Charlie Stross has been musing on the nature of publishing, the current US DoJ spat with Apple and Amazon. The piece has obviously been linked to a libertarian heavy part of the web because he's currently got a nasty infestation. One comment caught my eye because I think it's at the heart of some of my issues.
We want to be left alone, our rights respected and yours as well. The golden rule, etc. Worship who you want how you want as long as you don't blow up people in the process. Marry and love who you want. Trade with, ingest, and use whatever you want. It's your life and your body.To which I reply. Oh, sure you do! I bet you love puppies, kittens and ice-cream too.
Ron Paul uses this sort of rhetorical line a lot too. Look how reasonable I am, he says, I want people to be free to take drugs! Meanwhile, behind the curtain, he doesn't want there to be services and facilities to deal with some of the potential negative externalities of drug taking. (*)
These are the soft balls, the bits that a libertarian can throw out there and get everybody nodding and saying, oh, well, that's very reasonable.
The tricky bit is that bit at the end, "it's your life and body." - Well, yes it is, kind of you to notice.
The problem is, my life and my body have to share a society with yours. Sure you might live a long way from me and I might never meet you, except when Simon Bradshaw has scheduled me on a political panel at a worldcon to annoy you, but that doesn't mean we live completely unrelated lives.
I have to use the same roads as you do; the same bridges; drink (more or less) the same water which has been filtered through your kidneys and everybody elses too. I have to dodge the same homeless mentally ill people stuck on the streets because 30 years ago we thought it was a good idea to do away with more structured care services. I have to deal with the impact of poor education services on the economic well being of the country. I have to deal with the fallout of the current economic crisis caused, in large part, because the financial services sector used the SAME FUCKING LINES ABOUT THEIR
BODIE BUSINESSES as you did just now. They just wanted to be left alone! They weren't going to do anything to harm anybody or themselves, what business would do that?
Well, the kind of business that can funnel billions of other peoples money into their own pockets and get rich while everybody else got poor.
Nor do I want the leading cause of personal bankruptcy to be induced by people WITH insurance not being able to pay for the services they got insurance for. Nor do I want my tax to go to paying for the uninsured 350lb hypertensive man with undiagnosed diabetes to be hospitalized for a heart attack and then have to have a heart by-pass and kidney treatment for a massive 6 figure sum because it's your money and you don't want to pay taxes to help him out with a few hundred dollars worth of primary care a year and preventative medicine.
Our lives intersect in thousands of terribly boring and mundane ways which mean that you don't get the option to be left alone to do your own thing, not when your own thing impacts me and everybody else in ways that you can't comprehend.
(*) - Personally, I think legalisation is the only sane approach myself but that's a different rant.
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