Script feedback
Hello,
Below is a script for my next video which is a bit longer than normal so I wanted to see if anyone had any feedback before I animate and publish it. I'll probably change some of the syntax when I record the voiceover to make it all flow better, so what I'm most interested in is if there are any parts that seem unclear or confusing?
Healthcare, rights, and other people’s labour
1.
Anytime someone says “healthcare should be a right” some clown will pop up and say “actually anything that requires the labour of others isn’t a right”.
Let’s for now ignore the ridiculous version of this argument which implies that free at the point of delivery healthcare requires forcing doctors to treat people at gunpoint.
We also need to ignore the fact that capital income and rental income both require the labour of others and therefore can’t be rights, so taxing them to pay for universal healthcare should be perfectly acceptable.
I suppose then we also need to ignore the fact that our labour relies on the labour of the parents who raised us, and the teachers that educated us, and the people who built the roads we drive to work on.
And we need to ignore the fact that our labour would be much less productive without the advancements in technology made possible by generations of other people's labor.
We also need to ignore that the relative wealth of people living in rich countries is made possible by the labour of those living in less rich countries.
In short we need to ignore the obvious fact that our world is so interconnected that literally everything we do relies on the labour of others and instead read the clown’s argument as something like “healthcare can't be a right because the policies necessary to provide people with that right require taxation which forces people to give up some of the income they have worked for”.
2.
A few years ago we might have dealt with this argument by pointing out that lots of things we commonly talk about as rights are funded through taxation. The right to vote requires a lot of administration. We could save a significant amount of taxpayer money by abolishing elections and adopting a hereditary system.
Similarly the right to a fair trial can’t be a real right as it forces the taxpayer to stump up for judges and juries, when we could skip all that and settle for just the executioner.
Recently however, it seems like the clowns are being more open about the fact that they don’t really care for these rights either so this line is now less effective. We need instead to talk about a right the clowns would never want to abandon, the right to property.
3.
There’s two major problems with maintaining that people have a right to property while claiming that healthcare can't be a right.
Firstly, while it’s true that abstractly saying people have the right to private property doesn’t cost anything, neither does abstractly saying that people have the right to healthcare. Abstractly saying things is one of the last free forms of entertainment available.
However, making the abstract things we say concrete does cost money, and we spend a whole bunch of tax money enforcing people’s property rights.
The second problem is that property law actually functions a lot like tax law. If I think a piece of land is mine, but property law disagrees, it will be forcefully taken from me. If I think some money is mine, but tax law disagrees, it will be forcefully taken from me.
Tax law might take 30% of the apples I pick from a tree, but if property law says that tree belongs to someone else, it will take 100% of my apples.
Any law beyond “don’t physically attack people” is essentially an addendum which says “except when they violate this rule”. In this regard there is no difference between laws which force us to respect society’s norms around property, and laws which force us to respect society’s norms around providing people with healthcare.
We can argue about whether these laws are fair or conducive to a well functioning economy or whatever, but we can’t make arguments based on violence or voluntarism, as all laws are enforced with violence, and none of them are voluntary.
The clown might seek to get around this by claiming that their property is an extension of their person, that attacking their land is equivalent to attacking them. But there is no equivalency there. You are not soil, even if your skull is full of it.
4.
But we still haven’t got to the core issue with the clown’s argument.
When someone says people should have a right to healthcare, what they’re really saying is that society should make an effort to guarantee that people who need healthcare get it.
The important question here is should healthcare be treated like schools, roads, and the fire department, or should it be treated like breakfast cereal.
Focusing on what a right is rather than how healthcare should be funded is an attempt by opponents of public healthcare to hide their heartfelt belief that poor people should die behind an abstract philosophical discussion.
But it fails even on its own terms, because outside of the legal context saying something is a right is just a strong moral claim, and all moral claims require things of other people. That’s why we argue about them.
Trying to circumvent that argument by claiming that the sacrifices required by the rights you favour are fine, and the sacrifices required by the rights you oppose are unacceptable isn’t going to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with you.
People have the rights we collectively decide they have. There’s no shortcut around the negotiation required by this fact. Because we live in a society. I thought clowns knew this.
Comments (28)
"In this regard there is no difference between laws which force us to respect society’s norms around property, and laws which force us to respect society’s norms around providing people with healthcare." Yes, all norms require enforcement. Libertarians and others going back to Locke attempt to conceal this fact to privilege property as being "without force".
"People have the rights we collectively decide they have. There’s no shortcut around the negotiation required by this fact. Because we live in a society. I thought clowns knew this." This is a brilliant and simple analysis. Society is inescapable and must be recognized, even if only to make it butt out. Negotiation is the key word here: the rights we create are part of complex social negotiation to maximize benefits and minimize burdens (hopefully.). There are no "natural rights" to guide us: those are ineffable fantasies. How many natural rights can dance on a pinhead?
One of property's greatest costs is not domestic enforcement, but international enforcement. 1/3 the national budget in the USA so that invaders won't simply come in and confiscate your property. Police and private security are about equal in spending in the USA: that means that property enforcement is enormously subsidized by police and military expenditures.
All legal rights create duties for others, which have costs. "Labour" is a misdirection. Duties to cooperate and duties to defend the right.
I consider health care to be a right, but when I was growing up in the 50's and 60's, it absolutely was not considered so. In fact, as kids, the common response to a verbal threat of violence was "You do and you'll pay the doctor bill".
Hope you are doing well!
I just got here and now see that maybe you’re not making as many videos these days. I’m still gonna stay a member because I think these videos/ideas deserve attention/$
It's a collective mechanism and is variable by the castles lawmakers. Their minds individually are incapable of juggling the variables. They moved slowly, and talk slowly, and change is therefore inadequate for maximising efficiency. It's exemplified by an obese society where the game is to cure obesity related diseases by novelty as eating less and exercising more are widely deemed the behaviours of the poor and less intelligent classes. Only horseriders and elite athletes can fully overcome this, though even they struggle. Health is not a right any more than it's a law, it's a personal necessity for survival. The modern western world offers many less risk rather than more health, enabling it to take more health risks. But if even greater personal risk exposure is permitted then healthcare becomes easily oversubscribed and bankrupts society, as self (ego) becomes > collective goals. As collective goals can be represented by tax income, selfish people get deliberately sick. Sick becomes cool. The nation crumbled, as the bloat is propped up by unwelcome migration. Civil war ensues, and the unhealthy become dead or enslaved. This is society without robots, but ai could improve it for those who dare follow a selfless caring algo. Hence ai v ai is inevitable modern battelground. And MPs are replaced by gaming crew alliances and animators.
This entire soliloquy lacks clarity and fails in its analogy—in addition to being factually incorrect at several points. What is the point of this?
Going to echo Brad here. Saw your videos on Instagram, and I think it is some of the best stuff I've ever seen there. You're doing amazing, thoughtful work. I've shared it with a lot of people, and they all seem to really appreciate it, too. Keep kicking butt!
Just a brief note to say I recently came across your work on Facebook Reels and I’m utterly smitten. I’ve shared one of your pieces every day for the week since you first popped up. My private group for political discussion is enjoying what I share, so hopefully I am the first of many…or at least more than a few…new supporters. Keep up the great work!
As a member of society I, and by extension the rest of society, has a right to expect the working poor and the medically indigent receive healthcare so as to halt or hamper the spread of disease. This becomes a public saftey issue as much as law enforcement is. Consider the covid epidemic and the resulting mortality in the free market system of the U.S.
You create fascinating political and philosophical art. Suggestion: slow down the words your main character, presumably you, just a little bit, maybe 10%. Also, a little more voice modulation to emphasize keywords. I'm suggesting subtlety here, not wholesale change I look forward to more.
No right can be enforced without cooperation. That's why we have governments. But it goes beyond that- when a company pollutes, taxes moderate that pollution into the commons. Pretending that a long and lengthy court battle where malice aforethought must be proved to force them to consent to make them pay for that (instead of making a fail-baby-corporation like J&J to go bankrupt) is equally as rubbish. Poor health is often a side effect of bad nutrition, or pollution, or being priced out of shelter or good food, or system strain based on work, most of the value of which goes to the employer. We collectively cause the damage, privatize the profit and publicly finance the gains? FJ you are amazing, and I love every one of your videos. This a a great script.
I LOVE this, but maybe instead of (or in addition to?) showing how property law and tax law are similar, it might help to provide more concrete examples of "we spend a whole bunch of tax money enforcing people’s property rights." Or just how tax money enables even an extremely off-the-grid, get-off-my-land lifestyle. For this I'm going to call people who are anti-tax, pro-private property, pro-free market "libertarians". In what ways does a libertarian expect something to be done, or to exist, where they did not directly pay market value for it? Maybe expecting other people to have knowledge of how laws work? Or to even to be able to read a "Private Property" sign? This expectation requires public education, or the libertarian should have no expectation of other people's literacy. They also expect to be able to pay money for things. Again, public education is necessary so people know how money works or how to do basic math. And what about the cash that's under a libertarian's mattress? Someone had to *physically make* that cash so that the libertarian could store its value. Or if it's in a bank? Someone has to work to make sure the bank software stays active and accurate and doesn't glitch out. If suddenly no one printed cash and no one maintained bank software, how does a libertarian store value? By writing it down? Oops, can't read, sorry. Shells or shiny rocks? Good luck agreeing on how much a shell is worth. So basically, a libertarian lifestyle absolutely requires the labor of others.
Thanks! I planned to use the animation to show some of the ways in which we spend money enforcing property rights, but I was going to focus on policing and prison, I might now add a line about how the general administration of the market also requires labour. I have decked the clown out in ancap colours so we're definitely thinking along the same lines.
I think there may be an opportunity to expand the whole thread towards a discussion of how we define rights and what inalienable rights exist. Split it up into several videos on the whole topic of rights instead of just healthcare.
Oh man I love it. Some of the paragraph enders are some solid gut punches (in a good way). I did also struggle with the phrasing of this bit: "Any law beyond “don’t physically attack people” is essentially an addendum which says “except when they violate this rule”." But I think it could just be reworded to be a little clearer.
As a lawyer in the US, it feels like the clown is operating at a much higher lever of argument than the actual argument in the US politics. Now, everything you wrote is absolutely a fair response to that high level argument, so I don’t disagree with you at all. So, my principle concern is that the political objection here is that since healthcare is not among the “natural” rights that allow democracy to function, it is not a right on any basis. Once the question is then reduced to whether gov’t should provide healthcare (rather than a right), any number of objections are raised: costs, fear of gov’t monopoly (for universal healthcare), rationing, poverty rhetoric, ect. Another method of attack on healthcare rights has been contractual: what do you pay to society to deserve the right to healthcare? So, “labor of a human being” isn’t seriously on the list of objections anyway. That is, objections that doctors would “have to treat” is not the freedom we are concerned with. Doctors themselves say they are mostly happy to treat patients either as gov’t subsidized employees or work for directly for money. In some cases, its quite hard to keep doctors from treating patients. But, they need income to pay off their own ruinous debts and real estate overhead. They associate with companies because they can’t afford to work alone - they don’t have the capital to do it, and banks won’t loan it to them. So, it’s not the doctor’s objection. So, in US politics, it seems the rhetorical attack centers on the freedom of patients - yes they are free to die - but if they have enough money, they are free to receive whatever treatment they want. Or, in other words, there is a right to healthcare, just not a right to have gov’t provide it. So in this, maybe we all reach the same conclusion: Rights as rhetoric don’t really work well unless both sides agree what a “right” is. Another way to put it is that US politics can’t agree that there is a right to minimum *wages*, let alone a right to gov’t healthcare benefits. So, you’ve definitely pointed in the direction of the correct flaw: rights have to be negotiated in the social contract.
Yeah that last point about rights being whatever we collectively decide they are is really what I wanted to get to, via a few things I find interesting. I know I'm not covering every retort out there, but honestly, I think most of the more practical objections to some kind of universal healthcare are fairly easily addressed by looking at the countries that already have it, and manage to achieve better health outcomes while spending less money.
1) - Any law beyond “don’t physically attack people” is essentially an addendum which says “except when they violate this rule”. - I don't understand this line, so I don't know if it adds to the argument, but the argument flows well without it so it seems unnecessary. 2) I feel the characterization of the counterarguer as a clown detracts from the argument. It is vulnerable enough to being called a strawman*, without potentially being dismissed as ad hominem. * I'm likely underinformed, but the only argument I've heard against publicly funded healthcare is that a person's health is their own responsibility. Since this is accompanied by the mistaken belief that if a person makes good choices they are guaranteed to have wealth and good health, I believe it's a special case of the fundamental attribution error.
I'm going to change how I explain what I mean in 1 to hopefully make it clearer. On 2 I don't think it's a strawman (or an ad homien) because I'm not saying their argument is wrong because they're a clown, I'm explaining why I think their argument is wrong while separately also calling them a clown. It might not be the best approach but it helps me keep the video visually interesting and allows me to finish with the silly reference to the joker "we live in a society" meme.
Your way of writing and how you transfer it into your voice overs ususally works very well in you videos. With a longer format, there might however be a danger of adding and adding thoughs, until at some point the brain lets it all drop because the load is too heavy to carry. One suggestion might be trying to condense a bit more by reducing the count of long sentences by breaking them up into a shorter sentence strucutre. Another one might be adding some breathing time between thoughts where nothing is being said and we just see something visually beautiful or interesting. -> idea: since many of your thought pieces often have banger sentences that would call for a mic drop, maybe this could be a transition vehicle and a pace breaker at the same time. Like this: we see one character stating a banger tought, then s/he drops the mic. We see the microphone fall through space or other interersting backgrounds (this would be the visual breathing pause), and then the mic gets caught by another charcter (or even the same one) and the flow of information continues. For context: my perspecitve is the one of somebody who enjoys writing explainer videos and to compress information into super easily digestable bites. It doesn't necessarily mean it apllies to your work, as it breaks many rules in such an endearing way that we're all here :)
I'm definitely conscious that I sometimes move unnecessarily fast through the videos. I think when I started I wanted to do a lot of quick cuts and snappy stuff because I didn't have much confidence in the aret or my ability to hold people's attention, and I've kind of got stuck in that mode. I will try to slow down and add some breathing space in this one.
Hi! Really interesting and to the point. The only bit where I was slightly lost was when you said property law is like taxation. I do get the explanation of why the two are similar, I was just slightly lost by the additional layer of comparison. You use part three to lay out how property law and a right to healthcare are similar and in order to do that you go on a tangent explaining why property law and tax law are similar. That took me out of the argumentative flow a little bc I was wondering why we suddenly are discussing tax law. Especially as you wanted to hit home with the point about clowns never wanting to abandon property law while I‘m pretty sure clowns are anti-taxes. Other than that, I‘m excited to see it animated :)
The idea there was that a right to healthcare would be funded by taxes so if I can show that tax law and property law are similar in the relevant respects the clowns either have to accept that taxes don't violate their principles or accept that property does. I might add a line making that dilemma more explicit.
I don’t have anything to add except I’m excited to see it.
This is so good, I thought the line 'Focusing on what a right is rather than how healthcare should be funded is an attempt by opponents of public healthcare to hide their heartfelt belief that poor people should die behind an abstract philosophical discussion.' was such a banger. I didn't know this was part of the patreon, such a cool feature!