Fat Chance?

by Don Boudreaux on July 28, 2009

in Frenetic Fiddling, Health, Hubris and humility, Nanny State

Bart Hinkle, of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, is always very much worth reading.  For example here.

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  • ArrowSmith
    To each according to his needs right?
  • Crusader

    The logical result of all this is to turn personal choices and characteristics into issues that should be decided collectively. After all, if Thin Mints and Samoas are the new unfiltered cigarette, shouldn't they be more tightly regulated? And if that spare tire around your middle could raise health-care costs, then doesn't a society in which those costs have been collectivized have the rightful authority to tell you to lose it? More and more people are answering yes: You have a duty to stay thin for the good of the collective.


    Yes this is a very valid point. When we say as a society that "health care is a right", then I have a right to regulate what you eat so that your lack of fitness isn't an undue burden on me.

  • vidyohs

    Crusader, your satire is spot on.


    Health care is a right. you should have it and I should have it....hell we agree that even muirduck and DK can have it.


    But, the right to health care, I think we agree, is only maintained if one obtains it entirely with one's earnings. If anyone accepts, needs, or demands assistance to pay for that health care it is automatically converted to a privilege and one now becomes a technically a slave and obedient to the masters that pay your way. Those masters may be the collective, but you will dance to their tune.


    It is a farce to talk of health care being a "right" that is going to be granted by government or even an employers.


    Yet there are those who will close their eyes to reality and salve their consciences by telling themselves, "It's only my right."

  • CRC

    The bottom line in all of this is that the one who pays is the one who says...that is to say what you can and can't do.


    This is as old as government itself. Isn't this a chief complaint about the insurance companies...since they are paying they are dictating what things will and won't be covered...what treatments are authorized or not...AND...what things are good lifestyle choices and what are not.


    That anyone believes this arrangement will suddenly change when another large, impersonal, bureaucratic entity is paying the bills is a sure sign of the failure of our educational system.


  • Crusader

    Bottom line is your rights end in range of my fists.

  • Gil

    Gotta laugh when Libertarians talk violent. X)

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