Jim Otteson asks about rights and duties with respect to health care. A choice line:
“What is not the test for having a right to something is that one really, really wants it.”
From the perspective of economics, there’s a subsidiary question: if I have a duty to provide others’ health care, what, then, do I have a duty to forgo in order to provide it? How are these obligatory costs identified, and by whom? Right now, I’m blogging about rights and duties, watching Sesame Street clips with Jacob, and intermittently talking to the plumber who is fixing some of our faucets. Is this OK? What should I be doing instead? Whose blessing do I require?
The comments on Jim’s post are interesting. Common apologetics for universal health coverage (“Europe does it,” “we have Social Security,” etc.) are canards because these are all financially unsustainable. Welfare state public finance is an exercise in (presumably well-intentioned) institutional prodigality. We could probably throw a heck of a party if we cashed in all of our assets and spent everything on booze, but the money and the liquor would run out eventually.
For more, here’s Bryan Caplan’s resource page from a recent debate in which he participated.
Cross-posted at Division of Labour.
