"Your life is not your own."

Great post at The Incidental Economist about Ezra Klein's post at The Washington Post on the libertarian view on health care. A few great points below.

From Ezra Klein:

"It’s all well and good to say personal responsibility is the bedrock of liberty, but even the hardest of libertarians has always understood that there are places where your person ends and mine begins. Generally, we think of this in terms of violent intrusion or property transgressions. But in health care, it has to do with compassion.

We are a decent society, and we do not want to look in people’s pockets for an insurance card when they fall to the floor with chest pains. If we’re not going to look in their pockets, however, we need some answer for who pays when they wake up — or, God forbid, after they stop breathing — in the hospital."

From TIE:

"...my life is not entirely my own to the extent (some) libertarians may think it is or ought to be. I am not the only one who cares about the consequences of my decisions. I am not the only one who suffers or enjoys what comes of them. I am not the only one who cares about whether I live or die. I am not the only one who matters.

It’s not just some vague “society” that cares about my life. It’s much more concrete than that. It’s the people I see every day, that I live with, for whom I’m, in part, responsible and on whom I rely. It’s my family, friends, and co-workers. They all care about my life. I care about theirs. My life is not entirely my own."

Both are excellent reads and really clarify why libertarianism, like liberalism or conservatism, is not a 'one size fits all' solution to the world.

When Republicans suddenly need government

Great column on salon.com about how the Republican Party's position on government changes when faced with a disaster. More importantly, the article points out how the party has changed today:

"...the true believers who make up today’s GOP base probably are more sympathetic to [Texas Congressman Ron] Paul’s claim that "we just don’t have the money" for federal disaster relief than they are to [New Jersey Governor Chris] Christie’s statement that "your No. 1 goal as governor in a situation like this is the saving of human life -- and everything else is secondary."

This underscores a serious political problem for the Obama-era Republican Party. It used to be that GOP elected officials had some wiggle room when it came to balancing the demands of their base with the imperatives of keeping the broader public happy. This was important because the general public has some very mixed feelings when it comes to the role of government. While conservative rhetoric about government being bloated, wasteful, inefficient and unnecessary is quite popular, so are most big ticket government programs and services. Republicans have learned this in the past when they’ve bent too far toward pleasing their base -- think of Newt Gingrich’s attack on Medicare in 1995 or George W. Bush's planned Social Security overhaul in 2005.

But the wiggle room is basically gone, and today’s GOP base demands absolute ideological purity from its leaders. It’s no longer enough for them to campaign on generic anti-government rhetoric."