Currents in Contemporary Ethics

Emmanuel E. Fuch V. R. “Vouchsafe,” The New Republic 236, no. 4, 805 (February 19 and 26, 2007): 14–15.

See, for example, Tanner M. , “Schwarzenegger Gets It Wrong on Universal Coverage,” Open Forum on the Governor's Health-Care Plan, San Francisco Chronicle, January 11, 2007: 8–7.

See, e.g., Tristram Engelhardt H. Jr. , The Foundations of Bioethics , 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996): At 161. “In the world as we see it, we find both robbers and taxmen taking resources through force, with the latter often having as little secular moral authority as the former.”4. Boaz D. Kirby D. , Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 580, October 18, 2006.

Cf. “The Non-Taxpaying Class,” Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2002, at A20.

As noted by Samuelson R. J. , “Hiding Health Care's Costs,” The Washington Post, Wednesday, January 31, 2007, at A15. According to the (Massachusetts) Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector, the final proposal authorized in March of 2007 has significantly smaller premiums (as a percentage of income) for persons with low- to mid-range incomes.

See Tanner , supra note 2.

See Engelhardt , supra note 3.

Engelhardt states as a “maxim” that one should, “Give to those who need or desire health care that which they, you, or others are willing to pay for or provide gratis.” Id., at 403.

Id., at 165.

Nelson J. L. , “Everything Includes Itself in Power,” in Minogue B. P. Palmer-Fernandez G. Reagan J. E. , eds., Reading Engelhardt: Essays on the Thought of H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997): 15–30, at 17.

See Engelhardt , supra note 3, at 157.

Locke J. , Two Treatises of Government, book 2, chapter 5, numbers 27–30, in Locke J. , The Selected Political Writings of John Locke (New York: Norton, 2005). See also Engelhardt, supra note 3, at 155–157. There are critiques of this theory of ownership – see Wolf C. , “Contemporary Property Rights, Lockean Provisos, and the Interests of Future Generations,” Ethics 105 (1995): 791–818, at 794–97 – but libertarian theories of ownership relevantly resemble Locke's view.

Public Acts of the 37th Congress, Session II, Chapter 75, 1862, at 392–393, available at <http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=012/llsl012.db&recNum=423> (last visited June 18, 2007).

This is actually a very interesting problem for libertarian accounts of the colonization of the Americas, which is not pursued here. True, by 1862, many Native American tribes had been forcibly cleared from the land being settled, and so were not using it; but that was due to morally unjustifiable coercion. From here on, in discussing land in North America I will simply write “unowned” rather than the more accurate but more awkward, “unowned by settlers of European origin, though there were non-Europeans already residing there and/or nomadic tribes regularly passing through, or there recently had been before they were forcibly removed.”16. See Locke , supra note 13, at book 2, chapter 5, numbers 27, 33–36.

See Engelhardt , supra note 3, at 158–160. Engelhardt does not develop the idea as it is developed herein.

Id., at 158.

Engelhardt does not conclude this. He argues for a “negative income tax” which is basically a payment to each person on the planet. Note, however, that this approach leads to remarkable (and wildly impractical) results, including tax collection being an international function and requiring that persons pay a “reproduction tax” before procreating, in order to recompense the additional burden on the “negative income tax” that each person is owed. One wonders whether his intention was to make the redistribution so complicated and impossible to perform – he speaks at one point about the possible need to collect and redistribute funds intergalactically – that no one would be able to do it, so that even this justified taxation could never be performed. Id., at 157–158.

Id., at 394.

Engelhardt does acknowledge a conclusion that is prima facie similar to this position when he acknowledges the “inevitability” of a multitiered health care system, though in fact the only part of it that is inevitable is the private tier. Public provision of basic health care out of communal funds is permissible, but not required; indeed, it seems to rest largely on contingent altruism. See id., at 398–403. Also, he does not justify this system in terms of the Lockean Proviso and the libertarian concept of ownership, perhaps in part because that taxation does not provide “communal goods.” See id., at 158–159.