Rand & Ron Paul: Social contracts? How do they f-ing work?

With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.



Basically, once you imply a belief in a right to someone’s services — do you have a right to plumbing? Do you have a right to water? Do you have right to food? — you’re basically saying you believe in slavery.


I’m a physician in your community and you say you have a right to health care. You have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you? That’s ultimately what the right to free health care would be.

That's so dumb that I'm going to address the stupid instead of addressing where the moral-fail occurs. If I'm a paying customer, I have a right to make a contract with someone for their labors. My right to health care is the right to be a consumer.  No one is saying Rand Paul has to get up out of bed and look at some eyeballs or the cops are going to force him to do jack shit. The health care debate is about allocating the resources of the community so that when any individual needs Rand Raul to come look at their eyes--Rand Paul gets paid.  He gets paid for what he does. The people in his office get paid.  That's not slavery. That's getting paid.   If he doesn't like looking at people's eyeballs for money, then he should have gone into a different business (OFFS, he went into politics, didn't he?)

Now I think he's using this "government thugs march in and enslave him" rhetoric because the truth is a little uglier. He doesn't see where anyone has the responsibility to pay taxes that are then used to pay a doctor for someone else's health care. That's also really dumb.  We pay for other people's use of different services all the time. We are all paying in various ways for other people's access to, say, firefighting services or police services--we just don't think about it in those terms. The reason we do it is because we all benefit. If my neighbor's house is on fire--I want someone to put it out before mine is damaged. If there's a crook out there stealing cars, I want hir caught before zie steals mine.  And if there's sick kids in the neighborhood, I want them taken care of before they infect mine. People don't live in a hermetically-sealed bubble where they and only they are responsible for their own troubles.  We have socialized services for things like water-testing and food inspection because we all benefit. There's a shared benefit for a community where we take collective responsibility for the health of people. What he is saying is "If you can't pay for it--die already. No one is paying for you, freeloader."

That he himself is a doctor makes this kind of awkward, though. Hypocritical oath, much?

But this sort of misunderstanding of how it all works is evident when his old man Ron Paul talks about FEMA.  What the senior Paul is saying is that in the case of a natural disaster, mind you, people have done something stupid and should be responsible for themselves. In a natural disaster. One was very stupidly living in an area that was prone to wind, rain, snow, tectonic plate shifts, mudslides or fires. You know, like the planet Earth. He also seems to be kind of disconnected from what FEMA actually does, or why there's such a thing as whole areas designated "disaster areas". If you and about a few thousand of your neighbors are homeless, you are not going to be able to wait, homelessly, for your insurance check so you can go  to Home Depot and fix your problem.  The whole community might have a sudden and desperate lack of access to services and goods they need, like water and food and a roof over their heads. That's why an agency like FEMA comes in--to save lives, not to "bail people out". What a weird perspective he has! It's as if other people don't....matter?

I don't really think blowing off the welfare of your fellow human being was what human civilization, let alone the USA, was based on.

I don't understand how people with so little common understanding about government went into politics at all.