jonathan-cunningham asked: "Um, are you implying that it is unreasonable to expect people to live their lives as people have for millenia?"
I'm implying that social Darwinism in the year 2011 is morally indefensible. Are you of the impression that no one died of preventable illnesses in those millennia? Or that we should ignore those lives as an acceptable loss? Obviously, as has been repeatedly demonstrated, without Medicare or SCHIP more people would die- this runs directly counter to your absurd statement that those programs "do not help the poor in any way". You're pretending that because you and many others survived without assistance, anyone can. That's nonsense.
First off, let me just say that I love tumblr arguments/debates/fist-fights. I find them fun and stimulating and I hope you enjoy them as much as I do. However after this I think I’ll move on to other topics.
Your really need to update your definition of Social Darwinism. I neither believe that the poor and sickly should be left to die so their “defective” genes aren’t passed on. Nor do I believe that human society should be characterized by a regime of “survival of the fittest”. Indeed quite the opposite, not only do I think every human being should be treated with equal respect but that those who have the most hardship in their lives are often the most laudable and interesting.
What human beings have been doing for millenia is freely cooperating with each other to achieve mutually beneficial ends, no government required. Every member of a society has every incentive to render aid to his compatriot when he falls on hard times. Families, tribes, clans, whole nations are formed because of this basic principal.
All illness is preventable. The question is who decides what illnesses are to be prevented, to what extent, and what people are “worthy” of help? These choices are not the realm of government. Earning a salary under an arbitrary number or reaching some arbitrary age limit shouldn’t be the deciding factor; rather the choice (and the responsibility) should be left to each individual to take care of himself and those around him. I’d rather be responsible for the well-being of my family than the bean-counters in Washington.
Well let me ask you, what to you would be an unacceptable loss? What if the entire federal budget were spent to keep one person alive? Would that be a moral use of government power? Two people? Ten? A million? I don’t mean to suggest that there is such a thing as “acceptable losses”, but rather to demonstrate that the very question is unanswerable and ghoulish.
You are correct, though about my choice of words. I should have more accurately phrased it thusly: “Medicare and S-chip help that segment of the population to whom those programmes are available and to whom in the absence of those programmes would not be as well, if not better, off, taking special account of all the various social and fiscal effects these programmes have over their histories.” In which case yes, those who are lucky enough to receive the bounty of semi-socialized medical insurance before the butcher bill comes due are better off indeed. But when the costs of these programmes, both social and fiscal, begin to come in to focus, as indeed they now are, what will be done then?
When medical costs are so high that no one can afford to see a doctor but the rich what will you say? “Sorry, the government made promises it couldn’t keep, but hey at least your parents and grand parents benefited from these programmes”? When Social Security runs out of money should all the people who paid into it for years just shrug? Incidentally, before you make the argument, historically the U.S. government has never been able to raise more than 21-22% of GDP in taxes, an amount that will certainly fail to cover the liabilities of these “social safety-net” programmes. Revenue is not the problem.
I didn’t survive “without assistance”. I had a mother and father and grandparents who took care of me. They didn’t take care of me because they paid a 1.45% payroll tax. They didn’t take care of me because federal law said they had to. They took care of me because that’s what human being do. Government certainly hasn’t a monopoly on compassion, or assistance, or charity.
My larger point was that society did just fine without these government programmes. We didn’t chuck the elderly off a cliff before 1933 when Social Security was created (incidentally when Social Security was created it was kind of a rip-off because it was rigged so the average person only collected benefits for a few years before their life expectancy hit; most people were expected to die before they ever collected a dime). There weren’t colonies of lepers outside major cities before 1967 when Medicare was created. Before 1997 when S-Chip began children weren’t dying by the school-bus load. In short, humans, to paraphrase Dostoyevsky, are creatures able to adapt to any condition. We are good at survival. We will continue to be so.
And we’ll survive in a world without Medicare et al.. The way things are going with the Medicare Trust Fund, pretty soon we will have to…
