Most people tolerate the unpleasant ramifications of the status quo because they’re used to them, Bryan Caplan notes:
“What if a poor person gets sick, doesn’t have insurance, and can’t get friends, family, or charity to pay for treatment?”
“What if an elderly person gets defrauded out of his entire retirement and the perpetrator vanishes into thin air?”
“What if a child is starving on the street, and no one voluntarily feeds him?”
“What if someone just can’t find a job?”
If you’re a libertarian, you face what-ifs like this all the time. The point, normally, is to make you say, “Tough luck” and look like a monster. What puzzles me, though, is why libertarians rarely ask analogous questions. Like:
“What if Congress passes an unjust law, the President signs it, and the Supreme Court upholds it?”
“What if the government conscripts you to fight in an unjust war, and you die a horrible death?”
“What if a poor person drinks and gambles away his welfare check?”
“What if the government denies you permission to legally work?”
“What if the President decides your ethnicity is a national security risk and puts you in a concentration camp, and the Supreme Court declares his action constitutional?”
“What if a person lives an extremely unhealthy lifestyle, so by the time they’re retired, they’re in constant pain no matter how generous their Medicare coverage is?”
“What happens if a President lies to start a war, and voters don’t particularly care?”
Once you start the what-if game, it’s hard to stop. Name any political system. I can generate endless hypotheticals to aggravate its supporters. The right lesson to draw: Every political perspective eventually has to say “Tough luck” when confronted with well-crafted what-ifs. There’s nothing uniquely hard-hearted or cruel about libertarianism. Defenders of democracy, nationalism, liberalism, conservatism, the American Constitution, and social democracy all eventually sigh, “Life’s not fair,” or “Well, what do you want me to do about it?”
True, but unhelpful.
Try this: “When you have figured out how to solve all the problems in the world without creating new ones, then I’ll talk what-ifs with you.”
Better yet: don’t adopt an ideological label in the first place. Letting yourself be pigeonholed in a sucker’s game.
Yes, that can lead to a straw man problem. No solution is perfect, which is kind of the point.
Then there’s: “Would you really rather Y than X?” Now we’ve framed it into a matter of trade-offs of values, which is frighteningly close to an intelligent and enlightening exchange.
Extreme cases all of them. Extreme cases make for bad law and for bad policy too.
“What if a poor person gets sick, doesn’t have insurance, and can’t get friends, family, or charity to pay for treatment?”
Nonsense. By law in the USA if you are sick and go to a hospital and seek aid, that hospital by law is required to TREAT you and do so in a manner as it would for any other patient. Your bill latter most of the time written off as a tax write-off.
I forget the source- likely one of those late night sarcasm comedy shows – but my fave is when some comedy drone asked some NRA spokespuppet: “How many children will have to die before you accept (gun control measure goes here)?”
I would never be able to do PR work, since my answers would all be:
Whose children are they?
How did they get shot and by whom?
Were they part of the fight?
Were they knocking over a pharmacy?
Did they also have a gun? Knife? Club?
Were they really children in the colloquial sense or 15-18 year old rookie bangers?
Then when we get down to the actual kids actually innocent and shot by their stupid friends with stupid parent’s easily accessible gun, I’m open to serious prosecution of the parent involved.
If in the role of NRA puppet, I’d probably just ask the comedian when he stopped beating his wife, the ur-classic of this genre.
I recall back in the 80s when it was more clear that the progressive left would be the ones to keep us out of space [man can't be all raping the pristine environment of Mars with a human colony, since that would be imperialism, ecocide, and barely metaphorical sexual assault] that one often heard the notion put about that we should solve all the problems on earth before we go out there.
Solve all the problems. As though they were a defined, finite, soluble and agreed set.
Maybe nobody wants to hear this, but a lot if these questions boil down to who has the cure for original sin. The problem both libertarians, and those who believe in some sort of government, frequently have is that they think if we can just get the system right we’ll cure problems that are an intractable part of human nature.
Don’t get me wrong, some systems are definitely better than others, obviously. But eventually somebody is going to have to be trustworthy, somebody is going to have to be brave, somebody is going to have to be humble enough to see that something isn’t working even if it’s their own idea and it would be embarrassing to admit that. Acting like widespread virtuous behavior that makes society function “just happens” is ignoring a key variable. The fact that most retailers can trust more than one employee with the keys to the till is actually a tremendous social accomplishment that not all countries share. It’s a much bigger key to a better society than whether or not we should privatize the post office.
The number of stupid demands made by stupid people is large, but not infinite. Think of clever and snappy retorts in advance for the more common ones.
Forget PR. The only way to win an argument is to one up the other guy in front of witnesses. Nobody gets points for logic, because the audience can’t even follow logic and gets bored by it anyway. What they admire is the demonstration of superior mental alacrity. Be clever and punchy, and watch them just assume you made sense.
Ever have something say something to you, and you don’t know how to respond, and then afterward you think of the perfect comeback? Take heart. You’ll get another chance eventually. Remember those comebacks. Have them ready for the ext time.
Solid advice. So was “don’t let yourself be pigeonholed.”
One is never in a good starting position when pigeonholed as “the libertarian” or “the conservative” or [now, even] “the liberal” in the room.
What if you were taught that life is inherently unfair, to some extent, for everyone. What if you knew that, if you were poor, you couldn’t live your life like rich people do, taking no thought for what degree you got, or whether you learned a trade, or whether you lived your life working hard and saving responsibly for retirement.
That’s how people used to live their lives, before they were taught in progressive Leftist schools that sooner or later the socialist government will make you whole, and you didn’t need to take responsibility for yourself.