Daniel Lee, writing for the Indianapolis Star, has an article entitled “Daniels’ Plan aims beyond uninsured.” His plan is to insure about 120,000 low income Hoosiers. Daniels argues that the plan could actually save Hoosiers money, reasoning that as it is now, folks generally get service, but they get it at the emergency room when their ailments become intolerable. This is an expensive, inefficient way to deliver treatment. The folks who get such treatment can’t pay for it, and the costs are passed along to others in ways that are themselves inefficient and expensive.
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[…] Chris Rahe: Single payer health care By Doug Chris Rahe, writing a column in the South Bend Tribune, opines that Gov. Daniels health care proposal doesn’t go far enough. Daniels has suggested increasing taxes on cigarettes to pay for insuring those who can’t afford it but who do not qualify for Medicaid. Rahe says band-aids and babysteps are simply too little, too late for the health care disaster we face today. We need to admit the system we have now is just flat broken. […]
The premise of raising taxes to pay insurance premiums for those less fortunate is a noble one, however singling out tobacco users as the primary funding source is not only unfair it’s economically unsound.
The ultimate goal here, as I see it is a smoke free Indiana, right? Well at the end of fiscal 2005 Indiana had collected roughly $450 million for the year in tobacco taxes and sales tax on tobacco products.
So….my question is, after you’ve driven this perfectly legal practice out of existence by ordinance and by tax, where are you going to get that $450 million a year? Rabbit out of a hat? As awful as this sounds you have to consider too, the cost of thousands more people living many years longer will have to be funded as well. (social security/healthcare/living expenses etc.)
You may want to be careful what you wish for, it could end up being very expensive for a lot of non-smokers.
This from Daniels, on top of his apparently socioeconomic rather than Biblically-informed approach to criminal recidivism, suggest to me that he might actually have read the writing on the wall when it comes to last week’s elections.
Well, good for him. It makes him more literate than Bush…
Tim, when we run out of smokers, perhaps we can legalize other sorts of drugs to tax.
Doug, maybe we could just do that now, collect the tax money on pot now, and stop the senseless killing in defense of drug turf in poor neighborhoods- now.
I agree Mike. I was only partially joking. I’m ambivalent about how to approach drugs. On the one hand, I think it’s hard to make a case for having booze and cigarettes being legal while marijuana is illegal; and I think that the War on (Some) Drugs is largely counterproductive, corrosive to our civil liberties, and wasteful of our resources. On the other hand, drug abuse — including abuse of alcohol and cigarettes — can really mess up a person’s life along with the life of the person’s family and can consequently drain society’s resources as it tries to help pick up the pieces.
Doug- no doubt that drugs are beyond merely ‘bad for you’. And yet, people still engage in such behaviors.
I don’t think that smoking, tobacco or otherwise, will ever vanish from this earth, but the single most effective thing in reducing the behavior has been education, which helped beget a cultural change towards the social unacceptability of smoking. The reduction in percentage of smokers happened all while it was legal.
De-criminalizing pot or other drugs won’t eliminate all of the horrors associated with them, but it will eliminate some of the worst. For reference, note the orderly sale of alcohol and compare it with the sale of pot or cocaine.
De-criminalize, regulate, and educate.
Mike Kole,
Doesn’t government-sponsored/funded/approved education against a decriminalized drug sector constitutie rather un-Libertarian interference in the market?
How would we like it if the public schools advocated Ford cars over Chevys to high school students? Particularly in Driver’s Ed classes?
What if such advocacy were in the context of comparative crash-survival studies across car manufacturers?
(On the other hand, we already have Coke and Pepsi product placement in public schools by way of vending machines.)
Sure, public education is contrary to the libertarian endpoint ideal, but the reality is that public education is already there. As long as there are health classes, may as well put them to good use. The health facts are undeniable. Tobacco use increases the likelihood of cancer. Saying so is not advocacy.
Mike Kole,
Fair enough. I’ll bet I’ll get more of an argument from you if I observe that what Doug says about hard drugs also goes for gambling. For many people, at least, the thrill of gambling appears to bypass their rational thought processes and gets at a sort of endorphin activator, much like some narcotics.
Yet most LP libertarians I’ve met find the notion of merely regulating gambling abhorrent, let alone banning it. Yet the empirical evidence is there that gambling overpowers reason (even if only in a subset of the population with “addictive personalities”, people don’t choose to possess such disorders) and destroys families.
And a step beyond gambling, we have all sorts of “legitimate” banking practices like predatory lending with usurious interest rates, high fees, and capitalization of fees. And near to that we have deceptive advertising.
If this isn’t a slippery slope into wholesale market interference, I’d like to know where you draw the line, and why.
Probably only tangentially related, but I’d recommend reading “Coercion: Why We Listen to What ‘They’ Say” by Douglas Rushkoff. It’s a look at (mostly) marketing techniques designed to circumvent rational decision making.
Branden Robinson says:”Yet the empirical evidence is there that gambling overpowers reason (even if only in a subset of the population with “addictive personalitiesâ€, people don’t choose to possess such disorders) and destroys families.”
I would submit, the “empirical evidence” you speak of is flawed. It’s entirely to easy to justify bad behavior copping the “addictive personality disorder” plea.
Sometimes people aren’t “sick” or “afflicted” they are just plain stupid.
The casino doesn’t destroy the family, the bar doesn’t destroy the family, the drugs don’t destroy the family. The moronic behavior of people who should know better is what destroys families. Everyone has choices, and unless you’ve had a lobotomy, you have the basic tools necessary to make choices that are correct.
Tim Zank,
Ah, yes, the argument from inerrant supremacy of the individual will.
The problem is that people often don’t have the basic tools necessary to make choices that are correct. Rational actors with perfect information in market transactions, for example, is an idealization that is convenient for academic modeling. Laissez-faire capitalists have elevated this approximated abstraction to the level of philosophical axiom, a burden it cannot withstand (see, e.g., Akerlof, Spence, and Stiglitz’s 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics).
Not only is asymmetric information a problem, but the simple facility of reason is under perpetual assault in our society. Many economic conservatives trumpet the supremacy of reason while simultaneously defending an instutition broadly dedicated to undermining reason. That institution is religion, and in the U.S., economic conservatives have allied themselves politically with the proselytizing, evangelical Christian stripe of religionists who most actively seek to corrode rational thought.
There are numerous other sources of anti-reason in our society from advertising to news programming edited by mandarins of corporate colossi; Doug cited one source above.
Why should a person invest trust in their facility of reason when they are so frequently and confidently informed that their reason is insufficient to grapple with reality? Evolution and natural selection couldn’t possibly be responsible for the diversity of species on Earth, so there’s no point studying evolution in action, as Peter Grant does on the Galapagos Islands. Why should Iraqi children who haven’t even joined the al-Qaeda Junior Martyr’s Brigade yet die at the hands of sectarian militias or Coalition of the Willing installed to search for WMDs that don’t exist? Guess they should have used their informed reason to get the hell out of Iraq. If they get caught in the crossfile, they’re just plain stupid. (Just like Rachel Corrie, no doubt.)
Consequently, color me unimpressed by the arguments of fundamentalist capitalists who have perverted the notion of personal responsibility to the point where any given individual is wholly and solely responsible for all ills that befall him or her, as if he or she had perfect foreknowledge of outcomes (if that were true, gambling could not exist as an industry).
Oh, I forgot one exception. Government taxation is, of course, always a grievous crime against the indivdual, regardless of its magnitude or how the revenue collected is spent, because of course there are no such things as externalities or the free-rider problem. There’s a sub-exception, though — the taxes levied become your fault again if you vote for Democrats (even if it’s Republicans who pass them).
Let me know if there are any salient points I’ve missed.
Tim Zank,
Incidentally, thank you for setting a good example by citing as “flawed” evidence you haven’t even seen yet.
Conclusions first, evidence later (or not at all). You are truly an impeccable exemplar of reason.
Branden Robinson,
Wow! I’m impressed. How long have you been waiting to use that vocabulary? So let me see if I can translate and summarize your eloquent, yet verbose dissertation.
It sounds like your argument is really quite simple. Corporations, Republicans, and Christians (and their advertising agencies)have so twisted the minds of Americans they can no longer be held accountable for their actions.
You even managed to drag Iraq into a simple discussion of personal responsibility versus addiction. Now that ain’t easy!
Now, your statement “Yet the empirical evidence is there that gambling overpowers reason (even if only in a subset of the population with “addictive personalitiesâ€, people don’t choose to possess such disorders) and destroys families.†states the evidence is “empirical”, therefore any learned individual (such as myself) would already be aware the evidence you cite and thus would not have to have actually “see” it.
I would submit I am an exemplar of reason,(though not impeccable) while you my friend are making a very simple argument unreasonably complicated by obfuscation.
I was unaware that my vocabulary was worthy of comment. If I intimidated you with it, I apologize. If you’re attempting to make a gesture of solidarity toward readers of this blog whom you think might be having trouble with it, I urge you to reconsider your audience. This is an attorney’s blog, so I reckon the people who participate here are up to some educated discourse. My own notion of populism does not require that I insult the intelligence of my peers by talking down to them; yours may differ.
Nope. My argument is that there are many sources of propaganda and bad reasoning upheld as good sense in our society. The three you cite are prominent, but not exclusive, purveyors of such.
I submit that sound reason is a commodity that withers if not cultivated. We do not cultivate that which we do not value. When watching a White House press conference, a television commercial, or a preacher’s sermon, I see little value afforded to sound reasoning.
Furthermore, assessments of resposibility and culpability, particularly in individual cases, are often matters of some subtlety when dealt with with due attention to relevant facts. This is one reason civil liability lawsuits take more than an hour to litigate. (I’ll grant you that GOP initiatives for “tort reform” might result in such a phenomenon, however, so if and when that happens you can come back and spike the ball in the end zone at me if you like.)
Why should we ever bother with “fact-finding”, in any context, if we can always deduce the correct assignment of blame from a three-sentence syllogism?
Major premise: Killing is murder.
Minor premise: PFC John Jodka killed a 14-year-old Iraqi girl.
Conclusion: John Jodka committed murder.
Major premise: Killing is murder.
Minor premise: CWO Lewis Welshofer killed an Iraqi general while interrogating him.
Conclusion: Lewis Welshofer committed murder.*
* Reasoning may not be reflected in verdict. Major premise void where inconvenient.
Silly me; I thought personal responsibility was always relevant.
Interesting. So “learned individual[s]” enter any discussion already aware of everything they need to know to reach informed conclusions about it?
Or maybe not learned individuals in general — maybe just you. I get the feeling the Pope will be wanting his Divine Revelator back. Is it still under warranty?