Comment by johnnyg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnnyg | Hacker News Reader

1. Can we agree that both full socialism and full rand style capitalism end in tears?

2. Token rebuttals.

a. Someone lives irresponsibly, I live responsibly. The sick that comes for us all devastates them early and I'm told "since we all get sick, they got sick much earlier due to all the crack and booze, they can't pay because they were grasshoppering it up while you worked, so now you pay". This is an extreme example, but I work in healthcare and I think I'm no stable ground saying that you can substitute cheeseburger for crack and get a majority. Is this how we want to set things up and call it just?

b. Snow comes. I get out my shovel and go help my neighbor. I don't think doing this flies in the face of Rand. I do it because it is right to do in my gut because I know I'm fit to do it and they aren't. I don't think Rand says not to shovel, I think she says it is MY CHOICE to shovel or not and I own that moral choice after I make it. There's still a right and a wrong choice.

When somebody gets TB, regardless of their lifestyle, is it in your best interests that they get a full course of treatment in an isolation ward in hospital, or that they wander the streets coughing blood all over the place and incubate a new drug-resistant strain? Is it in your best interests that tap water is maintained by competing for-profit companies (see Victorian Britain and cholera), and is it better for you to pay 'insurance' to competing for-profit fire services?

> is it in your best interests that they get a full course of treatment in an isolation ward in hospital, or that they wander the streets coughing blood all over the place and incubate a new drug-resistant strain?

That's a false dichotomy. An example of a 3rd option is to put them in an isolation ward, and allow them to simply die if they can't pay for treatment.

When it comes to medical care, the question of how to allocate resources on quality of life improvements is never so simply and black and white.

> That's a false dichotomy.

No it's not, it already happened in New York in the 90's.

c. Insurance. Ayn Rand did actually state her opinion on health insurance. According to her, it's completely proper if a group of people choses to create a system of insurance as long as they're not forcing anyone to use that system.

With regard to 2.b.)

Rand, however, also condemned voluntary communal activities, depending on individual participants' motivations.

E.g. on charity: "To view the question in its proper perspective, one must begin by rejecting altruism’s terms and all of its ugly emotional aftertaste—then take a fresh look at human relationships. It is morally proper to accept help, when it is offered, not as a moral duty, but as an act of good will and generosity, when the giver can afford it (i.e., when it does not involve self-sacrifice on his part), and when it is offered in response to the receiver’s virtues, not in response to his flaws, weaknesses or moral failures, and not on the ground of his need as such."

If it were truly merely a matter of voluntary choice, there would be no moral blame on me if I chose to help someone, regardless of my motivations as such. If I were giving handouts out of the apparently perverse reason that someone needs it, Rand would condemn that; in contrast, a libertarian emphasis on choice would mean it's as valid as any other motivation, so long as it's non-coercive. (In the same line of argument, she would condemn me for advocating communitarian policies, because speech, even though it's inherently non-coercive, can be morally stained.)

Overall, though, I like the concepts you're pushing for in 2, though I don't think Ayn Rand would have embraced them. You're looking for someone closer to Elinor Ostrom, who is much less inflammatory and not at all focused on moral questions but also much more thoughtful and interesting.

I assume that by "full socialism," you're referring to Stalinism, something that's actually rejected by most socialists, and any serious socialist.

To answer your question, no, we can't.

It doesn't help that there are varying definitions of all these words. I have always understood socialism in the Marx sense. It's the stage after capitalism but before communism where the workers control the means of production. There are still markets, but things are run as cooperatives. I'm not saying if it's right or wrong, just that a lot of people get the definitions confused and what not.

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