On Aug 12, 2009, at 4:31 PM, John Williams wrote:
On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 3:59 PM, Trent Shipley<[email protected]>
wrote:
John Williams wrote:
There are billions of people around the world with worse healthcare
than virtually everyone in the United States. If the goal is to
redistribute wealth to improve healthcare because of the belief that
everyone should have a chance to live and be healthy, then why not
focus on redistributing wealth from people in the US to the people
in
the world who have far worse health care than those in the US?
Why not?
The basic reason is that people are both tribal and self-interested.
Would this be an accurate expansion of that?
"It is ethical to take wealth from some people in order to help other
people with less resources, but only if all of those people are in the
same political boundary"?
If so, then why is the political boundary more important than the fact
that there are other people outside the political boundary who are
much worse off than most of those inside? And when I say why, I am not
looking for a sociological answer about tribes, but rather an argument
about ethics.
Very interesting questions you raise.
This discussion seems (to me) to have pitted those who hold that
governments are a mutually-agreed upon means by which people can (and
maybe should) pitch in to help each other vs. those who believe that
governments are bullies that steal from some people people in order to
give it to other (apparently unworthy) people -- at gunpoint, in
the most extreme form of this meme.
Your question hinges on the "mutually agreed-upon" part of the way I
characterized the "liberal" point of view: as a U.S. citizen I tacitly
(and sometimes not so tacitly) agree to pay my taxes as dues for the
things I get from that government. For good or ill, I am part of one
"tribe", mainly concerned with the well-being of that tribe.
I could, and perhaps should, consider myself a citizen of planet Earth,
with equal concern for people in Guatemala and the Horn of Africa and
Iraq and Greenland as I have for people in San Jose, California, the
USA. In fact, I've done my bit on that front, traveling with Habitat
for Humanity to Guatemala to build houses. I say this not to brag as
much as to say that I have done a tiny, tiny bit to express my world
citizenship, even if I am mainly a member of the USA tribe.
Other than various charities, there isn't a world "government" (i.e.,
a "mutually agreed-upon means by which people can pitch in to help each
other out") through which I can "redistribute wealth from people in the
US to the people in the world who have far worse health care than those
in the US."
Dave
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