Man as an Island
posted by Frank Pasquale
I just wanted to recommend this Robin West essay, “Justice Roberts’ America.” It articulates the individualism at the core of the Roberts Court, even after it upheld the mandate:
The individual has a right, then, where the government has no power to command otherwise, to not obtain health insurance for himself, even if doing so is irrational, doing otherwise would contribute to the collective health of the polity and his refusal to do so raises the cost of health coverage for all. Stated positively and more generally, the individual has the right to “exit” a collective attempt to resolve a civic problem through the democratic levers of civil society.
The right to exit obliquely recognized here is not unlike other recently conceived (or dreamt of) libertarian rights. It is structurally similar, for example, to the express right the Court created from the Second Amendment in their decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago: an individual right to defend oneself with lethal force, and to thereby withdraw from, or exit, the collective, civic delegation to police forces of the work of protecting us all from social violence.
To discern the appeal of that point of view, one need look little further than the recent Batman movie. The positive social vision there is: “count on a high tech billionaire to save you.” Public institutions are corrupt; the people are a mob. On the other hand, the more futuristic “Hunger Games” rebukes that vision: billionaires with drones may have more on their minds than saving cities.
Finally, the “man as an island” mentality may be discerned in other enclave-withdrawal patterns around the world. As this essay notes:
[Consider] the rising number of elites who refuse to immunize their children from common diseases. . . . Does their rejection of participation in “herd immunity” signify not only that they don’t feel part of the herd, but that they have internalized immunization at the ontological level, it extending so far that they do not feel threatened by the re-emergence of plagues infecting normal people?
If the fates of nearby cities are easy to ignore, certainly what appear to be long-past or far-distant plagues are easy to discount as well. The problem appears to be a far larger one than mere bounded rationality.
August 13, 2012 at 1:01 pm
Posted in: Constitutional Law
Print This Post
Responses (1)
Veracitor - August 14, 2012 at 8:19 pm
That quote is remarkably tendentious:
* The individual has a right, then, where the government
* has no power to command otherwise, to not obtain health
* insurance for himself, even if doing so is irrational,
Irrational? Says who? Especially when premiums are set by government fiat rather than actuarial risk (but also when a prospective insured knows more about his own risk profile than some insurer), it is often the case that the expected value of insurance (probability of loss times expected indemnity) is less than the value of premiums– and that’s just money value, not even counting subjective value. The decision not to purchase insurance can be perfectly rational.
* doing otherwise would contribute to the collective
* health of the polity
A’s purchase of insurance has very little to do with B’s health, so A’s contribution to “the collective health of the polity” must refer to A’s own health status– which may not be enhanced by the forced purchase of insurance (see above).
* and his refusal to do so raises the cost of health
* coverage for all.
False. If you assume premiums based on actuarial risk then it matters not to B, C, D, et-al. if A buys insurance. If you assume risk-blind premiums (“broad community rating”) then A’s participation may as easily raise costs as lower them, since A could end up claiming a large indemnity.
Looking at the problem more broadly, there is a well-known “insurance effect” which strongly increases demand for services covered by insurance. The more you broaden coverage (e.g., adding acupuncture to a health policy) and the less you tie premiums to actuarial risk (e.g., instituting community rating and guaranteed issue), the worse the insurance effect gets. When you insulate people from the cost of services to themselves, they demand more services– including frivolous ones– driving up costs for everyone.
Empirically, every American government scheme to expand health-insurance coverage in the last 50 years, from Medicare to Romneycare, has driven up costs wildly faster than forecast by proponents.
The surest way to keep health costs down “for all” is leave health insurance to the free market. Obamacare is a move in the wrong direction entirely.
* The right to exit obliquely recognized here is not
* unlike other recently conceived (or dreamt of)
* libertarian rights. It is structurally similar, for
* example, to the express right the Court created from
* the Second Amendment in their decisions in District of
* Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago: an individual
* right to defend oneself with lethal force,
The “individual right to defend oneself” predates not just the Columbia v. Heller but the Constitution and the Bill of Rights– the Supreme Court didn’t “create” anything (see Blackstone).
* and to thereby
* withdraw from, or exit, the collective, civic delegation
* to police forces of the work of protecting us all from
* social violence.
How much protection against “social violence” (formerly “criminal acts”) is a “member of the collective” (formerly “a citizen”) entitled to? The President is protected by several armed Secret Service agents at all times, but “police forces” provide almost no protection to individual collective-members, and by law, owe no duty of protection to any individual member of the collective. If an ordinary person does not defend herself against “social violence” while it’s happening to her, no one will, so any “delegation” of her right to defend herself is ineffective and therefore pointless. More importantly, anyone who defends herself actually defends the collective as well (a happy side-effect), because even occasional self-defense reduces criminals’ expected gains from their crimes, which deters them from committing those crimes, reducing the incidence of “social violence” for all potential victims. Finally, a self-defender doesn’t “exit” anything– she still pays for “police forces” which continue to exist and “work” at “protecting us all” by arresting criminals who completed acts of “social violence” against victims unable to defend themselves.
Self-defenders act in a very pro-social manner, automatically defending their communities along with themselves (not just by creating deterrence– do you really think individuals have no value to their communities? Every self defender who preserves herself benefits her friends, relatives, neighbors, employer, political representatives, et-al.). We should encourage self-defenders, not damn them with some confusing accusation that they are “exiting” some “civic delegation” of protective work to “police forces” who by their nature always show up after the “social violence” has injured the victim.
(I suppose someone ignorant of the literature on the question might imagine that guns in the hands of self-defenders are a menace to non-criminals in “the collective.” In strict fact, this is not the case (see http://gunowners.org/sk0802.htm and don’t neglect the references– some to Clinton Administration Justice Department reports authored by anti-gun advocates). And don’t bring up suicide– suicide rates are effectively independent of handgun availability. If you want to reduce suicide rates, do something about unemployment.)
Leave a Reply