Questions of Conscience, etc.
December 12, 2009 · By Martin Street
A nurse in the US who is a practising Catholic was forced by her employer to participate in an abortion against her will on threat of losing her job and her license. I don’t really have a cogent analysis for this, so I’m putting out a series of unconnected ideas on the subject to spur further debate (if anyone has the urge to sink back into the infinite swamps of the abortion debate yet again, on this chilly December weekend.) Some of these ideas are kind of balled up, so feel free to take them apart at your leisure in our conveniently provided comments section (free of charge!).
- This occurred in New York, a state that rather famously responded to a dearth of abortion performing doctors by forcing medical residents to perform abortions as a condition of obtaining their full accreditation. The article mentions that federal policy now prohibits hospitals that take federal funding from forcing employees to perform abortions. I wonder if this was the Bush administration’s response to New York’s policy. Then I wonder how public financing of health care would affect availability of abortions under this rule. Since the number of doctors choosing to perform abortions appears to actually be dropping, I have to wonder if the present situation won’t lead to more “crisis” abortions taking place. Then I wonder how long it will take for the Obama administration to change this federal policy in any case, and ponder the mystery of why they haven’t done so already. Perhaps a reader can fill me in.
- Should doctors be allowed to choose their own specialties? Yes, they should, but medical students aren’t doctors. The fact of the matter is that a license to practice medicine is issued by the government, and political considerations and policy trends will necessarily come into play. On the other hand, in the US and especially in Canada Supreme Court rulings have taken the abortion debate out of the hands of politicians making it a de facto policy decision internal to our countries’ professional medical associations. If politicians don’t get a say and doctors are becoming less in favour of abortion, I wonder if future restrictions on abortion won’t come from within the AMA and CMA. And then I wonder what the political response would be, if that was to happen.
- A nurse is in no position to determine if a procedure is necessary or not, even if the superficial analysis she does based on vital signs is correct. Nurses aren’t consulted for their opinion and therefore they aren’t privy to all of the medical considerations of the case. While I sympathise with this woman’s impulse to use every argument to win her case, I think the argument she’s making here is generally a bad one.
- It’s interesting to me that a certain segment of the population feels it’s perfectly okay for someone to claim conscientious objector status after having joined their nation’s military, knowing full well that the point of a military is to fight wars when required, and a demographically similar segment is the most likely to be up-in-arms when it’s suggested that doctors, nurses and pharmacists should have the right to conscientiously abstain from participating in post-coital contraception, believing as they do that the point of medicine is to protect and heal human life and not prevent it. Am I right in thinking there’s a certain amount of cognitive dissonance at play there? It’s the same as people who are outraged at the idea of capital punishment but simultaneously in favour of allowing partial birth abortions even when the baby is viable. (Obligatory cheap shot: Tooky Williams is lucky he wasn’t an infant, or he wouldn’t have had any supporters at all.)
“Supreme Court rulings have taken the abortion debate out of the hands of politicians making it a de facto policy decision internal to our countries’ professional medical associations.”
Henry Morgentaler hero of pro-abortion advocates whose, legal battles in Supreme Court of Canada legalised abortions in this country is a pseudo medical fraud who never studied medicine in Germany as he claimed that he did. Henry Morgentaler, who seemed to have been financed in his early days in Canada by Russian KGB, (as his wife Chava Rosenfarb lived in Poland as late as 1947, with another KGB agent Bono Wiener) obtained his medical diploma at University of Montreal by fraud (he came to Canada in 1950 and got his medical diploma in 1953). So one can say that legalisation of aqbortion in Canada was in fact KGB plot aimed to destroy this country.
Speaking of Supreme Court of Canada; Rosalie Silberman Abella’s alleged father Jackob Silberman was killed by Nazis in 1939, in Krakow, Poland almost seven years before Rosalie was born, allegedly on July 1. 1946 in Stuttgart, Germany. BTW her alleged father never graduated from Jagiellonian University of Krakow, Poland (studied there for only two years). Rosalie keeps in her chambers faked diploma of her alleged father and shows it to her visitors. Rosalie’s alleged mother Fanny (Feiga) Krongold (aka Felicja Kwiatkowska) from Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski, Poland was also killed 15 months before Rosalie was born. She was murdered by AK (Polish Home Army) in March of 1945 in Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski. So it seems that currently sitting Judge of the Supreme Court of Canada is at the best habitual confabulator or at the worst child of KGB agents who were given identity of dead people and sent to Canada with the mission to destroy this country’s legal system..
Before you dismiss it all as raving of a lunatic of sorts do some research on your own.
Karol,
I would never go so far as to say that the KGB wasn’t interested in the downfall of Western democracies. On the contrary, it was their raison d’etre, similar to the CIA’s mission to create friendly democracies throughout the rest of the world.
So I wouldn’t put it past the KGB to attempt to plant agents in positions of power in Canada. However, I am unfamiliar with the specifics of the cases you cite, and to be honest I don’t really feel compelled to do any fact checking to bolster or refute your allegations.
My contention in these sorts of matters is that Canada’s system of government, it’s laws, it’s judiciary, it’s media scrutiny, and it’s civil society combined form a robust enough system to prevent the sort of stealth takeovers you are describing. The government makes all sorts of policy decisions I disagree with, and in some cases I would go so far as to say these decisions will have a negative impact on the country. But I don’t believe that harm is the actual intent of judges or politicians involved. For me that’s a bridge too far.
Henry Morgentaler wasn’t successful because of his crafty foreign espionage training; he was successful because a large minority of Canadians agreed with his stance on the abortion issue regardless of their disposition toward him personally. If Morgentaler hadn’t taken up the mantle of abortion champion some other doctor eventually would have, no doubt with similar success. To think otherwise is to suggest that Canada alone would be the only secular Western democracy to maintain a ban against abortion. Not likely.
Likewise, I find it highly unlikely that even the most skilled spy could con his or her way onto the Supreme Court without some collusion from within the PMO. In other words, your allegation implies a spy scandal that is larger than what you mention here. Again, for this to happen without any hint betrayed to the larger public (I’m basing that on the fact that this is the first I’m hearing of it) indicates to me that this scenario is well into grassy knoll, second shooter, conspiracy of silence territory. I’m sorry, but I just don’t buy it, and again I don’t feel any need to look into it further. I have plenty of reasons to dislike and distrust the decisions the Court has made since 1982 without having to believe some Justices are KGB (or Jewish cabal?) plants.
The thing I said about medical students not being doctors is technically incorrect. I believe that residents are addressed as “doctor” from their first day on the job. To clarify, what I meant was they are not fully accredited medical practioners, let alone specialists who get to choose which branch of medicine they will concentrate their practice in.
Search …Yuri Bezmenov on Google or you tube….Russian plot.
Durward
I watched this video in particular:
http://www.dailymotion.com/vid.....v?from=rss
Fascinating stuff. I think he gives the Soviets a little too much credit for the phenomena he’s describing, and in fact he kind of recognizes it himself when he says that none of the top apparatchiks could believe how successful their schemes had been. I think it’s a human tendancy to tribe up, to take sides and to buy into your own side’s propaganda unconditionally. So while the Soviets may have been attempting to plant seeds and influences I doubt that they were the root cause of anything Yuri is describing. The Roosevelt administration had more of an influence on modern American lefties than anything the Soviets did in the sixties. Is he taking credit for that too?
Case in point: I think the greenies are all basically a bunch of marxists, mainly because all of their solutions to pollution amount to nothing but wealth redistribution schemes that won’t affect the biosphere at all. A lot of what he’s saying about useful idiots being blind to any contrary evidence rings true about the greenies from my perspective, and maybe to you too. But the greenies say exactly the same things about me, that no amount of evidence will convince me to change my mind. That’s not entirely true by the way, but I do scrutinize new contrary evidence from left-biased sources than I do with evidence that proves my points coming from the right. That’s the green perspective looking back at everyone who argues with them. What I’m saying is that there is a tendancy for people to become ideological and tribal and stubborn which doesn’t rely on Soviet instigation.
And in fact, the years between this interview and now are evidence that I’m right. Watching this video when it was brand new must have been shocking to a lot of people who saw and believed the truth of what Yuri is saying. In the 1970s and early 80s the world really was on the brink; it looked like Communism was set to win the Cold War. When this video was shot the Soviets were as powerful as ever, despite the efforts of Reagan and Thatcher to turn the tide. But the tide did turn, and Communism did fail, because even though a lot of people had bought into it’s obvious benefits and it’s inevitability, an equal number had tribed up against it and were willing to fight it to the end.
By I digress, because I’m rambling and I don’t have time to reorganize my thoughts into a more logical series of statements.
Martin,
try these three links just for starters:
http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/ar.....-silberman
Rosalie Silberman Abella
b. 1946
by Irving Abella
Born in a displaced persons camp in Stuttgart, Germany on July 1, 1946, Rosie Silberman was the daughter of Jacob and Fanny Silberman. Jacob, the son of a book store owner, was born in Sienno, Poland (82 km WSW of Lublin) in 1910, while Fanny Krongold, the daughter of a wealthy roofing supply manufacturer, was born in Ostrowiec in 1917….
http://66.155.126.243/krongold.asp
The Krongold Family: My grandparents and their children. Sitting, on the right my grandfather Chazkiel (Yehezkiel) Krongold, on the left my Grandmother Chaja (Chaya) Maria Krongold. Standing, my mother and her siblings from right to left: my uncle Hershel, my mother Giltla (Guta) Szajdla, my uncle Baruch, my aunt Feicha, and my uncle Nachman Krongold. All but my mother perished in the Holocaust. ……
While I was born long after the events took place, I often talked to my mother about the fate of her close family during the Holocaust time. She told me many times that soon after the Germans invaded Poland in 1939 most of the family members that resided in Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski, including her mother Chaya Maria Krongold, and her brothers Hershel, Nachman, and Baruch Krongold were sent to death camps where they were murdered. The only exception were herself, and her father Chazkiel Krongold who was left behind because he knew how to manage the two factories he owned, one for asphalt paper and the other for leather products.
Another family member who survived the war was my aunt Feicha Krongold. During the war she adopted a false identity as a non-Jewish woman named Felicja Kwiatkowska. Under that identity she became a member of the underground Polish resistance movement, fighting the Nazi régime. Soon after the war she was reunited with my mother. Together with a group of other women they went to Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski to find out the fate of her family and other people of the town. Later that day my mother had to go back to Warsaw to take care of my sister who was then only 5 years old. On that night a group of Polish people that took over the Jewish property in Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski and were afraid they would have to give it back to the survivors raided the women and massacred all of them. Learning about the tragic fate of her sister, and fearing that she and her daughter would be next, my mother used the false documents her murdered sister was using during the war to cover her identity, and soon after fled Poland to Israel, leaving behind her husband Henryk Swarc who promised to join them as soon as he could. He never did. ..
Also try this:.
http://books.google.ca/books?i.....38;f=false
You might also try to Google term; Krongold Felicja Kwiatkowska and you will find publications in Polish refering to the same event that took place in March of 1945.
Now, ask yourself; how many different families with the last name Krongold owned factories manufactruring roofing products (asphalt paper) in Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski, Poland before WWII?
BTW Sienno is a very small village 18 km away from Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski, place is so small that most likely it does not have book store to this very day.
Martin,
Try this:
http://www.yadvashem.org/wps/p.....earchfor=1
The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names
Full Record Details for Zilberman Jakob
Source Pages of Testimony
Last Name ZILBERMAN
First Name JAKOB
First Name YAAKOV
Father’s First Name MORDEKHAI
Mother’s First Name KHAIA
Sex Male
Date of Birth 1909
Place of Birth POLAND
Marital Status SINGLE
Permanent residence NISKO,NISKO,LWOW,POLAND
Profession STUDENT
Place during the war KRAKOW,KRAKOW,KRAKOW,POLAND
Place of Death KRAKOW,KRAKOW,KRAKOW,POLAND
Date of Death 1939
Type of material Page of Testimony
Submitter’s Last Name KEMPLER
Submitter’s First Name FRIDA
Relationship to victim SISTER
Registration date 08/07/1957
Martin,
The government should not be monopolizing the licensure of doctors or anybody for that matter.
Charles, who besides the government should grant medical licenses? Or are you actually saying that doctors shouldn’t require a license to practice? As for “or anybody” are you saying that licenses shouldn’t be required to pilot an automobile or a jumbo jet? You’ve got me curious as to how libertarian you’re willing to go with this.
I insist on going all the way to the end by demanding that your doctor, your airplane pilot and you should be free to do anything you want with or without a license. Why should I stop at any limits?
See, Martin, I have a few questions for you:
1) Why do you trust the government bureaucrats to accredit anything??? In other words, why do you trust their judgment over and above your own or anybody else’s judgement?
2) You have me curious too because you are insisting on socialism in the sub-markets of accreditation and certification. What argument do you have in defense of socialism here that can not be in turn used by socialists in every other market of the economy??? How socialist are YOU willing to go with this? I will tell you right now, any limit you identify is purely arbitrary.
—
Unless you are truly looking for a subsidy, socialism does not have to be a last resort to covering costs in the market. Most vulgar “conservatives” fail to grasp that market solutions exist for all sorts of accreditation.
Insurance companies can accredit and certify your driving, flying, doctor, plumbing, etc. licenses. If one of their licensed professionals fails, it should be that insurance company and their clients/stock-holders that pays up — not the tax-payer. As such, the insurance company has a market incentive to minimize its payouts by making damn sure its licensees are actually competent to do the professional tasks of licensure. How else would you have it???
In this regard, if you want to get a job as a pilot, you would do well to seek licensure in the best (defined by the performance and history of its licensees) insurance company. If you wanted to operate independently and encourage passengers to climb aboard your plane, you would seek the same licensure to support your reputation.
Naturally, in our current state of affairs, insurance companies behave like all other socialists: any cost that they can off-load onto the tax-payer suits them fine. They like to be “conservative” and keep things just the way they are.
Charles,
Presumably you wouldn’t stop at outsourcing licensing. I’m going to assumed you’re also in favour of outsourcing national defense, minting currency, civil policing and the courts. There has to be a model similar to your insurance solution for each of these.
So, for starters, your reference to “tax-payers” must be force of habit, since with nothing left to do there’s no reason for a centralized system of government to exist. Okay so far.
What happens when there’s a case of medical malpractice and the insurance company who licensed the doctor refuses to pay? I suppose the plaintiff would take his case to a privately run court, but what if the company refused to recognize the court’s decision? The plaintiff could pay a policing company to go and collect the money, but what if the insurance company had their own police?
I’m thinking you have to draw a limit to privatization somewhere, or else you run the risk of society collapsing into little warring tribes, and all of the problems that go with that (see Africa). I’m not really a socialist, unless you consider Reagan to have been a socialist (by the sounds of things maybe you do). All government is a little bit socialist after all; it’s the nature of the beast. In one version of his “shining city on a hill” speeches Reagan described Western free market democracies as an eternal struggle (I’m paraphrasing) “to balance maximum individual liberty against maximum social good”. That sounds about right to me. Going too far towards either extreme is less beneficial than trying to keep a good mix of both.
You can not be so easily left off the hook, Martin. You have to rise to the challenge of defining “social good” — which is an impossible task by the way — and then I would ask you to offer a model to attain it. Furthermore, I would also say that you should answer the following question: “Why should we have any interest in political affairs? Who is to say that we are not already achieving your social good?” I will tell you: we have interest in political affairs because our governance is NOT good. Social good is whatever/however/whenever you want it to be and nobody agrees on how to get there. It is interesting to note that your Opening Post tried to point out a cognitive dissonance.
Sorry but your “social good” goal does not cut it and it never will because the concept does not exist.
What an odd question.
My guess is that what would happen is the insurance company would have a hard time encouraging future clients to continue doing business with them. I have a question for you: In our current state of affairs, what happens when there is a case of medical malpractice? Now, tell me what criteria should be followed to compare our current state of affairs (I am deliberately omitting any restriction of whether the insurance company pays or not or whatever) to that of a free market?
Just out of curiosity, in our current state of affairs, what happens when insurance companies refuse to pay out claims????? I will tell you: the policy-holder is bloody-well out of luck, to put it mildly. Policy-holders who win in our socialized court system are so far and few in between. Most people can not afford to keep fighting in our bloated socialized legal system. Social good to the rescue?
One more thing. I recommend that you take a look at this:
Ronald Reagan: An Autopsy before falling in the trap of offering Reagan as a defender of free markets. He was nothing but a crony.
Charles,
Whether you’re for it or against it, human existence requires on a certain amount of social co-operation. The social good begins where personal liberty ends, in any system including yours. In the expression “The right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose” the social good is the lack of assaults. (Perhaps you’re more comfortable with the idea that a person should be able to swing their fist into another’s face with complete abandon and let the chips fall where they may.) So the social good is the diminshment of personal liberty in favour of mutual benefit.
Now for quid pro quo. You still haven’t explained how your proposals won’t send us back to a stone age existance of warring tribes, plus I want to confirm that in deed you have no use for any form of government at all, and if not then what social functions a government should handle.
I was trying to humour you by playing your little game with the insurance company, but it’s clear from your answer that your system is no better and a little worse than what currently happens when a doctor screws up, so I fail to see any benefit in switching. (To be clear: in your system anybody can be a doctor, insurance companies aren’t required to pay out and so de facto there is no sort of licensing requirement or scheme at all, and therefore anyone stupid or desperate enough to trust a person who calls himself a doctor is essentially rolling the dice on whether they get an educated practioner or a lunatic con man. Don’t, don’t, don’t, say it’s the same thing today.) Also, it might benefit you to look at history, to see that at one time doctors were in fact unlicensed, and the current system evolved as it is because it is an improvement over what came before, and you’re basically asking us to go back to the Middle Ages.
Human existence does not require cooperation. However, I will agree that people tend to cooperate anyway — they just happen to do so different ways. I think it is fair to say that if people can get away with coercing their neighbors, they will do so whether they do so through the apparatus of a structured state government under the nebulous pretense of social good or whether through any other form of aggression, I do not think it matters.
Your concept of social good — “the diminshment of personal liberty in favor of mutual benefit” — is lacking. You are just semantically sweeping things under the rug because there is no universal definition of mutual benefit.
However, there is always a conceptual problem that you will never be able to overcome: liberty, mutual benefit, social good, peace, joy, happiness, utility, whatever it is that you are maximizing (or minimizing for that matter) are not measurable and nor are they interpersonally comparable.
In other words, you can not create a summation of MY loss of liberty with YOUR gain of liberty to arrive at any intelligent conclusion.
Yeah and nobody has ever explained how my proposal will send us back to a stone-age existence. Furthermore, nobody really knows whether men of the stone-age were at war any more or any less than modern man is currently. It makes no sense to presume nor to compare.
Regardless, stone-age man may actually have been living a more morally correct life than what we are compelled to live. I happen to believe that technological advancement is stunted by government intervention, myself.
We all have “use” for some form of government whether we like it or not by virtue of the fact that government forces us to use their services and denies us the opportunity to abstain. The only functions a government should handle is its own abolition.
If you are trying to imply that governments make my life better than without governments, you may in fact be right. However, I may be a lazy free-loading bastard on welfare or maybe a demonic international arms dealer. In both instances, I parasitize the tax-payer and without the government I would likely be a poor beggar. As such, what in the world do you want to confirm?
I am not insisting that you switch. If you want to patronize government certification, be my guest.
I am insisting on freedom of choice — something which you are denying. I find it laughable that you raise the issues of “mutual benefit” or “social good” or “maximize liberty” or “minimize assaults” and deny the privatization of professional certification.
Wrong. There certainly is a scheme: it is a market.
Unlike our current state of affairs, the preferences of the customers would be manifested by their patronization of the the available suppliers.
What you fail to see is that my hypothetical melding of insurance providers and certification can only exist if customers buy their services. Customers will only buy their services if their certification and their insurance are BETTER than your socialism. If the private options were worse than your socialism, the private options would never thrive. Yet, you insist on denying people the freedom to offer choice. Your opposition is astonishing and absurd.
I will, will, will remind you that a “nurse in the US who is a practising Catholic was forced by her employer to participate in an abortion against her will on threat of losing her job and her license” precisely through the statist institutions you insist on defending.
As far as looking at history is concerned, I am not convinced by your presumption that the current system evolved as an improvement. You are getting cause and effect backwards. The current system evolved to control supply and to limit entry into the market. To think that governments monopolized licensing for The Social Good is a bit naive, in my opinion.
[Before I go any further, full disclosure: I work for a company employing licensed professionals, though I myself am unlicensed. My opinions expressed here are philosophical and unconnected with the practical considerations of my line of work per se. Just thought I'd add that bit of information for the sake of arguing in good faith.]
Charles –
You seem to be trying to place the onus of proof onto my half of the discussion. So first of all, let me point out that I’m the guy arguing for the status quo here, and you’re the guy arguing that society as we know it should be pitched out the window in favour of a social construct wherein we have to fact check every relationship with every person or institution in our lives. I don’t feel obligated at this point to write a disertation to defend a situation that is working very well, better than any system of social organization in history. It’s up to you to provide some sort of reasonable argument why your proposals would make changes for the better. So far you haven’t provided a single convincing argument (beyond your own unbacked assumptions) that the trust created by government mandated licensing schemes should be supplanted by individually verified contracts, or that the market could provide a better way of enforcing those contracts than the courts and police we already employ, or that bartered chickens are a better store of value for negotiating those contracts than money backed by the federal government. You’ve only convinced me that despite my mild libertarian leanings there is no way I’d ever vote for a libertarian party. Which I already knew, but hey, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded, eh?
Believe it or not disagreeing with your anarchistic free-for-all doesn’t automatically make someone pro-Soviet. So stop calling me a socialist, it’s starting to grate a little. I’m in favour of self-reliance, and I’ve even posted to that effect here, (http://www.thepolitic.com/arch.....but-verify), moreso in the comments. The market does work. It is currently working. The irony is that there actually are alternatives to licensed medical practioners, and funny enough they go under the moniker “alternative medicine”. Some alternative medicos are pretty bright, and some of them are lunatics, but spending your life having to tell the difference isn’t required because the alternative to the alternative is to observe that the social contracts based on trust that we labour under actually work as expected most of the time; and therefore we are able to trust licensed professionals and skip having to spend our lives carefully researching every other human being we interact with. You saying that my opposition to your little scheme is absurd is itself the absurdity; you’re suggesting I’m against creating a situation that already exists. What I’m against is getting rid of the part of the current situation that relies on the existence of a functioning civil society.
You seem to base a lot of your assumptions on the idea that the government is an entity exterior to the rest of society as opposed to an expression of the incidental common purposes of men. It’s function and maintenance requires more citizen involvement than you give credit for. A modern nation state is built on a complex set of interpersonal and institutional relationships that ultimately require a great deal of trust between individuals and the institutions they interact with. You are suggesting we abandon that “nebulous” system of trust in favour of a situation where we are always obligated to personally confirm the value of every aspect of every interaction.
I’m stating, point blank, that the amount of time and energy that is saved by maintaining a mature, robust civil society based around trustworthy institutions is the very thing that makes our current high standard of living possible, and that this is in fact in line with and a furtherance of Adam Smith’s concept of the division of labour. In other words, the society we live in is the best yet devised expression of the market concept that you worship, and government licensing is an integral, non-negotiable pillar of that advanced social-market construct. Government licensing was NOT, per your argument, instituted to limit the market but to better facilitate it’s expression.
So don’t call me naive, okay?. I’ve actually read Smith, and further, I understood him.
Charles, a couple more points, now that the main thrust of what I had to say is out of the way:
I tend to think of human existence as something slightly more congenial than solitary individuals periodically engaging in rape to procreate. I can’t imagine any other way for the human species existing without cooperation. You’ll have to enlighten me.
I’m sorry you have a problem with my quick definition for “the social good”. Perhaps you should track down a copy of one of Reagan’s “shining city” speeches for his better explanation. As for there being no metric for measuring mutual benefit, let’s go back to my example: “Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose.” Assuming we agree with this principle, the diminishment of our individual natural liberty is measurable; we agree to limit how we swing our fists in favour of leaving each other’s noses intact. The resulting mutual benefit is also measurable: since we each agree not to punch, we benefit from not being punched. This is principle of “the diminishment of individual liberty in favour of mutual benefit” in action. It can be carried to many, many aspects of life and is another fundametal pillar of a mature civil society: we agree to recognize limits to our own freedom in order to benefit from other people doing likewise. But as Reagan also cautioned, there can always be too much of a good thing. Hence his notion of an eternal balancing act.
I think I just did. Except, to be accurate, I never said that I would gain liberty as you lost it, I said I would gain benefit. Which I just demonstrated.
On the contrary, archaeology is full of evidence that stone aged people were almost continually at war, or the inter-tribal equivalent of war. Very few skeletal remains exist of people who died of natural causes. Life was short and brutal for cavemen. Either way, modern life as we know it is impossible without the nation state’s mature civil society in place. The system you advocate leaves trust limited to close relatives and associates. We have societies structured like that on Earth right now, in Africa, and they are basket cases, and the only thing that keeps them in the modern world at all is the endless charity and intervention of the West. If we gave up the system we have and that allows our modern market economy to keep functioning we’d quickly be basket cases too, and it would be a return to the stone age for all of us.
So, my statement about cavemen being at war is in your words uprovable, but you’re going to go ahead and conjecture about their moral standards? Back to Africa. Look at the licensing requirements, country by country. Then look at the technological developments those countries have introduced. Look at your last sentence. I get that it’s just your opinion, but still, it doesn’t follow. I mean, the places that have no water quality standards are the same places that rely on us to drill wells for them. They haven’t got the technological prowess to drill a hole in the ground. There’s a best selling book out right now about a kid who built a windmill out of spare bicycle parts. In his part of the world that’s a serious breakthrough.
Again, now that I think about it, it’s kind of ironic that we’ve gotten this far without either of us noting that, with very few exceptions, most of what we require from licensed professionals can be obtained through unlicensed imitators. You can see an osteopath, or you can go to a chiropractor. You can hire a licensed surveyor, or you can hire an unlicensed contractor with RTK to collect data. You can hire a limo, or you can flag down a passing car thief. In every case, you get what you pay for, but that’s a side issue (that I can verify from my association with licensed professionals). But the many of the options you crave already exist, and even more or less as you conceive them.
The point I was making in the text you quoted was that an licensed doctor within our present system is absolutely a better choice than an unlicensed doctor with no other option. You replied by noting that sometimes private institutions licensed by the state force people to do things against their will and against the law. Um, okay, but that’s not even a connected thought, let alone a refutation.
Forgive me but I believe you are misinterpreting the freedom that I propose and how it may play out economically. You keep saying that I am insisting on “individually verified contracts” when that is not what I am saying at all. Granted, people should be free to verify whatever they want. I believe you are correct to see that would be a waste of everybody’s time if they had to verify everything. That verification is where the insurance company steps in.
Insurance companies can be the middle man between the customer and the professional. They do that already in other domains. The scope of their coverage should be free to expand into professional licensing and put their money where their mouth is. In our current state of affairs, what I propose would be illegal and you support such restrictions. So, yes, a quack-professional may be free to fool potential customers but nobody is really being fooled by a professional who can not demonstrate insurance coverage.
The upside is that the poor Catholic nurse in the US would be free to practice her professional in a morally correct manner.
Yeah but you still insist on defending a social structure that would make it illegal for a Catholic nurse to refuse to perform abortions because she has no choice but to practice according to what her government stamp says.
Better according to who? It certainly is not better for the poor Catholic nurse in the US. How does her loss of liberty enter into the equation of the social good?
I am proud of the the free market mechanism that I offer because the infringement of liberty is never endorsed nor are compromises made for the good of anybody else. Your social good equation is just stealing from Peter to give to Paul while ignoring that you stole from Peter.