Taxpayer-financed social welfare programs are each and every one morally wrong, including Medicare. If you want to read excellent reasons why Medicare is wrong, including practical ones, go to the FFF website and use the search aid to find articles about Medicare, like this one, which argues that Medicare for All will greatly increase deaths due to sloppy medical practices endemic to the public financing of health procedures. The next few paragraphs explain why Medicare and indeed all taxpayer-financed social welfare programs are, in my estimation and judgment, morally wrong.
Social welfare programs provide welfare, and this takes money. The government gets most of its money from taxpayers. Even when it issues bonds, the interest must be paid and that comes from taxpayers. The government doesn’t work or produce goods that it sells for money. It has to get most of its money from taxes, because its fees don’t bring in much and neither do its sales of its assets.
Taxes are collected by force of arms or threats to fine, penalize or imprison you if you refuse to pay or disobey the IRS. The taxes are levied by Congress, whom we elect. We have taxation with representation. This means that all voters jointly or collectively are responsible for the system of taxing themselves. In turn, that means that your individual responsibility is extremely slight. If there are 100,000,000 voters, your say is one one-hundreth of a million. This means that your responsibility is essentially nil or zero. This means that the collective say of the other 99,999,999 voters weighs on you. You have no say while the system of everyone else comes across to you as an imperative you must obey. Everyone faces the same thing. Each is coerced but all together comprise the system of coercion in operation.
The system of taxation is one in which the violence against you is initiated by the system over which your control and say is negligible. To you, the tax collector is more or less as a thief. Your attitude toward this thievery may be favorable or unfavorable, but your attitude is irrelevant compared to the real fact that you lack control over the taxes. They are taken from you whether you like it or not.
It is this taxation procedure upon which all social welfare programs rest. They cannot be right morally if the taxation procedure is not right. So, is it right or wrong? Taxation extracted from you and over which you have no real say, except that 1/100,000,000th share of the vote, initiates violence against you. This means you have no choice. You must pay the taxes. This means your freedom is curtailed. Is this right? Is it right that your freedom should be curtailed by everyone else or by a system arranged in this way? It doesn’t matter what happens to the money extracted from you, whether it goes to good causes or bad causes. That misses the point, which is to evaluate its extraction from you, because no matter what’s done with your money, the way it’s taken from you is still the same, and that way is still open to a moral evaluation. (Besides right and wrong are not determinable by how the money is used. For one thing, you have no say over that either; and reasonable people differ on good and bad causes. The disposition of the money is likewise a process over which your say and control are nil.)
What can we say about the forcible extraction of money from you by the government or system? It’s involuntary. It reduces your freedom. It’s a form of servitude or slavery, because it takes what’s yours and transfers it elsewhere. No matter what you think of the procedure, it’s a theft whenever the taking is without your consent. Does voting amount to consent? Have you consented to taxation by voting? No one knows but you, and unless taxes are made to be voluntary, no one can ever know. We cannot infer from the act of voting that you consent to the system or the taxes you pay, nor can we infer that you do not consent. We can ask why force is necessary if indeed everyone consents. The fact of force being imposed is consistent with the idea that otherwise the government would not be able to raise the amount of funds that it raises using force. This means that consent to taxes is not the rule. You may be voting for the lesser of evils. It cannot be concluded that your vote is a form of consent to taxes.
Do you tacitly consent to the taxes by not revolting or joining a revolutionary movement? That cannot be concluded either. The rightness or wrongness of taxes doesn’t depend upon whether or not you take up arms to defend your freedom. The moral judgment depends on whether you are being robbed or not, and there seems to be no way of escaping the conclusion that you are being robbed. By this is not meant that every single one of us thinks he is being robbed or doesn’t consent. It means that the system of taxation is arranged in the manner of armed robbery, and this would not be so or necessary if robbery were not the intent and the reality.
If taxation is robbery by the nature of the system, then taxation is wrong. If robbery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. If taxation is robbery, then Medicare and social welfare programs are indefensible on moral grounds.
But suppose a poll is taken. Polls are taken and they suggest at best an even split between people satisfied with Medicare and those not satisfied with it. In many years, the dissatisfied exceed the satisfied. But votes do not determine what’s right and wrong. Right and wrong have to do with the inherent nature of relations. It’s wrong to kill someone for no reason other than your own pleasure or gain. This is going to be true no matter what a poll shows about its rightness or wrongness.
But suppose you think that Medicare helps save lives and you consider this a good thing, so that you approve of Medicare. What you think doesn’t affect the rightness or wrongness of Medicare. It simply amounts to a poll of you and you alone. You don’t determine what’s objectively right and wrong. Right and wrong are not subjective. It’s a fact that situations and relations occur that make it hard sometimes to know what’s right and wrong, but that fact doesn’t mean that subjectivity determines right and wrong. It only means that hard situations occur and sometimes judgment is required. No one is claiming that knowing right and wrong will always be easy.
9:49 am on July 20, 2019
