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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (24331)	7/24/2012 10:18:44 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Rules aren't just made by government,and that's even with government crowding out some other types of rule making. David Friedman has written a lot about this. But lets assume that speed limits and road rules will only exist if created, promulgated and enforced by government. (In reality I wouldn't go that far, but I do think the basic idea of government traffic rules works.) OK what does that assumption get us? Well I guess it gets us to "we probably need government traffic rules and enforcement", not much beyond that. It says nothing about 99% of what government does, and moving back to the topic of this thread it says nothing about medical care or insurance. Even if we don't just limit it to traffic, if we assume there is properly a large role for government laying out some basic rules in areas to keep people from causing harm to each other (something you'd find general agreement on from minarchists to extreme statists), you could get that without most of what we have for government in the US (and esp. without most of what we have on the federal level). Which doesn't necessarily imply that we should vastly shrink government (although I do think we would be better off with less of it), but just that your point about traffic doesn't really get us anywhere. It doesn't support any expansion of the state, or even the state being as extensive as it is now. Its not an effective general anti-libertarian argument, its not an argument for Obamacare, or for single payer, or any other government medical program, and its not a response to the general point that Peter raised, which can be expressed as "A taking from B to give to C, isn't compassion on the part of A".