Faux-Privilege vs. Freedom

There is one other reason to keep the non-privileged from paying for better benefits:

Imagine for a minute that everyone had BASIC health insurance. Provided by the government. If they get cancer, it will be paid for. If they sneeze, they will pay out-of-pocket for a doctor. Doctors who are AMAZING will charge... 200 for a visit. Not so amazing ones... 30.

Woah there. If your doctor charges you 150 per visit, you will be sure as hell checking that the doctor is good. While at $30 whatever. If you pay for your drugs, you will be damn sure you need them at $150 a pop. But at $15 a pop, meh better be safe than sorry.

Now an insurance company comes along... Hold up, sure I'll pay for it but how easy is it to make claims? Are they actually paying out or are they just giving you red tape?

It goes on.

Look at the COMPETITION created:

Doctors compete on skill to get not only clients who pay next to nothing per visit but pay hundreds to the doctor, but also on how much they charge.

Treatments compete on effectiveness. Will I pay $10k for a treatment that may be equally as effective as a $1k treatment?

Insurance companies compete on coverage/serving customers. Because anyone can leave and switch, and if they don't they have the safety net. Insurance companies now stop having the per-person monopoly. Very rarely do people have any choice in insurance companies.

Employers have employees who have only the risk of lack of salary when leaving a job. Though that risk is bad, especially when owning a mortgage.

The competition created becomes crazy. Entire monopolistic business models get toppled. And all for a very very small price. The fun part is once the free market kicks in, prices will plumet too. Competition will ensure to that. We just have to make sure competition gets a chance.

Exactly. When I moved to the Bay Area to work for Apple, it was all very nice but had a strange "taste" to it, sort of like Cowslip's warren in Watership Down.

It's not just the health insurance, it's also the college loans (and the prospect of having to pay for your children's college) and the mortgages. People with debt don't make much noise, and while people were likeable and smart, there was an undercurrent of deferring to authority that seemed bizarre.

If you steal our words, how can we fight you? Maybe it's time to invent some new ones.

'Privilege' never used to mean 'wealthy' or 'rich'. It meant "a special advantage, immunity, permission, right, or benefit granted to or enjoyed by an individual, class, or caste."

The word 'freedom' has also been subjected to a subtle change in meaning. The word formerly meant freedom from coercion, from the arbitrary power of other people. People who share your opinion have changed it to mean freedom from necessity, release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us.

Really enjoyed that one. It is interesting that you can use the same mechanism to frame the technological debate about open source and proprietary systems. That one might really pump up the rage views though :-) nobody wants to feel like they are being duped into carrying out someone else's agenda.

"white american males working as computer programmers are not privileged" - It may be hard for you to see privilege as in general everyone you grew up with grew up with the same privileges as you, and now that you are a computer programmer your peers are also equally privileged. But I can rest assure you.. that you are privileged..

I am a hispanic male working as a computer programmer, and maybe because of that it's easier to see the privilege my occupation affords me as my grandmother lives in a country where the median income after tax is 500 american.. Where every so often the police, and army decide to shoot it out in the streets.. Where 51% of the population is beneath the poverty line..

Maybe it's easier for me to see privilege as I went to a highschool that was a minority majority school in the poor part of town. Where some kids weren't worried about there health care from the flu, but there health care from a flying bullets within there apartment complex. Where the kids in the cafeteria line that had white slips are getting there only meal of the day because it's paid for by the government.

Not only do I think it's important to understand we are privileged; I believe it is also our responsibility to act on that privilege to make sure all are granted the same basics our life affords as engineers (job security, food, health care, personal security[violence], time off to vote, etc). Only when the general public is granted those basics will I even partially not think of my self as not privileged.

No, it's not freedom if your only option is to get a job at some company and then slave away in a boring job until retirement. There may be a safety net against losing your job - but it ties you to said job. And all those safety nets need to be paid for, if companies are being burdened with that it makes it harder to start companies and become truly free.

I am actually very much for safety nets, but I don't see why companies should have a special obligation to pay up. If society wants safety nets, society should pay (and companies would pay their share via the taxes they pay, too).

The removal of fear can also be considered a negative effect of a safety net though. Without the fear of failure, whats to stop one from making improperly weighed decisions? Isn't the fear of failure what drives the decision making process to the right conclusion? As a thought experiment: In a world with a marginally better safety net, would we really see cures for cancer or would we just see more Pinterest for X or Facebook for X start-ups?

Actually, I agree. I live somewhere with some (albeit kinda crappy) safety nets, and it's true: people are more likely to strike out on their own, start a political party, start a business, or just do what they freaking want with their lives in Israel than in the United States, where employment power is so concentrated that offending corporate America is a death sentence.

It's not dramatic, it's just that normal for Israelis is far more open and assertive than for Americans. Partially a cultural difference, but largely an effect of not actually being screwed for life by one bad decision.

These freedoms mentioned (with addition of free education) are called democracy in northern Europe. This is also why we have difficulty keeping straight face when someone claims that US has democracy.

In the context of OP's argument, I fail to see how government safety nets aren't just another example of "chains."

It might have been a good idea to spend a paragraph or three defining privilege as used in your post. Your use is valid, but it's going to annoy a lot of people who are accustomed to rich white men trashing them, and they might not be able to read it as intended.

This article irks me, not because I disagree with it (I do), but because it misrepresents the position it attacks. It claims to set up a balanced view of its opposition, but then hamstrings this view by only considering a tiny piece of it.

The author dismiss everyone who disagrees with him as "privileged" and wanting to "benefit from your fear". This is ridiculous and insulting. There are countless people who advocate the free market, not to entrench their position, but rather to give them a fighting chance against the existing economic hegemony in the first place. The "truly privileged" often don't want a free market, because the truly privileged are benefiting from the inherent inequality in a restricted market. This is obviously not true for everyone - but look at our recent bailouts of banks and car manufacturers. Do you think they would rather have a free market that would force them to sink or swim based on their own efficiency? Hell no! They would be out of business by now, if it weren't for the government using the power to kill peculiar to the government to coerce citizens into giving their money to mismanaged banks and manufacturers, so they could reap the wealth that comes with taking risk and offload all that risk onto everyone. (This, of course, ignores the fact that much of the mismanagement, particularly of the banks, was forced upon them by government regulation in the first place. For more information, I recommend Thomas Sowell's The Housing Boom and Bust. http://www.amazon.com/Housing-Boom-Bust-Revised/dp/B004I1JQ9... - not an affiliate link.)

I understand that he probably doesn't intend to defend the bailouts (though I consider them, or something like them, inevitable in a restricted market). But what he advocates is the same kind of thing - forcing people to pay for other people's risk (I understand that it's a very different scenario, because this risk is unavoidable, but in this limited aspect it's quite similar). His arguments make sense on the surface, and, indeed, perhaps universal health care does work better in a model that is already fundamentally broken (I seriously doubt this, but it's an argument for another time. But dismissing a free market argument without considering how a free market might actually work, assuming that it would operate without changing the rules that the current healthcare system works under, is setting up a straw man and triumphantly knocking him down.

You have to look deeper than just private healthcare insurance. When I argue for free markets, I don't just argue for free market insurance. Why is healthcare so expensive? Particularly when hospitals are usually built and funded by the government anyway? Why do we need health insurance to avoid going bankrupt?

A firm that began offering the same healthcare at lower prices would be overflowing with customers (the current hospitals, which have exorbitant prices, already are). So why doesn't anybody do that? First, because of the litigatory nightmare that is the modern healthcare system that, because of an absurdly low standard for malpractice suits (which are fine in principle, I admit) require doctors and hospitals to pay enormous amounts in malpractice insurance. Second, the restrictive and state-controlled medical licensing scheme, which drives the price of medical education through the roof. Third, the tremendous amount of regulation surrounding healthcare itself.

You may become indignant at this point, saying that total deregulation of the healthcare market is nonsense and poppycock, and that, while deregulation may drive many prices down so low as to be generally affordable without health insurance, there will still be some situations that would still be expensive enough to ruin most people. First, private licensing would still be available. The boards and organizations that already exist to license healthcare would still exist, they just wouldn't be controlled by the government, so you could work outside of them, allowing for more affordable healthcare in less restrictive licensing schemes. Clear malpractice and fraud would still be crimes, of course. To address the second objection, private insurance would still be available for those disastrous times, but it would be far cheaper because the frequency of bank-busting medical treatment would be vastly lowered. It would be affordable to pay for your own health insurance, rather than using an employer's, making it easier to start your own business. And that business would be started in an environment free of government-mandated monopolies (by far and away the most common form - look at the problems with Uber and Lyft), inconsistent and restrictive licensing schemes, and other harmful and difficult-to-avoid forms of regulation.

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My point in this long comment isn't really to convince anyone of my economic opinions. My point is simply that hand-waving my arguments away without considering their actual implications and what I actually advocate is not an argument at all. I'd love to engage in debate, but this is impossible if he's unwilling to listen to my arguments.

Oh look, a way to detect who's using an auto-submission script to try and get karma.

Just because raganwald writes it doesn't mean it belongs here.