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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

This essay is attacking a straw man, not Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand was not an anarchist and did not oppose government entirely:

http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=arc_ayn_rand...

I'm a having a little trouble believing the author actually read Atlas Shrugged - in it, one of the productive characters (Ragnar, if I remember right) explicitly lists many legitimate functions of government. One of them is maintaining public roads.

The author also deliberately fails to acknowledge the difference between public goods (blizzard cleanup) and private goods (medicine and financial services).

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The piece was written in the middle of a presidential election campaign where there were a lot of idiots running around saying we should eliminate government for all kinds of reasons that didn't make any sense. If it attacks anything, that's what it attacks.

Medical care is not unequivocally a private good.

True, but epidemic prevention is an extremely small problem (and a very cheap one to address), at least in the US. Virtually no one across the political spectrum (including most libertarians) opposes it.

Near as I can tell, the OP wasn't talking about it either.

But the same morals and 'ethical guideposts' apply throughout, do they not?

By way logic does a libertarian say that e.g. government coercing people to obey quarantines is acceptable, but that the government coercing people to pay for cheap public preventive care (before expensive specialist treatments become necessary) is not?

Quarantine prevents others from getting sick, while preventative care only prevents you from getting sick.

For comparison, compare laws against punching other people to laws against punching yourself.

And if you prevent someone from getting sick via preventable care you prevent them from spreading that sickness to others. Additionally even non-communicable diseases often have large impacts on those related to the person with the disease, so I don't see how you can truly separate the logic.

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