Participation
March 29, 2012 9 Comments
Quick note on the administration’s current-favored Obamacare defense, that they’re just regulating how we pay for a market we’re all in – because even if we choose not to buy insurance, we are still ‘participating in’ the health care market. If they mean that seriously and sincerely (which I doubt), once again we have a limiting-principle problem. Why?
Because (in that sense) everyone ‘participates in’ all markets.
For example, somewhere right now there is a Madonna-pap-smear-in-a-jar market. You might think you’re not involved in that market. Oh but you are wrong! You are ‘participating in’ that market just as much as everyone else is: as a Madonna-pap-smear consumer whose bid is $0. Clearly that bid affects the market (I mean, if your bid were higher, prices and supply would rise, at least a little). Clearly, that market could be ‘interstate’ or ‘substantially affect’ interstate commerce (if you had a higher bid, someone in Alaska might be more willing to ship to you).
Hence, that’s a market that (unbeknownst to you) you’re ‘participating in’. And since Congress can ‘regulate’ it, in the process they can force you to buy Madonna pap smears (if that serves the purpose of their ‘regulation’).
Not buying something, anything, could always be rephrased as ‘participating in the market with a bid of $0′. Bids of $0 automatically ‘affect’ that market. So, we’re all ‘participating in’ all markets, all the time. Hence Congress can do whatever the hell it wants to us, all the time.
That seems to be what ‘liberals’ think.
UPDATE: Slight correction; my bid for the pap smear is not $0, it’s less. Like maybe I’d take it off your hands if you paid me $40. See? Everyone. Is. A. Participant. In. All. Markets. On at least some level.
UPDATE 2: Backing off my -$40 bid for the moment. It occurred to me I’d better review the regs for/costs of disposing of biohazards first….
It’s kind of like how a butterfly flapping it’s wings could cause a tornado on Jupiter.
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What horse *bleep* logic. If you accept it then you must believe that everybody is a drug dealer/prostitute/politician…
I agree. It is horse **** logic to say that inaction with regard to a market is ‘participation in’ that market, and anyone who accepts such a notion must also accept that all are prostitutes (it’s just a matter of price, as the saying goes). Correct.
But of course, no one really believes any of this. The problem is that some people pretend to.
even if we choose not to buy insurance, we are still ‘participating in’ the health care market
That is the essence of Wickard, not to mention Gonzalez v. Raich. Of course no one actually believes it. It’s an artefact of tyranny, not a piece of serious jurisprudence – the false statement which, when let into a logical system, enables you to prove anything. If you didn’t at the time, check out Thomas’s dissent on Raich. It’s good.
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If you don’t buy insurance, you can still show up at the hospital and force them to treat you for free. Unless you are going to run on the, “I’m a heartless bastard who is ok with people dying in the street,” platform and win an election your wasting your time.
Morever, there are also sick people that can’t get insurance for pre-existing conditions. Unless your going to run on the, “type I diabetics and cancer patients should just go die in a ditch,” platform and win an election, some kind of guaranteed issue and group risk sharing is needed. Guaranteed issue/risk pooling requires that healthy members are forced to buy into it.
If you don’t buy insurance, you can still show up at the hospital and force them to treat you for free.
This is due to government policy. So if you are saying anything you are advancing the ‘one government intrusion makes all others constitutional’ argument.
Morever, there are also sick people that can’t get insurance for pre-existing conditions. Unless your going to run on the, “type I diabetics and cancer patients should just go die in a ditch,”
In a free market, sick people with pre-existing conditions could get insurance, it would just cost a lot. You know, the market price.
So what you are asking for is not ‘insurance’, it is forced subsidy, or stealth charity. That is because sick people with (sufficiently bad) pre-existing conditions are, almost by definition, charity cases. Which is fine, and part of the human condition, and something that could happen to any of us, etc., it’s just that there’s no good reason to believe that ‘insurance’ is the best way to arrange for supplying charity to charity cases.