AllThingsKC wrote:phuqueue wrote:
Gay marriage and health care are not even close to analogous. I also wouldn't say that supporting gay marriage necessarily means opposing any government "control" of marriage -- there are many ways in which government controls marriage that I'm perfectly comfortable with, but if the government is going to grant or recognize a right in some people, it shouldn't arbitrarily deny that right to others.
I guess what I'm asking is where is that fine line between the gov't involvement with marriage and the gov't involvement with health care, gun control, and other issues.
What I'm saying is that the line isn't fine at all. These are all very different issues with more dimensions than just "GOVT CONTROL? _
X_YES __NO"
With gay marriage, the issue is denial of rights. Marriage was recognized as a fundamental civil right in Loving v. Virginia and equal protection (which is explicitly provided for vis-a-vis states in the Fourteenth Amendment) has been read into the Fifth Amendment's due process protection. This means that you can't withhold such a fundamental right from some people arbitrarily. The question then is whether prohibiting gay marriage is arbitrary. It's fine if you personally don't believe that gay people should be allowed to marry each other, but the Bible is not legitimate as the sole basis for legislation, per the First Amendment. If you're going to say gay marriage should be illegal and heterosexual marriage should retain its privileged status, you're going to have to support that argument with some concrete reasons founded on something other than religious belief, because the Constitution explicitly provides that religious belief will not be the basis for our laws. I wouldn't say that the government shouldn't "control" marriage -- the government has legitimate interests in promoting marriage, and so should be free to privilege (and, conversely, regulate) marriage in certain ways -- but government control can't be exercised capriciously. This isn't just with respect to marriage, but in general. The government must tread lightly when it restricts fundamental rights.
You've got a little better argument with gun control, which I'll get to in a minute. I'll do health care first because it's quick and easy and you've hit on it twice now. There is no "fine line" between health care and gay marriage, there's more like a yawning abyss. These things are not similar at all. The government is not privileged to arbitrarily withhold fundamental rights, but you have no fundamental right to not be taxed, which is the power under which ACA was passed. On the contrary, governments have collected taxes since time immemorial and the Constitution empowers the government to tax and spend pretty much to its heart's content, with only the restrictions that taxes be "uniform" and that "direct taxes" be apportioned (a restriction that was lifted from income taxes by the Sixteenth Amendment). Going back decades, taxes have been upheld for all kinds of reasons. The government's ability to tax isn't unlimited, but the Constitution is extremely permissive. Moreover, there are legitimate societal harms here that must be addressed. Most importantly, health care costs are spiraling out of control, and one important reason for this is that hospitals are legally obliged to provide emergency care regardless of ability to pay. Insurance schemes operate on the basis that everybody pays into the system, and the system only pays out to a few people. This is how insurance companies make money and stay in business. Non-compulsory health care works in reverse: only some people (those who choose to get insured) pay into the system, but the system will pay out to potentially anybody who needs it. When an uninsured person goes to the emergency room, they still receive treatment, and they're kept in the hospital until their condition is no longer emergent. Then they get booted back out onto the street, whether they're necessarily fully recovered or not (this strikes me as extraordinarily barbaric, but I'm merely noting that as an aside; the health care argument is quite strong without even resorting to morality). After that, they get a bill. They can't pay. Their bill gets sent to collections. They still can't pay. But somebody has to pay, and that somebody is everybody else, through two main avenues. The first is direct payouts to hospitals by the government. The government (ie taxpayers) pays subsidies to hospitals to partially (only partially) compensate them for treating uninsured patients. The other avenue is through higher prices charged to everybody who can pay (that is, the insured). Your hospital bill is artificially inflated to help cover the guy next to you who doesn't have insurance. This will be paid by your insurance company, but because your insurance company is still a for-profit enterprise, they have to cover these higher bills somehow -- through higher premiums. But here's the particularly fun part. Bills rise across the board. Hospitals don't just charge you more because you're insured; they charge
everybody more (to be fair, hospital billing practices are generally much more byzantine than this, so for instance the insured and the uninsured typically won't be stuck with exactly the same bill for exactly the same procedure, but this is still basically how it works). This means that they take a larger "loss" on the inflated bill of the guy who couldn't pay, which in turn has to be covered by everybody else again. This causes health care costs to spiral upward, which is why we've seen it far outpacing inflation. Conservatives should actually be all about compulsory health care coverage, because when somebody who isn't covered goes to the hospital, he's essentially "stealing" from everybody else. This is precisely a form of wealth redistribution -- it's just a really fucking haphazard one that ultimately leaves everybody involved worse off than a planned, coherent system would (because even the uninsured "thief" doesn't actually get all the treatment he may need, just enough not to die in a gutter of his illness). When it comes to tax policy, conservatives seem to love this "every man for himself" approach, cut taxes -- and services -- to the bone and just let people fend for themselves; yet when it comes to health care, conservatives are keen to prop up our current free-rider-friendly model because
freedom. Gay marriage is in no way analogous to this issue, most fundamentally because gay marriage doesn't present any sort of harm to society (except in the minds of those whose religious values it offends). There are further points to make here with regard to the societal harms addressed by health care reform, for instance the close ties between rising health care cost and rising government budget deficits, but I'm going to cap this tangent here since this isn't the thread for that.
Gun control works a little better because many people view it as a fundamental right. Of course, it's not -- the right to bear arms is most definitely not unlimited (seems like the most popular illustration of this lately has been that you don't have a right to maintain your own nuclear arsenal -- once we agree that some absurd extreme is out of play, it just becomes a matter of where you decide to draw the line). Whether the Second Amendment even protects a
personal right at all is highly contentious, and the NRA's position that it does is a very recent development from just the past few decades (even the NRA itself didn't used to hold this position until around the 70s). Guns also present a very real and tangible social harm, and it's not just in relative aberrations like Newtown or Aurora or Columbine, but in the 11,000 or so murders committed with guns every year. The Huffington Post just had a great visual for this a few days ago that I already can't find anymore, a time lapse map of the US showing gun deaths since Newtown. It basically looked like Outbreak, these red circles appearing mostly around major population centers and just getting bigger and bigger. In three months since the massacre, thousands of people have been murdered. These deaths are mostly not noteworthy or eyecatching, so they don't get much attention. Perhaps that's the most damning statement you can make about gun proliferation in the US: murder has become so mundane that nobody even really cares unless you manage to make a particular spectacle of doing it. Gun lovers like to counter with the old "guns don't kill people" line, but even they must admit that the gun helps quite a bit. We can only really idly speculate about how many fewer people would be murdered if guns weren't so freely available -- either because it's more difficult to inflict life-threatening wounds on them with other weapons, so they ultimately survive the attack, or even because it just requires a great deal more commitment to kill somebody through most other means, whereas you can grab a gun and pull the trigger in the blink of an eye, which permits you far less time to reflect on what you're doing -- but it doesn't require a great leap to guess that a significant percentage of those victims didn't have to die.
One fun little side note that even links the gun and health care arguments together: each year more than 30,000 people are killed or injured by guns -- they all see the inside of a hospital in some capacity and a very large proportion of them receive treatment, many of whom are not insured. The CDC estimates that gun violence costs us about $40 billion per year. "Arms" are, in some capacity, a Constitutional right, but the extent of that right is far from clear, and the costs imposed on society by an overly permissive interpretation of that right are enormous. The same can't be said of gay marriage. This is why the line between gay marriage and health care or gun control isn't fine at all. These are extremely different issues, which helps illustrate the point Highlander made a few posts above about big vs. small government. It's not just "oh, I think gay marriage should be legal, so the government shouldn't act at all in this field, but I think guns are bad and health insurance is good so the government should bring the hammer down there." These things only seem inconsistent if you view the world through the lens of "big" vs. "small" government, where every issue is just a matter of adjusting the "size" of government to achieve whatever goal you want. But the government shouldn't be "big" or "small" just for the sake of it. I don't believe in big government, I believe in effective government. An effective government safeguards my rights -- my right to marry whomever I choose (who legally consents, etc), my right to be free of bullets in my body, my right not to get overcharged for routine health care services to pay for somebody else*, etc.
*side note: As a bleeding heart lefty I actually have no qualms with chipping in to pay for health care coverage for people who need it, although that doesn't change the fact that the way in which I do that now is as part of a hopelessly broken system; for me personally the moral argument against our current system is a very strong one, but I have also recognized that "compassionate conservatism" has gone nearly extinct, if it ever really existed in the first place, so pragmatic arguments are also necessary. Whatever your feelings about ACA in particular, it's pretty difficult to mount a coherent defense of our system as it currently exists -- it's a grossly inefficient, ultimately unsustainable model. Reform of some kind is sorely needed. Where the Republicans really went wrong wasn't in opposing ACA per se but in failing to put together a viable counterproposal.