Category Archives: Op-Eds

The Right To Die Is Part Of The Right To Life

Frederick Leighton -- The Reconciliation of the Montagues and Capulets over the Dead Bodies of Romeo and Juliet
Frederick Leighton — The Reconciliation of the Montagues and Capulets over the Dead Bodies of Romeo and Juliet

In late November, by a vote of 330 to 275, the British House of Commons supported a bill which will “allow” doctors to assist terminally ill patients, facing prognoses of death within six months, in ending their own lives.

Responses in the United Kingdom and elsewhere range from gratitude to outrage.

Oddly, much of the outrage comes from supporters of a “right to life” who oppose abortion and, when they’re consistent, capital punishment.

Consistency would also dictate recognition of your personal rights of ownership over your life.

Decreeing that you  may not be killed in the womb, or by another person, but that your rights end if you want to end it all, is a claim that you are property without inherent rights.

The “right to life” these advocates assert is, in this context, no different than a “right” to not have their cattle stolen or their slaves escape. It’s not about the opinions of the cattle or the slaves. It’s about exercising ownership rights over the cattle and the slaves.

The basis of any plausible “right to life” — or any other right — is self-ownership. It’s your life. You own it. It’s yours to do with as you wish, so long as you don’t infringe the equal rights of others.

It’s also yours to end, when and how you wish, so long as — again — you don’t violate others’ rights  with the way you end it.

There are obvious areas of reasonable disagreement on when that’s true or not, such as in cases of diminished mental capacity due to youth, dementia, etc.  But there’s no reasonable argument for  conditioning your exercise of that right on the arbitrary whims of government.

Maybe you’re terminally ill and don’t want to face your final moments in pain.

Maybe you’re IN pain that’s incurable, intolerable, and unlikely to cease.

Maybe the love of your life died and you don’t relish living out years or decades in your partner’s absence.

Maybe your situation has you believing that your continued existence will impose undue hardships on people you love.

Those are all reasons. Maybe “good” reasons. But your reasons don’t have to be “good” for the decision to remain, by right, yours and yours alone. Maybe you flipped a coin. Perhaps your religious beliefs say that you’ve reached your permissible lifespan. Your call.

If you don’t possess the right to end your life, you possess no rights at all.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Americans’ Healthcare Upset Isn’t Really About “Insurance”

West Hospital Emergency Room. VCU Libraries. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
West Hospital Emergency Room. VCU Libraries. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

On December 4, someone murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson near the site of the company’s annual investors’ meeting. Thompson’s killing was clearly planned rather than random, and at least appears to be job-related. As I write this, the suspect remains at large.

The establishment response, as usual with assassinations, combines “thoughts and prayers” with condemnation.

Social media responses, on the other hand, largely riff on Americans’ complaints about healthcare in general, and healthcare firms in particular. On a brief survey, I’m seeing lots of “poetic justice,” and not a little “more, please.”

I certainly feel the plaintiffs’ pains, and confess to frequently finding myself less than satisfied with my family’s (employer-provided) healthcare coverage. If this “targeted killing” is indeed a “customer dissatisfaction” incident, I guess I understand the sentiment even if I don’t approve of the particular penalty imposed upon Mr. Thompson’s person. Insert thoughts/prayers/condemnation language of your choice here.

What I don’t agree with is characterization of the whole matter as relating to “insurance.” It almost certainly doesn’t, because it’s been decades since most American healthcare companies have really offered “insurance.”

The system we’ve lived under since the early 1970s and the inception of the “Health Maintenance Organization” /  “Preferred Provider Organization” isn’t “insurance” — it’s “prepaid healthcare.”

“Insurance” is a hedged betting strategy. The customer makes a small bet that something unlikely and unpleasant will occur. The insurer makes a large bet that it WON’T occur.

To the customer, it’s worth betting $10 a month that he will suffer a heart attack, cancer, etc. and collect a large amount of money to cover his medical costs. The horrific medical emergency may be unlikely, but it’s expensive if it happens. Better $10 a month out of pocket now than $100,000 all at once later.

The insurer takes many such bets, knowing most of those heart attacks, etc. won’t happen. It will win far more often than it loses, and pay out less money than it takes in.

Does that sound like YOUR healthcare plan? Probably not.  Your plan probably at least partially subsidizes  everything from annual exams to routine vaccinations to prescriptions to diagnostic tests (chest CTs, mammograms, and colonoscopies, for example).

Yes, there’s an “insurance” component — you’ve still got that hedged bet in favor of that heart attack, the company still has one in against it — but you’re mostly just paying a middleman to partially cover stuff you’d have paid out of pocket for 60 years ago.

That middleman isn’t prepared to operate at a loss and go bankrupt.

Just as with actual insurance, you (or your employer, ever since World War 2 era tax rules began incentivizing insurance as a “fringe benefit”) WILL fork over more in premiums and “copays” for those benefits than it costs the middleman to provide them.

When a middleman (an employer) pays the piper (the healthcare company), and doctors work as the the piper’s orchestra, patient choice and patient satisfaction cease to be major incentives.

The problem isn’t the Brian Thompsons. It’s the system they — and you — are part of.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Why I Don’t Want Bad Takes to Go to Waste

Henry George’s epitaph marks the case he provided for disentangling economic exchange from political privilege, an insight he knew “will not find easy acceptance.” Photo by Mattercore. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

“Bad opinion pieces in papers of record” are getting a bad rap from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The congresswoman took to Bluesky on December 2 to suggest discussing “thinkers we find valuable” and avoiding “linking to bad columns” so that “incentives change” for news outlets chasing attention (and, presumably, ad revenue).

Such voluntary mindfulness avoids the appeal to force in Ocasio-Cortez’s previous intimation that  “one billionaire … shouldn’t be allowed to own so much of the internet.” (Would a flourishing Bluesky be satisfied with a valuation of $999,999,999?) The Dr. Evil a couple years back was not Twitter purchaser Elon Musk but Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, whose holdings included the Instagram where Ocasio-Cortez posted.

Still, that’s halfway to Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s maxim that “the cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.” The “better argument” of the other half may well come from a cold, hard look at the “fallacious argument.” Sagan and Druyan note John Stuart Mill’s contention that truth arises from “collision with error,” elaborating that “if we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that; it becomes stale, soon learned only by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.”

Such pallor might blanch Bluesky’s atmosphere if it drowns out a no-longer-silent majority. Ocasio-Cortez’s November takeaway on the site: “[A]n echo chamber just won a presidential election.”

That interpretation is unconvincing when Trump’s constituency compounded consistently nationwide, amid the ruins of early-2000s interventionist expansionism and a level of economic elitism that made a landlord playing a boss on TV seem like an upstart.

In particular, support for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq was bolstered by Thomas L. Friedman downplaying warning signs in New York Times rather than New York Post columns. Friedman wanted to “take a very big stick” to pop a “terrorism bubble;” Ben Burgis reminds us that outside of Friedman’s own bubble, “what the bubble-bursting meant in practice was that hundreds of thousands of human beings lost their lives.”  And while Marxists like Burgis are blamed for ideological groupthink in academia, he follows Marx in challenging capitalist economics with counterargument rather than dismissal.

Friedman’s “Suck. On. This.” promptly became one of the most infamous examples of his own phraseology doing the sucking.  In 2009, The Spectator‘s Alex Massie observed that laughing at “the sheer gawd-help-us ghastliness found on the Gray Lady’s op-ed page” via Friedman was uniting the blogosphere, sharing a takedown from liberal muckraker Matt Taibbi at the alt-weekly New York Press linked by Reason libertarian Matt Welch, who in turn got it from The Atlantic‘s conservative Andrew Sullivan.

Such post-Bush unity didn’t eventually last in those publications, let alone push more editorial oversight onto Friedman.  But his assertion that “the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15” can serve to perfectly crystallize a contrasting vision of the sort of market that results when neither burgers nor bombers receive handouts.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

  1. “OPINION: Why I don’t want bad takes to go to waste” by Joel Schlosberg, The Richmond Observer [Rockingham, North Carolina], December 10, 2024