A Reply to Rational Individualist, Mr. G___
Hello Mr. G___ et al.,
I apologize for the unsolicited email, but as we were all kindly included in the discussion by Mr. G___, I thought that you may be interested, and perhaps some of you may be able to contribute your valuable insight. I would like to respond with some thoughts I’ve been mulling over since I returned from my trip to India last fall.
I think the value of government health care, and many other political issues for that matter, boils down to essential beliefs about human nature.
Defining “justice” as the protection of rights, I think we would agree that the essential aim of government is systematized justice, the alternative being chaotic revenge. In her essay, The Nature of Government, Ayn Rand wrote, “A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control.” If the individual mind were a reliable measure of just compensation, we’d all agree on the appropriate methods to defend our lives and property, and we could enforce justice naturally and orderly, without government. Unfortunately, real people have frequent and wide disagreements on matters of justice, which indicates a faulty measure at the individual level.
With a proper government, we arrive at a reliable measure by taking the average of many individual minds via democratic process, and for the sake of peace and order, we give the government what Rand called “a legal monopoly on the use of physical force.” So, a government preserves its society, individuals who regularly interact voluntarily for their mutual benefit, against the chaotic elements ingrained in human nature, physical compulsion (robbery, murder, etc.) and overcompensation (revenge, vendettas, etc.), which are inevitably a part of any society. The citizen who sidesteps such a government to enforce their own idea of justice, with no trial or jury or democratic law, is attempting to have his or her own cake and eat it too. By electing a government, we fork over our right to enforce justice individually, and then neither we nor our neighbors can be dictators.
A government can’t eliminate theft or murder any more than it can change the nature of its subjects. In a society, someone is bound to violate another’s rights, and others are bound to overcompensate. For a society to remain beneficial to its individual members, its government must take responsibility for rechanneling that factor of human nature to its least destructive conclusion.
But there are other factors of human nature that we have yet to consider. Looking behind violations of rights, we find their natural and ineliminable, but undesirable, causes: Honest people can make big mistakes. People arrive at grim situations by accident, through no fault of their own, such as by disease and natural disasters and stock market crashes and oil spills. We fall victim to harsh crimes, whether or not our government is efficient. We are born ignorant and defenseless, and not everyone to functional parents, so some potentially stay that way, damaged from childhood. To put it simply, desperation is a part of our nature.
That desperation leads to violation. These cases are common. (I believe sheer malice is not.) For better or for worse, we aren’t all robots who can cast aside our own survival on principle. For many, the lack of basic necessities far overwhelms the generosity and empathy in human nature. So a starving innocent will steal. Morality that goes only as far as to assert property rights is of little use in grave circumstances. In such cases, desperation overrides rights. It’s not a matter of “should.” It just does, without asking.
Unlike theft and murder and revenge, morality-overriding desperation remains unchanneled with a laissez faire government; but like with theft and murder and revenge, rights will be violated. It’s inevitable. The question is: By whom? And in what manner? The choice is between either the whims of the desperate, or a system of legal and democratic redistribution.
The outcome of either choice is clear. Unregulated, desperation creates victims, breeds suffering, multiplies. The victims’ potential losses are enormous. Regulated desperation dwindles to a minimum, and rather than erupting as a harsh burden on a few, the remaining burden is spread thinly and fairly among the comfortable majority of individuals in society who can bear it.
Particularly to highly self-reliant people like Mr. G___, who wants to be left alone and to fend for himself, it may appear paradoxical that a systematized redistribution of wealth could result in more control over our own lives. He understandably compares the health care legislation to “gilded slavery”. Consideration of human nature, which though noble is deeply troubled, reveals that the compulsion he opposes actually originates in the human condition, in our incomplete mastery of our own lives. The health care legislation is indeed upsetting, but not because it creates more control: It reminds us of our pre-existing lack thereof.
Bryan
