False Morality

The other day, I had an extended… lets call it a “discussion…” with a couple socialized medicine advocates on the Internet. Yes, yes, silly me. Arguing on the Internet is like (per Google’s third suggestion) playing chess with a pigeon. Nevertheless, I persist in doing so, because, if I do it right, I expose my opponent’s flaws to third parties. It is the existence of those third parties that make the futility less futile, and it’s why I never engage in arguments via email or messenger.

As such discussions so often go, the other guys got around, after just a few exchanges, of accusing me of selfishness and indifference to the poor. They commingled this ad hominem attack with broad, highfalutin presentations about how a modern society takes care of its weakest, about how providing health care (which they dub a “right”) to those who cannot afford it is a moral imperative, and with references to Christ and Biblical scripture.

The purpose of all this is to attempt to lay exclusive claim to a moral high ground, to bolster their position (especially after their talking points get knocked down) by claiming to be “better people” than those they argue against. For all I know, they actually believe this, and do not see the problems and falseness of their position.

Libertarians are, at this point, nodding in agreement, as are some conservatives who are frequent pugilists in the Internet swamp. Others might ask what’s so wrong with the notion that a moral society takes care of its weakest?

The flaw lies not in that precept, but in the presumption that this should be accomplished by government. That giving government the power and authority to be the caretaker of the weakest is synonymous with society fulfilling that role. The flaw is two-fold: it supplants the voluntary cooperation of individuals occupying a common space (this is what “society” actually is) with forcible action by a few on a few; and it presumes against all evidence that this is a better alternative than relying on society to naturally accomplish that role.

Some believe that voting for politicians who promise to take care of the poor is a good way to be charitable. Some (including a Senator that recently ran for president) even believe that charity should be the exclusive province of the government. Here’s something that should be obvious: You are not being charitable when you give away other people’s money.

Government has no money of its own. Even that which it prints, creates via various mechanisms, or borrows is either the wealth of the citizens or an obligation placed upon the citizens. Thus, every dollar that the government gives to people or spends on people is a dollar taken from people. Thus, voting for the government to take care of people is voting for the government to take from people. The justification is that the people being taken from can afford it, and the people being given to need it. Does this ring a bell?

Here, let me help:

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

This was the core of Karl Marx’s thinking and the core of socialist/communist society. This thinking has destroyed societies, resulted in death tolls that exceed the worst plagues in history, kept billions in poverty, perpetuated human misery around the globe, and vanished trillions in wealth. It flies in the face of the most basic of moral precepts: that a man owns himself and the fruit of his labor, and establishes an arbitrary set of criteria for enslaving some to others.

Hyperbolic? Excessive, given the relatively narrow topic of discussion? Not really. In an argument about moral ascendancy, scale doesn’t really matter. If you’re claiming to be on the side of right, you don’t get to assert that the evil you do is lesser than the evil you purport to fight.

That last bit is a utilitarian argument – one about what best tips the scales in the right direction. For the answer to that, I turn to the great man, Milton Friedman:

So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear. That there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.

My arguments regarding health care and health insurance reform start with the free market. History has made it amply clear that market forces make things better, and are FAR, FAR better at making things better than even the wisest and noblest of central planners have or can.

This offends some people to their core, because they declare that the free market is not good enough to ensure everyone is cared for, because they think that profits made in providing health care are evil and diminish the care available to the poor, and because they think, against mountains of evidence to the contrary, that government and central planning can do a better job of providing for people’s needs and wants than market forces can. They often argue against perfection, i.e. that free markets cannot ensure everyone is perfectly covered, but ignore the staggering failures of government, both in health care (e.g. the VA is a disaster; Medicare/aid lose $100B a year to waste and fraud; Medicare/aid are grotesquely underfunded liabilities, Medicare/aid had been requiring annual “[doc fixes]” to keep the system from collapsing, ObamaCare was sold on false and unfulfilled promises, is skyrocketing costs, and is imploding), and generally (seriously – how many government programs have worked out “as intended,” on budget and on time?). They craft a utilitarian argument by holding one side up to a standard of perfection and dismissing the other side’s brutal history of failure.

Thus, even the utilitarian argument for societal morality being accomplished by big government collapses under scrutiny.

What of the “the rest of the world provides socialized medicine” argument? Apart from this being a bandwagon fallacy, the data does not support the notion that the rest of the world is better off for it. Moreso, those who make the argument ignore something else the rest of the world does: tax the bejeezus out of the working and middle classes to pay for this and other social welfare programs. Socialized medicine advocates conveniently ignore this flip side of the “rest of the world” model, and in doing so ignore the harm done to those poor they want to help.

As for the biblical argument? Nowhere have I seen that Christ argued for taking from Peter to give to Paul. His arguments were what what each of us, as individuals, should do, how we are to be personally charitable. It is grotesquely offensive to attack one’s religiosity or “Christianity” by challenging one’s opposition to government taxation and redistribution.

The bottom line is:

Giving away other people’s money is not charity.

It is not a moral act. It is the pointing of a gun masquerading as a noble act. Even Robin Hood, the great equalizer and righter of injustice, did not steal from some to give to others. He did not “take from the rich to give to the poor.” He stole from the tax man that which the tax man took, under cover of immoral laws and the threat of violence, from the people.

David Mamet referred to socialism as “the abdication of responsibility.” The moral arguments made by proponents of socialized medicine (euphemistically renamed “single payer,” probably because “socialism” remains a uncomfortable-to-dirty word even among socialists) are exemplars of Mamet’s observation. Rather than personally helping the poor, with money, time, or whatever they have, they decide that you and I and many others must be forced to do so, whether we already do so or not, whether it’s the best way to help them or not, via the conduit of taxation, regulation, and bureaucracy, and at the end of a gun.

The arguments I’ve made here derive from the health insurance debate, but they’re as applicable and relevant to every other debate about big vs small government. Whether it be directly aiding the poor, interfering in voluntary interactions between people, or regulating markets, there’s usually an argument that government should protect the weak from misfortune or from the predatory because it is the moral thing to do, and that argument fails in the same ways the health care morality argument does: it’s immoral to forcibly take people’s wealth simply to give to others, and it’s generally a far worse way of addressing these matters than voluntarism and free markets are.

There is no morality in advocating for big government to be the vehicle for helping the poor. There is only selfishness, laziness, and ignorance.