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So they're opposed to the military and the police then? If there was no military or police force then they would be fine with Gov. Inc?

dane-pgp 5y ago
Some people would probably prefer private military and private police/security forces, but those services work differently from private schools and private healthcare due to the inherent adversarial nature of the service they are providing. For example, the amount of police needed scales with the amount of criminals, and criminals wouldn't be the one funding the police, so there needs to be a way of forcing criminals to pay for the police, which requires something like a government. Similarly, everyone in a society benefits from that society's military, as you can't ask a foreign power to only invade the parts of the country that haven't paid their annual mercenary fees. Either the people who want to pay keep moving to more easily defensible locations, taking their military hardware with them and leaving the borderlands undefended, or you need a government to tax everyone to pay for a society-wide / territory-wide defence. In contrast, if other people don't want to (or can't afford to) pay for their own (or their family's) education and healthcare, that doesn't make you any less educated or healthy. (There are probably some economies of scale, and unhealthy people can affect you by carrying contagious diseases, but these are edge cases). So I don't think it is hypocritical for someone to (grudgingly) accept that the government provides a military and police, even though those are precisely the services that they should most fear trusting the government with.
- holonomically 5y ago
  > So I don't think it is hypocritical for someone to (grudgingly) accept that the government provides a military and police, even though those are precisely the services that they should most fear trusting the government with. It is definitely hypocritical. If you are not opposed to a collective military then being opposed to a collective healthcare system is nonsensical. And if you are opposed to collective efforts of any kind then that also runs into all sorts of contradictions because corporations are collective efforts. Whether force and coercion are involved are orthogonal issues which people constantly conflate and confuse with issues unrelated to them.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    I think there are nuances to the question of which services someone can support, which require deeper consideration than just "are they (involuntary) collective systems". If someone gets heart disease because of a bad diet, you may not want there to be an involuntary collective system that covers the cost of their medical treatment, since you don't get any direct benefit from this. (For comparison, a voluntary health insurance based system, with multiple competing private insurers, wouldn't have the same concerns attached). In contrast, if someone decides they are a pacifist and doesn't want to pay for the armed forces, but they live within the same borders as you, then they will gain the benefit of military protection that you are willing to pay for. That's not to say I personally agree with that distinction, though. Ultimately a life is worth the same whether it is ended by heart disease or a foreign soldier, and I believe that people in a society owe each other a duty of care to spend "reasonable" resources on protecting each others lives. However, I think that is a moral position, and someone with different morals could consistently draw a line between the necessity of involuntary military funding and the non-necessity of involuntary healthcare funding.
    - holonomically 5y ago
      > If someone gets heart disease because of a bad diet, you may not want there to be an involuntary collective system that covers the cost of their medical treatment, since you don't get any direct benefit from this. (For comparison, a voluntary health insurance based system, with multiple competing private insurers, wouldn't have the same concerns attached). I have no problem with anyone benefiting from the healthcare system regardless of their lifestyle choices. In the long run it benefits everyone to understand that their health and well being is not tied to a profit seeking system that views some people as less worthy of healthcare than others because it would be less profitable to provide care for them.

dane-pgp 5y ago

Some people would probably prefer private military and private police/security forces, but those services work differently from private schools and private healthcare due to the inherent adversarial nature of the service they are providing. For example, the amount of police needed scales with the amount of criminals, and criminals wouldn't be the one funding the police, so there needs to be a way of forcing criminals to pay for the police, which requires something like a government. Similarly, everyone in a society benefits from that society's military, as you can't ask a foreign power to only invade the parts of the country that haven't paid their annual mercenary fees. Either the people who want to pay keep moving to more easily defensible locations, taking their military hardware with them and leaving the borderlands undefended, or you need a government to tax everyone to pay for a society-wide / territory-wide defence. In contrast, if other people don't want to (or can't afford to) pay for their own (or their family's) education and healthcare, that doesn't make you any less educated or healthy. (There are probably some economies of scale, and unhealthy people can affect you by carrying contagious diseases, but these are edge cases). So I don't think it is hypocritical for someone to (grudgingly) accept that the government provides a military and police, even though those are precisely the services that they should most fear trusting the government with.

holonomically 5y ago
> So I don't think it is hypocritical for someone to (grudgingly) accept that the government provides a military and police, even though those are precisely the services that they should most fear trusting the government with. It is definitely hypocritical. If you are not opposed to a collective military then being opposed to a collective healthcare system is nonsensical. And if you are opposed to collective efforts of any kind then that also runs into all sorts of contradictions because corporations are collective efforts. Whether force and coercion are involved are orthogonal issues which people constantly conflate and confuse with issues unrelated to them.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  I think there are nuances to the question of which services someone can support, which require deeper consideration than just "are they (involuntary) collective systems". If someone gets heart disease because of a bad diet, you may not want there to be an involuntary collective system that covers the cost of their medical treatment, since you don't get any direct benefit from this. (For comparison, a voluntary health insurance based system, with multiple competing private insurers, wouldn't have the same concerns attached). In contrast, if someone decides they are a pacifist and doesn't want to pay for the armed forces, but they live within the same borders as you, then they will gain the benefit of military protection that you are willing to pay for. That's not to say I personally agree with that distinction, though. Ultimately a life is worth the same whether it is ended by heart disease or a foreign soldier, and I believe that people in a society owe each other a duty of care to spend "reasonable" resources on protecting each others lives. However, I think that is a moral position, and someone with different morals could consistently draw a line between the necessity of involuntary military funding and the non-necessity of involuntary healthcare funding.
  - holonomically 5y ago
    > If someone gets heart disease because of a bad diet, you may not want there to be an involuntary collective system that covers the cost of their medical treatment, since you don't get any direct benefit from this. (For comparison, a voluntary health insurance based system, with multiple competing private insurers, wouldn't have the same concerns attached). I have no problem with anyone benefiting from the healthcare system regardless of their lifestyle choices. In the long run it benefits everyone to understand that their health and well being is not tied to a profit seeking system that views some people as less worthy of healthcare than others because it would be less profitable to provide care for them.