Ask Lemmy

Nice to see so many pleasant replies from all sides! Didn’t know how casually people viewed this topic.

I really recommend people who are actually curious about libertarians to watch the 2024 free and equal debate on YouTube (link below). A lot of people here have some strong words against libertarians but don't really understand what they stand for. I think that is a dangerous mindset. I imagine a lot of feminists, BLM or LGBTQ folk understand how frustrating that can be.

I would take anybody in the free and equal debate over the two choices presented by the democratic and Republican party. I personally feel the libertarian candidates resonate with me but make your own decision. Vote for who you feel will represent your views best.

https://www.youtube.com/live/Bmidtp1_K-Y?si=A62jmReZvv8zt1n6

I am not THE libertarian to fully hold this argument and as others have mentioned there are libertarian arguments for universal healthcare, but I will present the best case I can from those I've heard be against it.

The primary case is the idea of negative rights vs positive rights. Where the idea that the state should protect you from others wanting limit your rights vs providing you the ability to do something.

So using the state to punish someone for who is trying to stop you from providing healthcare service is justified use of violence as it protects your negative rights and define and preserves you and the violators boundary. Whereas using state violence to force you to provide healthcare someone you don't want to would not as it violated your negative right.

This is primary argument against any positive right, is that since it requires a service to be fulfilled the state would be use violence (the basis of state power) to enforce it. Making it tantamount to slavery.

Now the reality of it though is that most libertarians do support this slavery at least in service of giving the state the monopoly on violence (police, military, etc) in order to protect their defined negative rights. And because of our current material abundance we are able to have a fractionalized slavery extracting wealth from people to small enough degree that most people don't find as aborrent full servitude of an individual.

I'm not a libertarian, but from what I've seen of their positions on this, they don't think that it's possible in an effective way. There's two possible versions: the government pays for everything, or there's public and private health care. A lot of countries have both, which is probably the best option since driving out competition is going to make everything go to crap.

The problem is that there are some arrangements that simply can't work or the existing system would implode in the transition.

There are also a lot of people who don't want to pay because someone who refused to get insurance for years finally decided to sign up for public health care because they suddenly got a serious health problem. In some possible arrangements, it would be necessary to force people to have health insurance, which is its own rabbit hole.