Abstract freedom for the privileged
by digby
Alleged legal expert Ann Althouse offered a puerile libertarian defense of the Kennedy position in oral arguments over Obamacare:
“Liberty” is a high abstraction. What is it about the liberty of compulsion to buy an expensive health insurance policy that Justice Kennedy is supposed to find appealing? Just because someone loves liberty doesn’t mean they’re going to love everything you slap a “liberty” label on!
Indeed. Being able to afford health care is a “high abstraction” to well paid college professors who are in good health and already have it. For the person who is sick or petrified of getting sick, it doesn’t feel quite as abstract.
This gets to the very essence of what drives me nuts about Randians. Their concept of “liberty” is the most cramped, narrow definition one can possibly fit into an plutocratic system.
Scott Lemiuex answers:
Universal health care has freedom-enhancing properties in a lot of ways: it allows you to move, or engage in entrepreneurial activities, without losing the employer-based coverage that is the only practical means of obtaining insurance for those who aren’t poor or extremely wealthy. Mobility, particularly in American constitutionalism, has always been a treasured liberty. Bankruptcy is, to put it mildly, detrimental to liberty in all kinds of ways. Beyond that, whether you want to call the security that comes from health coverage freedom-enhancing is a matter of taste, but this security is certainly more valuable to most people that the “freedom” of knowing that you can be bankrupted by an accident or unforeseen illness.
The even bigger problem here is that the rugged individualists who go without health insurance are not making a “choice” to be free of state constraint and state-provided benefits. They are, in fact, making a choice to stick the taxpayers with the bill if they have a medical emergency. Even a moderately sophisticated libertarian understands that the “freedom” to free ride is no freedom at all.
Perhaps Althouse, like the judicial idol she defended so feebly, would prefer a libertarian dystopia in which people who aren’t lucky enough to have taxpayer-funded health insurance are just left to die from accidents or treatable illnesses. But whatever they would like the policy baseline to be, what matters both for public policy and for the question of whether the mandate is a necessary and proper part of a concededly constitutional regulatory framework is what the policy baseline under federal, state, and common law actually is.
At the moment, that general social framework requires that we don’t allow people to die in the street for lack of health insurance.
But if the Randroids have their way, that will change. They’re just preparing the ground.And the silly Tea Partiers will be happy to help them because they believe they will never be among those who are on the losing side of that game. Maybe they feel “free” in making that choice, but it’s a damned shame their twisted brand of “freedom” results in the suffering of millions of others.
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