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Comment by chops | Hacker News Reader

only that people deserve health care, food and shelter

Why? These aren't automatically available in nature. They require work, and the application of the mind, to acquire. Health Care is a service provided by individuals. People have a "right" to health care only inasmuch as those who are capable of delivering said health care are willing to do so (that is, voluntarily).

The same goes with food gathering/storing/preparation and building manufacturing. Someone has to provide these services, and to state that because someone "deserves it" that those services must be rendered (without concern for rendering individual's agreement), well, that's the master-slave relationship.

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Why? These aren't automatically available in nature.

It turns out the answer to your question doesn't require empathy for your fellow man to understand. (Of course, if we were assuming this, the answer to the question would be largely obvious.)

A lot of things aren't automatically available in nature. Police, the military, public schools, and your broadband connection all come to mind.

It turns out that governments and society work based on this concept you may have heard of called a "social contract." Look it up. Saying there's a "master-slave" relationship implied by citizens deserving to have their basic needs met is either really ignorant or very disingenuous. Every citizen of this country is part of the contract, whether you realize it or not.

If you allow a large enough part of the society to become a desperate underclass, you'll find that they'll become dangerous to the rest of the society. Dealing with these problems will cost you more in taxes than simply improving infrastructure at large as a preventative measure.

Or, put more bluntly: the safety of the rich and upper middle class isn't automatically guaranteed in nature either. If you really want to take the nihilist approach you imply, then you'll find that poor people won't just walk idly by your house in despair; they'll just kill you and take your money. Or they'll get so sick that you have no choice but to start paying for their health care lest you catch the plague. In "nature" no one cares how well you code, only how well you can fend for yourself in the wild. Is that really the society you want?

Your point is valid, but I think it's a bit extreme to say that guaranteeing basic care makes everyone else a slave. A slave works for nothing to enrich others; a doctor loses some money caring for indigent patients but doesn't become poor while the patients become rich. There is a natural limit there.

The financial differences are irrelevant. A slave is one who works for another without choice, under threat of force.

The (American) slaves were given basic provisions for life, even some leisure time. Their fundamental problem wasn't the money or their lifestyle, it was the lack of choice. They didn't have the right to say "no, I refuse to serve you."

False dichotomy: you're either 100% free to do anything you want, or you're a slave. There's lots of middle ground, namely that making certain choices implies accepting certain constraints. Universal health care, for example, needn't _force_ doctors into providing care for certain people at gunpoint. It may imply, however, that if you choose to enter medicine that you may have to accept certain conditions.

This is already the case, actually. Working at certain emergency rooms obligates one to care for those that come through the door, regardless of whether they can pay. This hardly makes the doctors & nurses who work there slaves.

Similarly, in the US we citizens have a right to council, and if you can't afford an attorney, one is provided by the state. Does that make court appointed attorneys slaves?

Doctors can quit.

Right, but this applies to other basic aspects of american society:

- you have a right to trial by a jury of one's peers, but people have better things to do than sit around and listen to you defend yourself or slag on the accused...you don't see people clamoring at the bit for jury duty, do you?

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