most humans are just on the risk-averse side of risk-neutral.

A risk-neutral person would maximize the expected value, not the minimum value.

[roadrunnertwice]

It's all good; the best way to not get argued with is to not post huge screeds on one's LJ. (Please pardon my lag, though; I always have to get away from the keys for a while after writing something like that. What I said about political writing being hard.)

3. We also take your property by force and use it to fight fires that aren't your fault, investigate and redress crimes that aren't your fault, repair roads you didn't damage, and educate kids you didn't spawn. But despite their violent and coercive origins, I'm going to guess that you're in favor of socialized firefighting and socialized road repair. I am, too (and several socialized other things, besides), because a free and just society isn't possible without ensuring that certain vital services are available even to people who can't afford them. The money you lose to taxation doesn't buy some specific service for some random person somewhere; it buys the existence of the type of civil society in which, should the worst happen to you, you're ensured some minimum amount of protection against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

You know, as a sidenote, the "Taking property by force" framing for taxation really is a brilliant bit of rhetorical flourish, and I tip my hat to whoever first got that ball rolling. It's got everything a good frame ought to have: Factual correctness, shameless emotional manipulation (plus some good strong visual imagery), and enough cognitive force to gloss over and push aside a really impressive amount of common wisdom about the social contract.

Technical brilliance aside, I really hate that frame, because there's no room in it for the fact that we can't do everything by ourselves. There's no recognition that there but for the grace of God go I. It replaces all that with a sort of grand, mythic, monumental fantasy of rugged individualism. Which... seems to have brought me full circle to my general beef with Libertarianism. --It's like, I recognize that libertarianism, as a tendency, serves as a necessary e-brake on the train of state, but I really really don't like the places that Libertarianism, as a philosophy, thinks we ought to be laying tracks to. They're cold, lonely places.

1 and 2, I think Froborr pretty much covered me. 4... well, that one's mine to own, I guess. I still think that the philosophy of Libertarianism and the attacks we saw on that kid's family are born from the same fundamental blind spot. And at the end of the day, the harm done to them by this little brouhaha pales compared to the harm they'd have suffered by the sober and principled destruction of the program that kept them from going under.

I'm sorry, I realize that I sometimes get in your face about this sort of thing. You're a damn good friend to put up with my intemperate venting. =/

[jonsonite.livejournal.com]

3. In theory, I'm not in favor of either government firefighting or road repair. In practice they don't bug me so much, and it isn't worth fighting about at any rate. Anarcho-Capitalists tend to believe that in the absence of government coercion, civil society will provide voluntary solutions to problems. For instance, San Francisco (I believe) had private fire departments for some time, and people are experimenting with privatized highways whenever the government will allow them to. Elsewhere, Catholics provide health care to a lot of people and various charities provide soup, shelter, etc, to the homeless. It's an open question whether a decrease in government intrusion will result in a commensurate increase in charitable giving and action, but that's the theory.

The factual correctness is key to the "taking property by force" frame. How can somebody who is ordinarily against violence and aggression condone a nation-wide system of organized banditry? Practice, my friend: Long practice.

As for rugged individualism: I think my above discussion of voluntary self-organization covers it. You don't have to do everything yourself, but you are expected to do it with people who want to do it with you, and not take other people's stuff.

Of course, as you say, libertarianism tends to be more ebrake than anything else. So I don't think you have to worry about our utopia anytime soon.

And don't worry about getting in my face. I appreciate your eloquent zeal.

[nightswatch.livejournal.com]

"spoiler: you can never actually deserve their help"

Zing! That is the best line in political blogging I've read in a while. Nice.