Extra credit to Rep. Hal Wick (R-12/Sioux Falls) and friends for sparking conversation with HB 1237, the personal firearms mandate. The bill lit up the blogosphere (see Messrs. Woodring, Crissman, Woster, Dahle, Mercer... and Politico!) and Facebook discussions.
But Wick et al. still flunk this week's logic quiz for flogging a false analogy:
If the federal government can require every person to buy health insurance, a South Dakota lawmaker says the state can require every person to buy a gun.
That's the logic behind a bill proposed by Rep. Hal Wick, a Republican from Sioux Falls. Wick's proposal would force every South Dakotan over the age of 21 to buy a firearm for self-defense. He argues that such a requirement makes sense to "provide for everyone's protection," just as supporters of the health care legislation say all Americans need coverage ["Lawmaker: If Health Care Required, Why Not Guns?" AP via KOTA-TV, 2011.02.01].
Ms. Flint is ready for that conversation, as am I. As I noted yesterday, guns are nothing like health insurance in social utility. In terms of practical cost and benefit, Rep. Wick might strike a more apt analogy to health insurance by moving to amend: strike "firearm" and insert "bulletproof vest."
But beyond pragmatism, HB 1237 demonstrates a deeper philosophical failure by Rep. Wick and numerous cranky conservatives. They keep treating health insurance like a typical consumer product, an item you buy strictly for your personal benefit. Wick's bill text itself refers (ungrammatically) to arming each citizen "to provide for their ordinary self-defense." Self-defense. Not social order. Not justice. Self-defense, an individual benefit. Any fringe benefits for others beyond a close circle of family and friends are ancillary.
Health insurance is no such consumer product. Its immediate benefit is not direct provision of health care to you personally. Health insurance banks on the idea that you personally will not use the product. The immediate benefit of health insurance is the provision of financial security to a broad group of subscribers. You are buying into a social benefit, an agreement to provide collective assistance to a number of unfortunate fellow citizens, in return for the promise that they will provide you that collective assistance.
The health insurance mandate of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act does not intend to make you personally feel more secure or healthy. It intends to sustain a system of social protection that cannot sustain itself without the participation of the widest pool of supporters possible. The personal firearm mandate of HB 1237 explicitly denies any such social concern. HB 1237 runs quite explicitly in the opposite direction, expressing an intent to reverse the social contract by which we protect each other and return us to living a brutally short Hobbesian nightmare behind our personal barricades.
Rep. Wick doesn't get it. His joke gun bill (and no one should use the legislative process to make jokes) is about taking care of yourself. Health insurance is about taking care of each other... just like America.
Are you saying the analogy would be okay if the bill used language couching personal firearm ownership in terms of civil defense (a collective benefit) rather than personal defense?
I'm suddenly reminded of seatbelt laws. Why is it the State can mandate the use of seatbelts when it seems to be of primary & immediate benefit is to the individual?
Your use of Hobbes is quite telling. He argued we all cede our personal power to the sovereign. That the sovereign's survival and power is the highest political good. Sounds very Democratic and not very democratic - in fact that's also a short hop to fascist totalitarianism. I miss the days of more centrist non-Hobbesian Democrats!
Locke's influence on the formation of a LIMITED government with some explicit boundaries and benefits was the genius of the founders. The current devolution of DC and national political actors as "mini-Mubaracks" is telling. Moreover the whole US system is intended to have states checking federal power and federal power to be checked by branches.
Universalizing laws must on the face be highly suspect. Our social contract stipulate boundaries - the real place to begin the change would be to amend the constitution to do away with these boundaries to change the social contract THEN go all totalitarian on us. The courts are right on this one, until the constitution is changed....
The health care bill is a raw power grab first and secondarily a health-care bill. Although I have little hopes real decentralized legislation and reform will come from the Republican side. Bush II and Bush III (Obama) were/are hell-bent on making the presidency and Federal government the Hobbes-style sovereign. Fail.
In all this hullabaloo, one thing has emerged "perfectly clear" to me.
People who want this mandate will find a logical way to argue in its favor, and people who don't want it will find a logical way to argue against it.
Whether or not we ultimately end up with this mandate depends not on its actual constitutionality, not on its absolute merits and drawbacks, not on how it might be received by the nation's founders, no. Whether or not we end up with it depends on which group can more skillfully further their own personal ideology.
The final decision will be rendered by a Supreme Court by a vote among nine people, based, I fear, not on the law but on political preference. And I think that's a dangerous signal: The United States of America no longer has a pure, uncorrupted judicial branch. We have only opposing factions.
Shel: Yes, I hear debaters catch the same heck when they cite good old authoritarian Hobbes. I cite his social contract concept without endorsing his authoritarianism. I cite Hobbes because Locke and Rousseau couldn't beat his snappy "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" assessment of life outside the social contract.
Wayne: not o.k., but the analogy would be more apt. Seat belts: I have heard some argue that the seat belt keps the driver in place and allows him/her to better control the vehicle, this increasing others' safety. Thin, but the argument is there.
Stan: I think we've seen that political preference at work from the judges, too. Why else would the Florida judge defy precedent and annul the entire law instead of following the long-established practice of severability?
Cory's thread is said like a true statist who values creating a society and manipulating individuals to serve a greater social purpose vs. valuing the idea a free society and people is its own benefit.
Cory,
Thanks for explaining how Wick's bill has more merit tham Obamacare. Wick promotes liberty, will Obamacare promotes socialism.
Steve, once again, you confuse "socialism" with community and "liberty" with anarchy. As I review the transcript from a certain Nazarene carpenter, I find explicit exhortations to care for the sick and to put down the sword.
Troy, go get the SAD evaluated.
SAD?
[CAH: "Seasonal Affective Disorder"?]
The obvious question is, whether our legislators will now abolish the requirement to carry auto insurance. After all, by their arguments, that's unconstitutional, too.
Cory,
Jesus never said to give to Caesar so the government can take care of the sick. He healed the sick himself as an individual.
And you must of missed Matthew 10:34.
Thank you for making me look, Steve. Jesus was lost in the desert just long enough to experience temporal lobe epilepsy likely as a response to Seasonal Affective Disorder. The Lakota call it: nuni tawaci, or, we gahe tawaci
Here's a popular interpretation of the biblical.
The state also mandates drivers have car insurance. If you drive without liability insurance in SD, you could be found guilty of a class B misdemeanor. Sounds a little like requiring health insurance, doesn't it?
It does at first blush, Brad, but I'd contend there's a fundamental difference. We as a society fund the creation and maintenance of public roads. In order to use those roads (a community resource), we subject ourselves to certain restrictions. We need to get licenses to operate 3000+ lb motorized vehicles at speed. We need to register those vehicles. We even need to purchase basic liability insurance to ensure that if we screw up while using those giant metal(plastic) machines, the person we hit can be compensated.
There's an exchange - submit to X, Y, and Z conditions and you can drive on the public roads. There are also alternatives. Don't want to buy insurance? Okay. Take a cab, ride a bus, or ride a bike on public roads. You can even walk if you want. I could get a house close to school and work, and within a good distance to a grocery store, and make life choices to maximise my choice not to enter into private vehicular ownership & operation.
My alternative to not purchasing health insurance will be to pay a fine or to leave the nation... to take it to car insurance, the equivalent would be to pay the government a fine if I didn't own liability insurance regardless of whether I drive a car on public roads. That'd be a heckuva hit for the folks in New York City who've gone generations without owning a car.