Hello,
Below is a script for my next video which is a bit longer than normal so I wanted to see if anyone had any feedback before I animate and publish it. I'll probably change some of the syntax when I record the voiceover to make it all flow better, so what I'm most interested in is if there are any parts that seem unclear or confusing?
Healthcare, rights, and other people’s labour
1.
Anytime someone says “healthcare should be a right” some clown will pop up and say “actually anything that requires the labour of others isn’t a right”.
Let’s for now ignore the ridiculous version of this argument which implies that free at the point of delivery healthcare requires forcing doctors to treat people at gunpoint.
We also need to ignore the fact that capital income and rental income both require the labour of others and therefore can’t be rights, so taxing them to pay for universal healthcare should be perfectly acceptable.
I suppose then we also need to ignore the fact that our labour relies on the labour of the parents who raised us, and the teachers that educated us, and the people who built the roads we drive to work on.
And we need to ignore the fact that our labour would be much less productive without the advancements in technology made possible by generations of other people's labor.
We also need to ignore that the relative wealth of people living in rich countries is made possible by the labour of those living in less rich countries.
In short we need to ignore the obvious fact that our world is so interconnected that literally everything we do relies on the labour of others and instead read the clown’s argument as something like “healthcare can't be a right because the policies necessary to provide people with that right require taxation which forces people to give up some of the income they have worked for”.
2.
A few years ago we might have dealt with this argument by pointing out that lots of things we commonly talk about as rights are funded through taxation. The right to vote requires a lot of administration. We could save a significant amount of taxpayer money by abolishing elections and adopting a hereditary system.
Similarly the right to a fair trial can’t be a real right as it forces the taxpayer to stump up for judges and juries, when we could skip all that and settle for just the executioner.
Recently however, it seems like the clowns are being more open about the fact that they don’t really care for these rights either so this line is now less effective. We need instead to talk about a right the clowns would never want to abandon, the right to property.
3.
There’s two major problems with maintaining that people have a right to property while claiming that healthcare can't be a right.
Firstly, while it’s true that abstractly saying people have the right to private property doesn’t cost anything, neither does abstractly saying that people have the right to healthcare. Abstractly saying things is one of the last free forms of entertainment available.
However, making the abstract things we say concrete does cost money, and we spend a whole bunch of tax money enforcing people’s property rights.
The second problem is that property law actually functions a lot like tax law. If I think a piece of land is mine, but property law disagrees, it will be forcefully taken from me. If I think some money is mine, but tax law disagrees, it will be forcefully taken from me.
Tax law might take 30% of the apples I pick from a tree, but if property law says that tree belongs to someone else, it will take 100% of my apples.
Any law beyond “don’t physically attack people” is essentially an addendum which says “except when they violate this rule”. In this regard there is no difference between laws which force us to respect society’s norms around property, and laws which force us to respect society’s norms around providing people with healthcare.
We can argue about whether these laws are fair or conducive to a well functioning economy or whatever, but we can’t make arguments based on violence or voluntarism, as all laws are enforced with violence, and none of them are voluntary.
The clown might seek to get around this by claiming that their property is an extension of their person, that attacking their land is equivalent to attacking them. But there is no equivalency there. You are not soil, even if your skull is full of it.
4.
But we still haven’t got to the core issue with the clown’s argument.
When someone says people should have a right to healthcare, what they’re really saying is that society should make an effort to guarantee that people who need healthcare get it.
The important question here is should healthcare be treated like schools, roads, and the fire department, or should it be treated like breakfast cereal.
Focusing on what a right is rather than how healthcare should be funded is an attempt by opponents of public healthcare to hide their heartfelt belief that poor people should die behind an abstract philosophical discussion.
But it fails even on its own terms, because outside of the legal context saying something is a right is just a strong moral claim, and all moral claims require things of other people. That’s why we argue about them.
Trying to circumvent that argument by claiming that the sacrifices required by the rights you favour are fine, and the sacrifices required by the rights you oppose are unacceptable isn’t going to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with you.
People have the rights we collectively decide they have. There’s no shortcut around the negotiation required by this fact. Because we live in a society. I thought clowns knew this.