I have nowhere else to talk about this so I'll just post it here since it sort of fits.
First I'll say I disagree with the comment he's replying to by stating that medical care is neither a right nor privilege, it's a commodity service. It has to be paid for somehow, if you're not paying for it then your insurance pays for it (lol), and if neither you nor insurance will pay for it the government pays for it (socialized medicine lol), and if nobody pays for it then the quality of medical care goes down as a consequence. The supplies, equipment and pharmaceuticals have to come from somewhere, somebody has to design and manufacture the equipment, somebody has to develop and research for the pharmaceuticals, somebody has to manufacture the supplies, and this goes without mentioning the education and licensing requirements of the doctors involved which also costs them money.
Now despite that, the general argument of the comment he's responding to is stating that medical care can't be a right because it has to be sustained with money, an argument which hinges on the perception that a right is strictly a negative liberty, a claim which is debatable on its own but has some merit as the most common frame of reference as to what rights are happens to be the Bill of Rights which is largely made up of negative liberties, as in things the government can't touch. These include the right to free speech, gun rights, the right to remain silent, the right to private property, ect.
Chris misinterprets this argument entirely stating that the commenter thinks that medical care shouldn't be available for everybody. In that statement, he just blew off two different points worthy of nuanced discussion in favor of his utopian socialized medicine.
1) That medical care is a commodity service.
2) That medical care can't be a negative liberty (or negative right).
A good counterargument to this comment would've been to state that medical care is a positive right/duty, meaning that action on part of a doctor is obliged. Think of Good Samaritan laws for an example. Good Samaritan laws state that if you find a person in danger, be it by existing injury (bleeding out) or imminent injury, it's your duty to rescue that person to the best of your ability and there's no legal liability in failing to succeed or doing so against the wishes of the endangered person.
Instead, Chris goes on a tangent that if the United States ran out of money (lol how would that work) that all of your rights would dissipate. He states that rights only exist as a matter of public institutions protected for you which are
afforded to the individual.
Well this assessment is wrong out of the gate, because first of all, negative liberties are a matter of non-interference from authority and second of all, the Framers viewed the Bill of Rights as God given (or natural rights for a secular preference) rights, the absence of government does not preclude your natural/God-given rights because a man in nature, or a vacuum, can act on those rights to their hearts content. Free speech is not a proscribed privilege that can be taken at the discretion of the government unless that government is corrupt, which was the entire point of the Revolutionary War.
Further, the threat of criminal penalization does little to stop a truly demented criminal, so if I am assaulted for speaking my mind in spite of the presence of government, does that therefore mean I no longer have rights and liberties because the assault occurred? Of course the criminal has encroached on my liberty but they do not cease in their entirety from thereon simply because of this momentary violation. Negative liberties can only be invalidated insofar as they're actively interfered with, negative liberties exist at rest of action, that's the whole point. For free speech to be wholly invalidated would require the active oppression of a government for all the power and infrastructure it would take to continually abrogate one's freedom of speech. What we're talking about is the kind of Social Credit surveillance state of Communist China. Such active oppression of free speech couldn't exist in a power vacuum like he describes.
This goes without mentioning that Chris' argument hinges on merely letting oneself be assaulted because there's an absence of police being funded to protect you, but if such anarchy were to occur, would that not mean you'd have unmitigated opportunity (not to be confused with access) to self defense, like Kyle Rittenhouse? Chris' argument hinges entirely on the pretense of third party intervention as a pretext of protecting one's liberties.
In fact, Chris' logic revolves around synonymizing liberty with duty, because he veers into an argument that people have rights to education, fair trials, ect. These things are considered rights and duties, not liberties.
He states that rights are merely rights because we say they are, which is debatable, one could argue it's because we're aware of them being that they're supposed to be natural and/or God given. Do liberties exist irrespective of their recognition? If yes, this argument is invalid.
As a side note, he also goes into how he doesn't like being gouged for medical treatment but what he doesn't seem to realize is that part of the reason cheap-to-make things like insulin is so expensive is because the government banned the manufacture of generic insulin along with other generic pharmaceuticals and gave exclusive rights to the production of these medicines to what we call Big Pharma. His fabled socialized medicine already exists, just as a legal monopoly and not a direct limb of the government itself. It might work opposite to what he wants, where the government pays for it out of their pocket, but it's still ultimately the fault of the government doing what they would do in socializing medicine, which is subtracting competition from the market.
Then this goes without mentioning all his sperging about the Covid vaccine and how he's surprised that conservatives want FDA approved medicine, right after stating it used to be the hippy liberal leftists who were anti-vax, to which I find zero inconsistencies in accordance to his own narrative.
And then he brings up the 3/5ths compromise and I just start laughing at him. This argument is made even funnier when included in the context of his next rebuttal to a comment that reads "nobody has a right to your labor", to which Chris goes on a spiel about arresting him and informing him of his right to an attorney. Okay, but those public defenders are paid by the government and nobody is coerced to be an attorney. What does Chris propose in the total absence of a public defender? At least this time he's arguing in favor of positive duty and not trying to make an argument in favor of public slavery.
His UBI segment is just about the only smart argument in favor for UBI I've ever heard, but the problem is if the money given to the jobless 30% only exists so they can us it as food stamps then that devalues the currency with every check cashed because it's not being used in the service of creating more wealth but of preventing poverty, which means the overall wealth of the 70% of people with jobs will decline as a consequence because it's being given away for free and not spent on productivity.
In order for it to work without bankrupting the other 70%, the 30% destitute people in his hypothetical scenario would need to be able to put something back into the economy, which just takes us back to giving them jobs that are already filled by machines. Otherwise the 30% are simply borrowing against the value of the currency until it collapses in value altogether through inflation. I don't see a simple solution to the job bottleneck problem he presents. If and when it happens, it'll be a tremendously difficult humanitarian issue, and UBI is just a band-aid solution.
