Little stories like this from right wing nuts get people all the time...

[RadioRaheem84]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEM4NKXK-iA#t=341

I was sent this by my right wing future father in law in a mass email listing. It seems like people on his list are eating it up and consider it a fabulous way of simplifying the issue around universal healthcare. He asked to be rebut and he will send it out to all his list.

Any help? In it, Dinesh D'Souza, the worst little minion of them all reduces the fight for universal healthcare or Obamacare as holding a gun to someone's head to force him to give him his sandwich to a person who's hungry.

How do you even combat these little stories? It seems nearly impossible because he reduces it to such a blatantly simple thing.

[argeiphontes]

It's garbage, a ridiculous polemic.

The "moral content" of health insurance provision doesn't reside in how people feel about the transaction. Why not argue that coercion against murder ruins the good feelings somebody gets from not murdering everyone that cuts them off in traffic? Moral content has to do with actual effects on people's lives. Ethics is about actions.

Universal health care is able to provide health care to all people in the system at far lower costs than otherwise. This is not only because costs are spread from payers to those who couldn't otherwise pay, as is true of all insurance pools (that's the point), but also because a single-payer system controls prices far better than the one we have now. Everyone in the system benefits for that reason, everyone is "robbed" a little less. It would have been far better to have a "public option" in Obamacare, since we'd see lots of insurance companies going out of business for being inefficient.

Those guys in the video are real ass clowns, not sure what qualifies them to speak at a university. I hope they're not ethics professors or something. The answer to the question about why not hold the gun doesn't hold water. It assumes that the rights of one party to hold on to extra money is absolute against the rights of the other person to receive health care. This assumption is implied by the guy throughout the whole speech, and somebody should have questioned it, but that's capitalist ideological hegemony for you. It assumes that there is such a thing as a natural right to property, and not only that, but to extra property in the form of accumulation of the social product above and beyond one's needs that is somehow greater than the right of others to take it if they need it.

Ethics isn't about motives at all, it's about actions and outcomes. Cutesy stories about pulling the wagon are empirically false. Those hard-working job creators were perfectly capable of pulling the wagon when the marginal tax rate was 95%. People "in the wagon" are actually suffering from structural unemployment and the need for capitalism to maintain the stick of the underclass to whip workers into producing more surplus value. Thus, it's not an "inverted morality" to claim that the pullers should pull a bit harder to provide for the wagon, and I'm not sure it wouldn't still be the case even if everybody in the wagon was shiftless and lazy, since capitalism (and society) itself contains an inescapable element of coercion in the first place.

The key to battling these stories is to look at what assumptions they contain.

[RedMaterialist]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEM4NKXK-iA#t=341

I was sent this by my right wing future father in law in a mass email listing. It seems like people on his list are eating it up and consider it a fabulous way of simplifying the issue around universal healthcare. He asked to be rebut and he will send it out to all his list.

Any help? In it, Dinesh D'Souza, the worst little minion of them all reduces the fight for universal healthcare or Obamacare as holding a gun to someone's head to force him to give him his sandwich to a person who's hungry.

How do you even combat these little stories? It seems nearly impossible because he reduces it to such a blatantly simple thing.


Well, if the guy with the sandwich has a million sandwiches and refuses to give one to the hungry person unless he gets some money in exchange, then, sure, a gun will be used. The next step will be to take the sandwich millionaire's sandwich machines and use them to produce the sandwiches. Of course, that means lots of guns and a revolution if the sandwich guy fights back.

I love telling the right wingers that their wealth will be taken from them. And when they say "from my cold dead hands" I tell them: "That can be arranged."

[Sea]

Reply that people shouldn't get free healthcare because it pacifies them away from revolution, or some other ultraleft objection.

Or reply-all for extra commie points.

[argeiphontes]

Also, the wagon story is a complete reversal of a capitalist society where it's workers pulling the wagon and capitalists getting a free ride by living off accumulated capital and surplus labor. Shouldn't people pay for their free wagon ride? Or, like redshifted said, be booted out of the wagon.

[adipocere]

That's a particularly dull-witted analogy. What is the point of arguing with irrational, asinine logic? People like that don't want to debate or learn or become informed - they have petty, cruel little minds and the emotional sophistication of a child.

The best rebuttal is silence.

If you must:
sx2scvIFGjE

[Queen Mab]

I don't see the point in being sucked in to defending barely-reformist measures like Obamacare, which was basically drafted by the healthcare insurance industry.

[Marshal of the People]

The UN Declaration of Human Rights says:
Article 25.



(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

[Queen Mab]

Neither do I see the point in using the arbitrary fantasies (natural rights? srsly?) of the UN, an organisation constructed by imperialists, to defend anything.

[argeiphontes]

What's wrong with rights?

[Nihilism]

I don't think they have a problem with rights, just the idea that people have inherent natural rights. Sorry I know this is old.