My Right to Free Speech Enslaves You. Bwahaha.
Rand Paul:
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.
By this logic, one’s right to religious belief enslaves clergy; the right to keep and bear arms enslaves gun dealers; the right to legal representation enslaves attorneys; and, I suppose, the right to free speech enslaves, well, anyone who you want to have listen. While we’re at it, don’t we all have a right to life? That makes slaves out of everyone who does anything that keeps people alive.
Apparently Paul does not quite understand the meaning of the word “rights.”
You have a right to an attorney. That’s a plain fact. Yet, I don’t see any attorneys being enslaved.
Rand Paul, and the like, are suffer from Icarus’ syndrome.
The Greeks try to teach, through the Icarus story, moderation, in all things in virtue. Icarus, of course flew to near the sun and that caused his wings to melt and him to plummet out of the sky.
The broader concept is that, at the far end of all ideologies, is nihilism – the old “we had to destroy the village in order to save the village.” In a bizarre sense, Ayn Rand, whom Paul is named after, unwittingly makes the point by burning everything down at the end of Atlas shrugged. Hitler trod that road too, in the closing days of his regime ordering a scorched earth policy.
These guys have been in Icarus’ fog for a long time. Goldwater said in his 1964 exceptance speech, “extremism in the cause of liberty is no vice.” He couldn’t be more wrong.
The genious of Anglo-American civics, born out of the common law, has been pragmatism, with a bias for justice/fairness first, liberty/freedom second, and everything else, following along. As Wiesenthal said, “without justice their is only tyranny” and liberty that is not subject to constraint by justice leads to the tyranny of might makes right, which is, of course, the worst form of tyranny.
So the greeks were right all things in moderation. Liberty has to be balanced off of fairness, and other practical concerns when they pop up: it’s called pragmatism. It’s also called common sense.
In the real world, all ideas like liberty and fairness form a sort of check and balance on each other that keeps things in moderation.
The manifestation of extremist and extremist thinking, such as Pauls, is really just a manifestation of a lack of common sense. You can walk, you can chew gum, and guess what? You can do both at the same time.
In a certain sense, then, the guy is a bit of an idiot.
Especially in that the attorney is guaranteed free, which is Rand’s main point.
Especially when your ideal of “liberty” is as skewed and as conditional as some of these people see it.
And yet, all too often, fairness/equality is shunned, excluded in the name of freedom/liberty. We have freedom of speech, but not equality of speech. I don’t mean that in the sense that everyone’s speech must have equal impact as everyone else’s–that’s the result of effort–but that, as much as is reasonable, one person’s speech should not be disproportionately louder than anyone else’s. The Internet is an excellent example of this: especially because of Net Neutrality, my voice on this blog potentially has as much reach as anyone else’s voice in the country, or the world. Certain factors take away from that fair balance, but there is a reasonable fairness nonetheless.
This is where money comes in and destroys fairness. Not that it’s not fair for you to have more money than me, but that it is unfair for your money to allow you to steal my voice–to make my voice disappear because you can buy a bullhorn and drown me out.
Conservatives seem to hold that this is OK, as money represents the result of initiative, effort, talent, and success, reflecting one’s worth in society. As a result, money should be equal to things like speech and all that we value, as a way of rewarding those talents and strengthening society.
The problem is–money is decidedly not such an indicator. Oh, it can be, but it is much more so the result of inheritance, corruption, dishonesty, vice, and one’s willingness to manipulate, abuse, and exploit other people. And the more money is allowed to eclipse fairness and equality, the more it amplifies the effects of the qualities money represents at the expense of equality and fairness.
And honestly, I think conservatives are OK with that as well–as long as they can at least imagine themselves as the ones wielding the money. This is why they oppose measures like Net Neutrality, why they hate the initiatives that promote equality and fairness.
Education? Hey, if your parents can’t cut it, you don’t deserve it, loser. Health care? If you can’t demonstrate your value to society, then society owes you jack, you worthless bum, and you have no right to demand a doctor whose daddy paid his way to waste time on you. Equal speech? Prove that you’re worth it. Otherwise, wallow in the backwaters of obscurity.
I agree with the idea of having the freedom to fail–and I think most liberals do as well. That is, for the most part, a straw man argument beloved by the right wing. What the left argues for, and the right hates, is the idea of a level playing field, of a fair start for everyone. They feel that if you have money, then that should always give you an advantage when starting any endeavor–including your kid’s lives.
ie rent-seeking. Economics already has a term for “unfair profit” —
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent
the richer you are, the more times you can fail. Poor people don’t really have the luxury of failure, they screw up, good bye. Trump failed many times yet he’s a billionaire.
In a certain sense, then, the guy is a bit of an idiot.
I am reminded of Eisenhower’s letter to his brother from 1954:
The political processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not applied in this effort, we will lose everything–even to a possible and drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant insistence upon “moderation” in government. Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas.5 Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/presidential-papers/first-term/documents/1147.cfm
And what Senator Paul is missing here, is that the cost of public goods are not borne by the service provider, but by all taxpayers.
Doctors seeing Medicare patients are not slaves, any more than firefighters or teachers are slaves.
The lack of basic reasoning ability among the right is quite troubling. I really think their brains have been damaged by ideology (avoiding Godwin, like the Japanese ca 1943-45) or just engaging in some sort of performance art, a kabuki to try to woo the rubes one more time.
Man I just read that Eisenhower letter to the end, and damn does he lay it out.
Those kinds of Republicans are mostly long gone. Maybe the Maine senators.
The electorate made a terrible mistake in 1994 and doubled down in 2010.
@Luis
Money = Might, …
…until all civil function breaks down, then it’s just might makes might.
This by the way, is not impossible if reactionaries see their plans through. Paul takes civilization for granted, so he doesn’t realize the destructive force that his banging away at it does.
I think I’ve mentioned the flat domino theory before: it’s much easier to destroy than it is to build up.