Given Texas's conscientious objector exemption, the vaccine seems not to be really mandatory. (I say "seems" because I'm not positive how the exemption, which is on its face very broad, is applied in practice.) But what if it were mandatory? Should we oppose that on broadly libertarian grounds? When I say "we," I'm referring not just to hard-line libertarians (of which I'm not one) but also to those who have general Millian "free to do what I please so long as I don't hurt others" sympathies, even if those sympathies can sometimes be trumped by other concerns.
My tentative sense is that immunizations against communicative diseases are often quite proper, even as a libertarian matter. I say "tentative" because I'm sure others have thought about the subject in much more depth than I have, and perhaps they can prove me mistaken. But let me quickly lay out my thinking.
It is a sad fact of biology that we can spread communicable diseases without any conscious decision on our parts, even without knowing that we are infected. Any time we do this, we are indirectly causing harm to someone else. Say Alan has sex with Betty, who then has sex with Carl, who then has sex with Denise; say Alan is infected with HPV, and each sexual act would (absent immunization) spread HPV; and say Betty isn't immunized against HPV. Betty's failure to get immunized would lead to her unwittingly spreading the virus, which ends up hurting Denise. She hasn't intentionally harmed Denise, but she has harmed her -- you might categorize the harm as negligent (in that it flows from negligent failure to get immunized) or not, but it is indeed the infliction of harm.
Now it's true that the harm also flowed from Denise's voluntary decision to have sex with Carl. But, as I noted in an earlier post, it's hard to see why this should excuse the harm caused by Betty, any more than Denise's voluntary decision to get on the road excuses the harm that someone imposes on Denise by crashing into her with a car (or, if you prefer, that Betty imposes on Denise by crashing into Carl's car, which then crashes into Denise's).
Even if you think that some people's having many sexual partners should affect the analysis, remember that HPV can be spread even among people who are about as sexually constrained as can be expected. The Alan-Betty-Carl-Denise connection can happen even if Betty was a virgin when she married Alan; if she then didn't have sex with Carl until she married him (assume Alan had died, or had left Betty); and if Denise was a virgin when she married Carl (again, assume Betty had died, or had left Carl). This very scenario might be rare -- but lots of other scenarios in which people had led fairly safe lives, but find themselves getting HPV, are also quite plausible. And more broadly, even if people are leading somewhat riskier lives than this, participating in spreading a disease to them may still be quite rightly seen as harming them, despite their own role in choosing risky behavior.
Of course, if HPV immunization were 100% reliable, and 100% available, then this analysis wouldn't apply with quite the same strength: Presumably any person who remains at risk of HPV infection would be at risk because of her own refusal to get the vaccine. Yet while the immunization is supposed to be extremely reliable for 9-to-26-year-olds, it hasn't been tested on over-26-year-olds, and thus isn't recommended for them. Moreover, some people won't get the vaccine, possibly because they can't afford it. ($360 isn't chopped liver for many, especially for people who aren't in America.) Even an "assumption of risk" presumptive libertarian may reasonably conclude, I think, that refusing to get immunized is wrongful behavior, because it may lead to one's becoming a vehicle for transmitting a dangerous and sometimes deadly disease to third parties, and thus harming those third parties (in a way that an "assumption of risk" argument would not excuse).
Finally, recall that the question here is whether to immunize girls who are under 18, girls who may well get infected before 18 if the immunization is delayed until then. Even if it was just their own health on the line, and not the health of others whom they might indirectly infect, we could rightly say that they don't have the maturity to refuse this protection, and that their parents shouldn't be entitled to refuse this protection on their behalf. But since the question of what kinds of modest physical risks parents should be free to have their children run is thorny, contested, and old hat enough that I'm not sure I can add much to the subject, I thought I'd focus primarily on how parents' refusal to immunize their daughters may hurt others, and not just the daughters themselves.
So a brief summary: There may well be practical problems with truly mandatory immunization, and it may well be that herd immunity would mean that 90% immunization is good enough to reduce the risk to a level that doesn't merit regulation. There may of course also be practical objections to immunization if the immunization seems unduly risky (a question I set aside in the first post in this chain). But as a moral matter of individual liberty, it seems to me that there's little support for a claimed freedom from getting immunized -- and especially a claimed freedom from getting your underage children immunized. A requirement that people not allow their bodies to be media for unwitting transmission of deadly diseases strikes me as quite compatible with a generally libertarian perspective on the world.
Related Posts (on one page):
Justify away, but the libertarian position would be ... choice.
Believe it or not, there are still plenty of celibate daughters under 18, and plenty of women who have only one life sex partner. And that one, is often well chosen. These parents should not have a mandatory (new=experimental, and you well know there are never 100% guarantees on vaccines) imposed on their daughters, and if it comes, it certainly won't come under any true "libertarian" guise.
I'll cancel out JNB above. Poor reasoning, easily rebutted in reality of respecting family decisions.
*Key fact distinguishing this particular vaccine: the "disease" is only spread through sexual contact. Not randomly through the air, like other contagious viruses. Thus, many parents have no reason to support the drug industry in supporting an early vaccine. And don't argue that all gals under 18 are susceptible to sex w/o their parents knowing, thus the mandatory necessity. It just doesn't hold here.
this is a nice example for how to show that.
I've always been puzzled though about what makes one a libertarian once one has abandoned the absolutist stance. I mean one can no longer take a rights based approach once you grant that these rights can be defesed by some number of possible deaths but not by others. So why then isn't libertarianism a fully pragmatic thing, i.e., in most cases you think the libertarian policy would lead to better results? And if it is then shouldn't you always be re-evaluating these beliefs as the circumstances change, e.g., even if libertarianism is pragmatically a good thing in America maybe it is ill-suited to other cultures or to other times (say the future).
Actually I think the daughter thing actually pulls the other way.
I mean children are not in fact property of their parents. Even a libertarian would properly outlaw a device that parents could put on their children that would kill them if they had sex as this would be a violation of the child's liberty. Thus we in effect have a liberty violation either way. If we don't mandate vaccination then we allow the parents to violate their children's liberty or we end up in the weird place of trying to give these vaccinations in secret from parents.
Ultimately I don't see much difference between this and forcing the Church of Christ Scientist people to give their kids medications when they are in life threatening conditions, or even just conditions that might permanently disable them.
Besides, once you grant that some vaccines should be forced on people despite their objections (say for an airborne plague) what makes this case different? The argument that sexual behavior is a choice that many people choose not to take is no longer relevant because we know that the children who take virginity pledges are just as likely to have sex as other kids so we know that the public health benefits would not accrue if we let them opt out.
Of course we are as always working on incomplete knowledge, and keeping a disease in the population might have indirect research or direct diversity (in terms of immunity from other disease) benefits later. And what if there were a hundred or more shots?
There’s another libertarian argument as well – namely that people should have to accept the consequences of their own choices and government should not be used to force the costs of those choices on others. If someone contracts this disease, it’s because they chose to engage in the behavior with transmits it. It would be immoral under a libertarian philosophy of non-initiation of force to force anyone else to accept any part of the risk through mandatory vaccination.
I don't understand. Your point is that because only "sexual" contact spreads the disease, as opposed to some other form of contact, there's a difference?
So a government cannot coerce immunization even though the vector does not internalize the costs of a failure to immunize, because transmission is sexual?
Is that right?
That takes vaccination out of the realm of a medically administered therapy. Providing medical care requires informed consent. In compulsary vaccination both elements, informed and consent, are irrelevant. No physician under the present ethics of any professional society would administer or order anyone to administer a compulsary vaccination to a person who did not freely provide their consent to the procedure. In the end this may be just as well to demedicalize vaccinations, relegating them to the basic infrastructures that have brought most of the health improvements of the 20th century, namely, sanitation, clean water, good sewers, and control of pest animals and insects.
So why then isn't libertarianism a fully pragmatic thing, i.e., in most cases you think the libertarian policy would lead to better results?
I think the difference is that, under libertarianism, you do not compute the "better result" by reference to the interest of the person whose decision is potentially coerced. But I think the spirit of your remark is right - once you get away from the impossibly absolutist maxims, you're stuck in the "anti-paternalism" ghetto.
Put another way, this viewpoint holds that the threat of an STD acts as a natural deterrent against premarital sex, and that society ought not act to defeat this deterrent. Setting aside the question of how strong a deterrent this really is among teens or anyone else, its upshot is that universal premarital virginity is, or at least ought to be, valued more highly than public health. Talk about misplaced priorities...
Um no actually the costs are internalized because the people suffering from the disease are the ones who engage in the behavior which acts as the vector.
All someone who wishes to avoid the disease which supposedly is prevented by the vaccine has to do is not engage in that behavior (if they chose to do otherwise, they accept the risks that come with it). This is quite a bit different from something like a disease that can be transmitted through the air as people can much more easily avoid having sexual intercourse with others than they can avoid breathing in germs that are exhaled by others.
For instance,
ReVonna LaSchatze pretty much hit the nail on the head. Even if one subscribes to the idea that government should have the power to forcibly vaccinate people that rationale does not apply in a disease that (AFAIK) isn’t airborne or spread through casual contact.
Say what? Am I not understanding, or is the point somehow that the government can coerce vaccines if the target pathogen spreads via "casual" contact, but not via "sexual" contact? I don't get the logical difference, other than that you have some punitive interest in penalizing the sexual contact.
And this one:
There’s another libertarian argument as well – namely that people should have to accept the consequences of their own choices and government should not be used to force the costs of those choices on others.
I think you mean to say that the libertarian argument is that people have to accept the consequences of their sexual choices, because you just said above that "casual contact" would be enough to justify coercive immunizations. Sharing a beer, walking into a locker, or engaging in a variety of other types of "casual contact," is no less a "choice" than is sexual contact.
I guess I'd appreciate it if someone could explain to me why sexual contact is a "choice" but choosing to use a public restroom is not.
A libertarian can argue that with an STD, someone who refuses to get vaccinated only commits a wrong if he also commits fraud. And then there could be an argument about what constitutes an implicit fraud in a society where 70%, 80%, 90% etc. of people ARE vaccinated.
With an airborne disease, and with the same caveat that some in the population CANNOT get vaccinated, a libertarian has a harder time.
Um no actually they don't. A person internalizes the costs them getting the disease, but not the costs visited upon every person they transmit it to. If I cheat on my wife and contract it then I haven't internalized the burden on her in any economically meaningful respect.
Moreover, some people won't get the vaccine, possibly because they can't afford it. ($360 isn't chopped liver for many, especially for people who aren't in America.) Even an "assumption of risk" presumptive libertarian may reasonably conclude, I think, that refusing to get immunized is wrongful behavior, because it may lead to one's becoming a vehicle for transmitting a dangerous and sometimes deadly disease to third parties, and thus harming those third parties (in a way that an "assumption of risk" argument would not excuse).
I see a small difficulty here in that Texas, at least, is (as I understand it) making vaccination quasi-mandatory without paying for it. If there are indeed people who could not afford a voluntary vaccination, making it mandatory obviously puts them in something of a pickle.
I wonder, incidentally, whether from a public-health standpoint it might not make more sense to make vaccination mandatory for boys, voluntary for girls, on the ground that the purpose of vaccinating a girl is to prevent her being infected, whereas the purpose of vaccinating a boy would be to prevent his infecting others. The latter looks more like a genuine public-health concern to me. (Obviously if either all girls or all boys are inoculated, transmission stops.) Of course, IIRC the vaccine isn't yet FDA-approved for boys, but if it were?
Stop. Right. There.
Once we go beyond the question of whether government ought to force someone to do something or forcibly prevent them from doing something we are no longer on “libertarian grounds.”
The actual “motivations” whether real or a product of your imagination about what a parent decides to teach their children about premarital sex are none of your goddamn business and certainly none of the State’s.
Actually yes since the people who contract it from you would have also engaged in the same behavior which acted as the vector.
My understanding is that the parents' main objection to this vaccine isn't on libertarian grounds - far from it. Rather, it's from the same cultural-conservative standpoint behind opposition to condoms and sex education in schools. Namely, that immunizing children against STDs amounts to a gesture of tacit approval of premarital sex.
My problem with a lot of the people on this thread is what appears to be an attempt to disguise this same impulse as a "libertarian" argument. The basis for that "disguise" is some distinction between "choice" in casual partners and "choice" in sexual partners. If you can't draw and economically meaningful distinction between the two types of choice, then this is just a puritannical objection in libertarian drag.
And that account doesn't even consider the considerable medical and economic externalities that would be associated with a disease epidemic.
No, I just recognize that people breathing air that has been exhaled by a sick person is such a widespread occurrence that people cannot protect themselves against in a reasonable manner. Diseases spread by sexual contact are less likely to occur and far easier to prevent.
As far as my purported “punitive interest in penalizing the sexual contact,” the difference between a “libertarian” and a “libertine” is that the former actually believes in personal responsibility whereas the later seeks to externalize the costs of their lifestyle choice on innocent people.
Simply put, I don’t give a damn who you screw – just don’t try to use to State to interfere in my life or my child’s to protect yourself from the consequences of your lifestyle choice.
Another potential can of worms that just occurred to me: Are children of illegal immigrants covered by the vaccination mandate?
Does someone need to explain to Kovarsky that there is nothing contrary to a libertarian position that is based on a “puritanical objection”?
Libertarianism is a philosophy that concerns itself with coercion by the State. Period.
If people want to live a life based on puritanical beliefs and raise their children that way, that’s their call. Heck we’d probably have a better society in general if instead of trying to protect people from the consequences of a “libertine” lifestyle with mandatory vaccinations or State indoctrination on birth control, more people raised their children in a traditional manner.
That doesn’t mean that such people have the right to use the State to force their beliefs on others and it certainly does not justify (or invalidate attempts to oppose) forcing the opposite on them.
Balance that against the risk of being harmed by the vaccine itself -- which at this point seems unknown, and is probably at least statistically appreciable. (So far I have seen little in these posts discussing the risk of vaccination. The vaccine does not seem to have a long track record yet like the classic childhood vaccinations -- polio, tetanus, etc.)
The libertarian argument is that a person should have the choice to avoid the risk of vaccination and take it upon herself to minimize the risk of infection through careful selection of sleeping partners.
Change the scenario to an airborne infection, and that argument is much harder to press.
Actually yes since the people who contract it from you would have also engaged in the same behavior which acted as the vector.
O I'm sorry, I thought we were talking about libertarianism. I thought we were talking about the principle that the autonomous legal and economic unit was the individual.
You must be talking about something else. Because you don't mean that the individual internalizes the cost of the behavior. You mean that the category of people that engage in the risk-causing behavior internalize it. You mean that "they" do.
I apologize. I was proceeding on the misunderstanding that we were talking about what we were talking about. I didn't realize that whether costs were internalized at the level of the "group" engaging in the risk-taking behavior really mattered to libertarians. I thought the issue was whether a person, not a category of persons, internalized the cost.
You must feel the same way about "everybody that chooses to eat meat," or "everybody that chooses to use a public bathroom," or "everybody that chooses to go to a community hospital." I'm sorry, I must be posting on the wrong thread.
Not every woman will marry a cheating husband though or be raped. In fact, for many the odds are against it, believe it or not.
Thorley has it right. Why should a segment of the population not at risk for contracting cervical cancer (and I believe studies would bear me out that not all women are at risk, particularly if they are celebate or in purposely and faithfully lifelong monogomous relationships) be forced to take this vaccine? An airborne virus is different -- you have much less control over the air you breathe than the people you let inside your body. I don't think the "rape" scare tactics, nor the "your husband might cheat" or "your daughter might be sexually active w/o your knowledge" should tip the balance here toward mandatory. At some point, if you decide not to immunize yourself or your daughter when under 18, and something like rape from an infected person should occur, which leads to the one-time transmission of cervical cancer, I think a libertarian philosophy would allow the individual or individual parent to assess the likelihood of such a risk and live with the consequences, if cervical cancer is the result.
Better the parent make the choice with the young woman who will be with that body for the rest of her life, than the state impose what is "correct" or most efficient in controlling this internally contracted disease. Look around -- would you put your faith and your daughter's body in the government's hand under under a truly mandatory decision -- with no opt out. Not me, thanks. As for me and mine...
*again, we are talking the particular facts in this particular case. It's not an airborne virus, and the rates of cervical cancer in women are not as alarming as say, the HIV infection rate in some African countries. Under different circumstances, a whole new analysis and perhaps different conclusion than the facts here.
I understand that it's "harder" to avoid casual contact that "sexual" contact. But is their any less "choice" involved in my "cheat on my wife" example. Has my wife implicitly assumed some risk by having sex with me whose magnitude exceeds that of someone at risk of contracting a disease by traveling to a third world country?
Are you quoting MeatLoaf in this particular thread??
If so, I love it. Theme music for the threads. Heh!
Does someone need to explain to Kovarsky that there is nothing contrary to a libertarian position that is based on a “puritanical objection”?
Libertarianism is a philosophy that concerns itself with coercion by the State. Period.
I'm asking what distinguishes the state coercing a vaccine for an airborne pathogen from the state coercine a vaccine for a sexual one. Of course "morality" can be a basis for distinguishing between the two, but don't pretend that the distinction has anything to do with libertarianism or an ontologically plausiable definition of "choice."
I don't get your point. Any time someone has sex, they are accepting SOME risk of contracting an STD. As I said, the choice reduces, but does not eliminate the risk. If one chooses a partner who is moral (or perceived as such) then the risk can be reduced further than if one chooses a partner who has "slept around." Again, not elimination of risk, but reduction.
No, I would think in most situations the risk is LESS, albeit not zero. That's the point.
I'm sorry if I seem impassioned about this, but I'm pretty familiar with the disease, if you catch my drift. Like, I know "facts" and "data" about how the disease is transmitted. This is particularly strange:
At some point, if you decide not to immunize yourself or your daughter when under 18, and something like rape from an infected person should occur, which leads to the one-time transmission of cervical cancer, I think a libertarian philosophy would allow the individual or individual parent to assess the likelihood of such a risk and live with the consequences, if cervical cancer is the result.
Actually, the scenario by which your daughter would most likely catch it is not "rape from an infected person [sic]," but by consensual sex with a man that never knew he had it. You see, men don't get cervical cancer[!] HPV is undetectable to men, unless it is tested for specifically. So your daughter would, in all likelihood, not get it because she is raped by a stranger, but because she had completely consensual sex with a boyfriend that didn't know he had it. Mothers are free to "internalize" that cost by "choosing" not to vaccinate their child (although of course, the mother does not internalize the costs of the child's partners, or the child's partners' partners, but that's just a little to "mathey" for this thread). I just wouldn't want that mother to be, you know, my daughter's mother.
Would you force birth control pills on underage women because they might be sexually active without their parents knowing? Because they might be raped, or their husband might use faulty birth control? Becuase it would bring about an overall social good like only "chosen" babies being conceived?
Most libertarians would not. You are gussying up your objections but going to the bathroom in a public restroom no more puts you at risk for HPV as it does for pregnancy.
I suspect your failure to grasp our arguments here is because you are so entrenched in the complexities of "most" relationships, or your own morals and values, that you cannot see they are not necessarily shared.
Airborne v. sexually transmitted greatly changes the risk calculation for many young women, but for some reason you cannot see that.
>unwittingly spreading the virus, which ends up hurting
>Denise. She hasn't intentionally harmed Denise, but she
>has harmed her -- you might categorize the harm as
>negligent (in that it flows from negligent failure to get
>immunized) or not, but it is indeed the infliction of harm.
If one knows one can minimize the risk of sexually transmitted diseases and chooses not to, wouldn't one have recklessly caused the transmission, not negligently caused it?
It's a significant distinction because criminal liability general doesn't attach to negligent acts, but it does generally apply to reckless acts.
INstead of grappling with substance, you choose to assume I am ignorant. I apologize if my miswording, and poor word choice throws you. I do suspect, however, you get my gist, which you didn't respond to.
Correction: If the rape of a 17-year-old virgin leads to her contracting HPV, which can cause elevated rates of cervical cancer, and her parents and her have made the decision not to vaccinate her earlier, then she would have to accept the consequence.
My point is the odds are miniscule that a young women who is unvaccinated are raped and contracts HPV, and perhaps then cervical cancer.... it should be the family's decision, not the government's, whether to assume this "risk". Ditto the "odds" of a cheating, virus-spreading husband. You choose for you and yours; leave the liberty to others to decide for themselves.
"A moral partner." Jesus, I didn't realize what I was dealing with. Anyways,
I don't get your point. Any time someone has sex, they are accepting SOME risk of contracting an STD. As I said, the choice reduces, but does not eliminate the risk.
The point is not whether a person knows that he or she is engaging in risky activity. The point is whether, in choosing to undertake that risk, that person's decision accurately reflects that decision's costs and benefits. If I screw someone out of wedlock, my decision probably doesn't incorporate or reflect the preferences of my wife, who is now at risk of contracting the disease. As long as the decision to screw my mistress doesn't FULLY reflect my wife's interests, it doesn't matter that my wife knows that she is running "some risk" of contracting an STD by sleeping with me.
Explain to me why celibate women should share your risk concerns?
All your example points out is that people take risks out of ignorance of all the relevant facts.
The husband's decision to cheat on his wife clearly does not take her interests into account. So what?
The wife chooses to have sex with her husband -- whom she does not know whether he is cheating. That's what statistical odds are about -- the risk of something unknown happening. In this case what are the risks that (a) the husband is cheating and (b) cheating with someone who has the STD at issue and (c) transmits the disease to the wife. That has to be balanced against (d) the risks of the vaccination itself -- which I have yet to be convinced are not appreciable.
The libertarian view is that one has the right, free of govt. coercion, to balance (a-c) as against (d).
You sound like a real dog "Kovarsky", if I do say so hypothetically.
Explain to me why celibate women should share your risk concerns?
I think you've said more than I ever could.
Are men being vaccinated now? I thought it was women and teenage girls who were the subject of the mandatory vaccination.
Or is this some feminist rhetoric disguising itself as an argument?
If you choose not to vaccinate your children on puritanical (or any other) grounds, you are, however unwittingly and however slightly, increasing the risk for everyone else <b><i>including those who ARE vaccinated</i></b>.* Multiply you by a few thousand in a city, or a few million nationwide, and the purpose of the immunization program becomes significantly compromised.
So, another thing to consider is whether this slight, but non-zero, difference in risk justifies universal mandatory vaccination. (Sound familiar? Like, say, the question of whether the slight, but non-zero, risk of a major terrorist attack justifies the intrusive surveillance and security methods favored by the Bush administration?)
*Of course, in the case of an STD there is another way to avoid being infected: abstinence from sex. That gets us back to the culture-war angle, and the aforementioned notion of the potential for STD infection as a sexual deterrent.
It's sixth grade girls. I was making a point about internalizing costs. Not about feminism, but also not about the proposal being considered in Houston.
It's sixth grade girls. I was making a point about internalizing costs. Not about feminism, but also not about the proposal being considered in Houston.
It's sixth grade girls. I was making a point about internalizing costs. Not about feminism, but also not about the proposal being considered in Houston.
Seems that there is an echo here.
Seems that there is an echo here.
Would this argument justify mandatory testing for HIV?
Basically, ReVonna is admitting to some line between airborne diseases (which is still a 'choice' to be exposed to, since a person could choose to live in the wilderness and shun all human contact) and sexually transmitted diseases. If the reason is a conservative sex-is-bad one, then it is 'dressed up in libertarian drag'. If the reason is a numerical one, then it seems (to repeat myself) reasonable. Specifically, even though it's not enumerated, there IS some sort of cost/benefit calculation that can outweigh the principled libertarian 'choice' argument.
I agree with Professor Cross, vaccinations are a great example of a market failure, and if one of the main ideas behind government isn't correcting market failures, then why have governments? There is an argument that some market failures can be so minimal as to be ignored (or that the cost of 'fixing' them exceeds the cost imposed by their existence). I'm not convinced that is the case with HPV vaccines.
I hope that, if nothing else, it's clear that I understand that there is what you are calling a numeric difference between airborne diseases and sexually transmitted ones.
I just don't see how that difference should make a difference to "real" libertarians that aren't using the philosophy as a means to disguise cultural conservatism and sexual denial.
Put another way, this viewpoint holds that the threat of an STD acts as a natural deterrent against premarital sex, and that society ought not act to defeat this deterrent.
I realize that Eugene devoted a whole other segment of this series of posts to this supposed objection, but I have difficulty believing that social conservatives who object to mandatory vaccination do so because they're fretting about the loss of a deterrent effect. Surely the objection is that if the state insists on all sixth-graders being inoculated against an STD, it is treating sexual activity among sixth-graders as normal/commonplace/only to be expected? I doubt that any parent in America really thinks that only the looming fear of cervical cancer prevents his/her pre-teen daughter from running out and getting laid. OTOH, an awful lot of parents might understandably resent the government's assuming that she's getting laid already.
To make an admittedly clumsy analogy: It is difficult to imagine Jewish parents who keep kosher objecting to measures to combat trichinosis contamination in pork on the ground that their children are more likely to adhere to the dietary laws if pork is unsafe to eat. But if there were some otherwise-unremovable risk to eating pork that could be counteracted simply by ingesting a safe drug, I think Jewish parents would be understandably upset if treatment with the drug were made mandatory, yes?
Why did you address that to Joshua et al.? In any event, I agree with you.
Yes, that's perfectly clear. To quote ReVonna:
This indicates to me that ReVonna is admitting a line somewhere, which indicates to me that the numbers can outweigh the principled libertarian argument. I think that this is a common viewpoint, and so the argument should really be refocused onto the question, "where is the line?"
The versions used in the U.S. were developed from aborted human fetuses. Some object to injecting themselves or their children with the product of immoral (in their view) lab work. Surely the violation of conscience involved here is stronger, no?
If you do not share their view on the particulars, ask yourself whether you'd treat your kid with medicine made from third-trimester elective abortion, or from whatever point (post-birth?) you'd find immoral (animal testing?. At some point we'd all have a problem. How much do we defer to others' individualized objections regarding the production of a vaccine (or other "good")?
>> Basically, ReVonna is admitting to some line between airborne diseases (which is still a 'choice' to be exposed to, since a person could choose to live in the wilderness and shun all human contact)
I’m not sure why there’s difficulty drawing a distinction between an airborne disease and a behaviorally transmitted disease. My admittedly imperfect libertarian belief is that the gov’t ought to protect me from negative externalities to the extent that I cannot reasonably mitigate them myself.
If individuals stipulate a right to spread a highly contagious, airborne, and ultimately terminal disease leaving me with only the option of shunning all human contact, it’s fair to say that my “choice” in the matter was effectively coerced by a negative consequence of their behavior. Thus, I argue they have no individual right to expose me to the risk of such a serious contagion when my only recourse is to leave society entirely when that right is broadly exercised. My neighbor also has no individual right to store large quantities of radioactive materials or high explosives. Their presumptively rational decision to do so is curtailed precisely because it carries such a high degree of involuntary risk assumption by innocent 3rd parties. My decision to participate in society does not equate to my assuming the risk that my neighbor might blow my house up or cause my dog to start glowing in the dark.
Kovarsky:
The same holds true of airborne contagions, imo. You deserve to be protected from me if, by merely walking by you and coughing, I can put your health in serious jeopardy. True, you can avoid the risk by only going outside in a bubble and installing an expensive ventilation system to clean the air in your house, but what is that if not a response to a negative externality caused by my behavior? The burden imposed remains unacceptable regardless of whether my decision to cough near you was maliciously indifferent, simply negligent, or founded on the belief that God only allows people to get sick according to His Will.
You do, however, have the option of having sex with me or not (this is not a solicitation). It’s your option to pro-actively protect yourself through vaccination, ask me to get tested and then trust my on-going faithfulness, or simply do nothing and hope for the best. The degree of risk you’re willing to take upon yourself in our relationship is entirely up to you and, with the vaccine available, you have more choices now than before. But given the range of choices at your disposal, it’s hard to conclude that this is a scenario in which the gov’t needs to compel vaccinations for everyone. Since I cannot cough and infect you with HPV, it’s acceptable to let each choose their risk according to their own values and preferences.
You mention that you have the option of cheating on your wife and carrying the infection to her, an innocent 3rd party. Her family (when she’s 9 to 17 yrs old) and she (18 to 26) are certainly welcome to factor that risk into their decision on whether to vaccinate or not.
In essence, to the extent that I can suffer serious harm from a disease by merely going near a public toilet, I’m willing to accept gov’t coercion. But if I have to actively and voluntarily lick that same toilet to get a particular disease, forced vaccinations are unnecessary. And to the extent that my wife is suddenly at risk because of my secret toilet licking proclivity, she is presumably capable of factoring that degree of risk into her decision on whether to voluntarily vaccinate or not.
If you think the question is a quintissentially utilitarian one about where draw the line (which I do), why are we talking about libertarianism? Why don't we just talk about it in those terms, instead of clumsily invoking a theory that doesn't fit here?
The libertarian narrative looses it's persuasdive force when you start to premise it on subjective assessments of what risks are "reasonable" and what risks aren't.
I can't ban your IP address, because your comments come from varying addresses. (I'd actually tried banning you after the penis size comments, but that stymied me at the time, so I decided to drop it for then; but the most recent comment reinforced my initial intentions.) But I will delete future comments from you if they keep coming.
The vaccine only works if its administered before someone is infected with the virus. So administering it to sixth graders is making the opposite assumption about their sexual activity. I think it is one of the stronger arguments for making it mandatory (with limited opt outs). A minor old enough to want/advocate for the vaccine is old enough to have engaged in activities that could have already exposed them to the HPV virus. So parental choice may not be proxy for the minors choice. That's a tough libertarian issue.
One side note, if they do make the vaccine mandatory, and the drug company makes a killing off of it, I could see this encouraging more R&D on vaccines, which I would see as a bonus.
It seems to me that there are objective differences between "casual" contact and "sexual" contact.
For one, casual contact (with clients, coworkers, etc.) can be a reasonable condition of employment. Sexual contact is not. I also believe that to "live in the wilderness and shun all human contact" is objectively different in that it precludes other activity (politics, education, sports) in which a person can expect to participate. Limiting one's sexual behavior shouldn't have an effect beyond one's sexual life.
Likewise, one generally does not have the option of urinating in public in other than a public restroom, at least in those places that have public restrooms.
For that matter, I suspect a similar dynamic is at work with respect to opposition to ending the War on Drugs.
perhaps i misunderstand her, but i take michelle only to be saying that you cannot count among "legitimate" rationales resisting the mandatory vaccine that which would say, "well, if you give them the vaccine, you diminish the chance that they'll develop cervical cancer, which in turn diminishes the penalty for sex, which in turn increases sexual activity amongst sixth graders."
i tend to agree with her in the sense that i find the "cancer keeps 'em straight" argument morally repugnant, although i don't see anybody making that here.
>> The libertarian narrative looses it's persuasdive force when you start to premise it on subjective assessments of what risks are "reasonable" and what risks aren't.
I disagree. In most common situations, my assessment of costs vs. benefits is likely to differ from yours based on subjective assessments. I may prioritize current consumption over future consumption, and you the oppose. And it may in fact turn out that my risk settings are unreasonable - it hardly holds from a Libertarian view that you are obligated to pass a law compelling me to invest in my 401(k) against my wishes.
In fact most assessments of what risks are "reasonable" and what risks aren't are necessarily subjective. You and I can agree rising infection rates are causally related to reported increases in risky behaviors. We can assign a cost to that based on treatment expenses, shortened life spans, etc. We can also put a price on the vaccine. But we cannot put a price on a good faith, conscientious religious objection. And we shouldn't even put a price on an irrational fear of chemicals. If someone is happier living with the risk of HPV than injection, why shouldn't they be allowed to choose that based on their own subjective idiocy? If you disagree with their decision, you need only get yourself injected - which leaves you no better nor worse off than under the proposed mandatory regime, but allows them to live according to their own definition of happiness.
If sexual behavior was as involuntary and necessary as breathing, I'd be all for mandatory innoculations. Instead, this strikes me as one of those value-propositions - does your concern for Mr. Smith's 6th grade daughter's future well-being outweight their devout and truly held religious objection to decreasing the risk of promiscuity at such an early age? If they prefer to keep the random sex partner business risky but support their daughter's decision to take the vaccine immediately prior to marriage, is that something we ought to trump?
Perhaps you could clarify what precisely is so unpersuasive about that in your eyes?
Also, we know that healthy people with strong immune systems catch fewer illnesses, and therefore spread fewer illnesses. I therefore prose that we make mandatory a minimum of 7.5 hours of sleep per night, a minimum of 35 minutes of exercise / 5x week, and a minimum of 5 fruits and vegetables per day. Eating of sugary and junk food will be strictly prohibited.
If sexual behavior was as involuntary and necessary as breathing, I'd be all for mandatory innoculations.
You do see the humor in this statement, right? I mean, P-R-O-C-R-E-A-T-I-O-N.
You must distinguish a paternalism from a market-corrective rule. The vaccine is not imposed "because its a good idea" for the person being vaccinated (this is the version that fits all your analogies), but because person A's failure to get vaccinated puts persons B, C, and D at risk without person A having factored person B, C, and D into her decision to get the vaccination.
I don't feel like going back into everything traversed above, but suffice it to say that this situation is to be distinguished from those, such as those you invoke, where the only interest being asserted is the person being regulated.
1) Somewhat incapable of making rational choices for themselves; thus cannot be afforded the same liberties or held to the same responsibilities of adults, in a libertarian world.
2) Somewhat incapable of making decisions of any sort that their parents disapprove of.
For these reasons, libertarian arguments about children are always dicey.
In this case, I agree with the whole internalized risks thing, in this situation, rather the public health thing.
The presence of sexual behavior by people who cannot know the risks makes this tricky. I'd prefer some way to make this available to teens who want to have it but whose parents don't.
Final thought: for any measure on mandatory HPV vaccine use to be justified on public health grounds, cannot apply only women, but to both genders equally, or possibly only to men. The population immunity benefits are actually less for each vaccinated woman than each vaccinated man, using the simplify assumption that woman rarely catch the disease from other women. (Not on homophobic grounds, but most people are primarily heterosexual).
Excuse me, Kovarsky, but if you re-read my post, you can see that my point was that your failure to take care of your own heath compromises my health. Poor health = poor immune system = increased susceptibility to illness = spread of illness in the greater community.
Of course, I don't really advocate these kinds of laws. My real point is : Where does all this end? As long as our goal is to ensure the health of the general population, the state has a right to impose all sorts of restrictions and laws.
I will most likely immunize my daughter (after a discussion with her doctor). And I am glad this option is available to us. But I strenuously object to Governmental Force in this matter.
I agree I misread your post. I don't agree with your "where does it end reasoning," but I do agree that you appreciate the paternalist versus market corrective distinction. My apologies.
>> >> If sexual behavior was as involuntary and necessary as breathing, I'd be all for mandatory innoculations.
>> You do see the humor in this statement, right? I mean, P-R-O-C-R-E-A-T-I-O-N.
Who's forcing you to procreate with HPV-infected individuals? If a potential mate behaved in risky ways in the past and is suffering the consequences of that, you may choose to accept that or walk away.
I put HPV on par with cirrhosis caused by chronic alcoholism. It's a tragedy. I hate what it does to people's lives and I'm genuinely sorry for them. But I'm unwilling to have the government take over their behavior for them (as long as they're not driving a vehicle, for ex). If your at home, your drinking limit is determined by your body and your finances. Your potential mates are no more obligated to marry an alcoholic than you are to procreate with an HPV infected individual.
As a result, you've no right to insist my daughter get shot up with chemicals simply because it will eliminate one of the ways in which your son could perceive her to be an undesirable mate in a decade or two.
I'm losing interest in these one-line responses lacking in substantive details, so please don't be offended if I stop responding to them.
Although I admit I find talk of a parent's "right" to choose sub-optimal health care for their child, as an incedent to rearing it, to be a little disconcerting. You, of course, do not suggest this - but others do.
I'm losing interest in these one-line responses lacking in substantive details, so please don't be offended if I stop responding to them.
I've lost interest in your long-winded resopnses that overlook very simple concepts that can easily be expressed in a single sentence, so please don't be offended if I stop responding to them.
>> A requirement that people not allow their bodies to be media for unwitting transmission of deadly diseases strikes me as quite compatible with a generally libertarian perspective on the world.
Mon capitaine, I respectfully believe this is a case of improper framing creating a straw man. I haven’t heard any of the mandatory vaccination challengers claim a right to unwittingly broker disease. Please allow me to reframe it:
A requirement that people be injected with a helpful chemical cocktail to protect themselves from their future behaviors without regard for their own personal moral, ethical, familial, or cultural (or even patently irrational) beliefs is incompatible with a generally libertarian perspective on the world.
A socially beneficial “mandatory” law with an easy opt-out is clearly an area where a libertarian paternalist and a core libertarian can find disagreement. But if the law was truly mandatory and the dog had bite, I suspect even the libertarian paternalist crew might split in disagreement given the way such a law would trample over individual rights and particularly religious and cultural beliefs.
>> and especially a claimed freedom from getting your underage children immunized
When a matter involves children, libertarians generally believe the right of decision defaults to the parents or guardians, and not automatically to the gov’t without clear cause. If we agree on this, then the fact that this involves children on its own says nothing about a need for gov’t coercion, and yet in context the emphasis on “underage children” seems to imply the gov't ought to act in loco parentis without establishing the grounds for it. Perhaps I'm just reading too much into this part of the paragraph, though I'm at a loss for a better interpretation.
>> bodies to be media for unwitting transmission of deadly diseases
Complicating the issue, how a disease is transmitted can potentially matter more than its effects. If we generally accept that the harmful condition cased by a disease outweighs an individual’s right to choose and assume risks, regardless of the mode of transmission, would exercise this general principle when the mode of transmission is hereditary? Why not? For example, atypical mole syndrome (dysplastic nevi) is somewhat similar to HPV: the primary symptom is “bumps” (moles in this case), it increases the risk of deadly cancer (melanoma), and it is communicable.
The primary distinguishing factor for our purposes is the mode of transmission – it’s genetic vs. sexually transmitted (yes, there’s an easy punch line there). Should we mandate DNA screening and therapy to protect children from being the unwitting recipients? That would be consistent with “not allow their bodies to be media for unwitting transmission of deadly diseases”. Is DNA sacrosanct but the resultant bloodstream and immune system are not? I don’t mean that as a snark – you’re a widely respected and frequently referenced scholar and I am genuinely interested in knowing where your proposal would draw the line on government coercion and interference with my and my children’s bodies.
"remember that HPV can be spread even among people who are about as sexually constrained as can be expected."
Wow, I disagree. There are many who live much more sexually constrained lives than Volokh expects. Volokh's argument seems to hinge on this. The number of individuals who are more sexually restrained than expected can be ignored; that is, those who married as virgins and only have sex with each other, or never have sex, don't matter. The state can force them to go through the trouble and expense of vaccination even though their behavior will not expose them to any risk. These individuals are like those who live in caves or hermetically sealed bubbles when considering the merits of vaccination against airborne disease.
Here's a different scenario that illustrates why conservatives find this reasoning offensive. Suppose there were a virus that was easily passed through sharing wine glasses, and in no other way, so that it frequently was spread by those taking communion at a church. A vaccine was created to stop the spread of the virus, and made mandatory.
Those who don't commune are upset that they have to bear the cost and trouble of being vaccinated against a virus they are very unlikely to get, though it is not inconceivable that they might share a wine glass with a person at some point in their life who has also shared a wine glass with some other person who might be infected.
It seems to be very unlibertarian to say that all should be required to be vaccinated against the virus, because careful behavior can prevent obtaining it. I think the same is true in the case with HPV. There are a lot of us out here who have only one partner, and do not wish to go through the cost and trouble to prevent something that we are very unlikely to get.
But because those who are sexually restrained are insignificant, their liberty interests can be ignored for the benefit of all those more normal, less sexually restrained individuals.
This isn't libertarian.
So, three questions for musing only.
1) What percentage of parents would say their 10-year-old daughter will be a virgin at 18?
2) What percentage of group #1 wll be right?
3) What percentage of 18-year-old girls will tell the truth?
Nobody seems to want to assert that forced vaccination for airborn pathogens would violate an individuals rights (whatever that means), so Erisian23 and the like have taken refuge in a terrifically crabbed distinction between "reasonable" and "unreasonable" risk-taking behavior. Libertarianism, as I've studied the concept for the last 14 or so years, admits to no such distinction.
The issue, as Eugene framed it on the post, seems to be whether libertarianism housed some meaningful objection to the policy. The answer is, of course, no. Libertarianism allows for government intervention where there is severe market failure - of precisely the sort present here. Libertarianism does not allow for government intervention where there is a market failure "facilitated only by reasonable risk-taking behavior." Libertarianism is, by its nature, and absolutist impulse - it admits to no subjective evaluation of what "reasonable" justifications would look like.
None of this is to say that a government "should" mandate vaccinations. There are perfectly good consequentialist arguments against it. How much does it cost? How intrusive is it (the genetic versus sexual transmission question)? Or, my personal favorite, how reasonably can should we expect non-market forces to correct for it? All of these are valid questions, but they are NOT valid libertarian ones. If that's what libertarianism "means to you," that is swell. But those tend to be distinctions that libertarianism, as taught in most of educational institutions, eschews. To make such arguments under the guise of libertarianism is to gore that term beyond all academic recognition.
I imagine a graph of actual chastity versus parentally estimated chastity looks somewhat like a target recently riddled with buckshot.
(1) HPV causes 70% of cervical cancer
(2) 11-12 year old girls is where scientists have determined the vaccine will be most effective
(3) The Texas health care system is affected disproportionately (in relationship to other states) by the incidence of cervical cancer
(4) The vaccine has been 100% effective in clinical trials
(5) parents can opt out for religious reasons
You don't believe me, here.
So basically, you're free to get a cheap, mandatory vaccine, protect your daughter in the process, or you can invoke some mortally disfigured strain of libertarianism so that you can instead pay thousands of dollars in insurance premiums to subsidize treatment of cervical cancer victims whose afflication was enabled by precisely the wilfull blindness you defend here.
Sometimes political rhetoric really can cause people to lose all touch with reality.
>> I'm also afraid that some of what I'm saying is getting lost in translation.
>> I've lost interest in your long-winded resopnses that overlook very simple concepts that can easily be expressed in a single sentence, so please don't be offended if I stop responding to them.
Please accept my apologies for wording my closing line so *****ishly. I was frustrated because I suspected I wasn’t getting your point and you weren’t replying to what I’d said with appropriate corrections to right my understanding. This response is spot on and I think I "get" it.
>> I'm just saying that "libertarianism" doesn't furnish a particularly compelling objection, because vaccination is a quintissential market failure. The government may be in a sub-optimal position to correct that failure, but that's a utilitarian question.
Please allow me to furnish a particularly compelling objection: Mr. Smith is a devout Christian and sincerely believes STDs are part of God’s plan and are His way of encouraging people to behave a certain way. He further believes that mankind’s attempt to reduce the penalty is sinful and he opts not to vaccinate his daughter as a result.
You and I personally believe Mr. Smith has come to a poor conclusion. But he’s living his life according to his religious beliefs, a Constitutionally protected behavior (with exceptions; no right is inviolate). And the default libertarian position is to “preserve choice”.
I agree that vaccinations generally represent a “quintessential market failure.” Just the same, the CDC can recommend vaccination against hepatitis A, hepatitis B, polio, mumps, measles, rubella, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, HiB, chicken pox, rotavirus, influenza, meningococcal disease, and pneumonia; this does not lead us to immediately conclude that all of these vaccinations ought to be mandatory.
>> Questions about "where does it end," "how do we draw the line," etc. are all perfectly reasonable questions, and also ones that libertariansim is profoundly ill-equipped to address. That's my only point.
Libertarianism does address the point: if the negative externalities of Choice X outweigh the benefits of preserving choice in general (freedom from coercion, freedom of religion, etc.) and Choice X in particular, it can be outlawed (or conversely, made mandatory). Fraud and polio come to mind. If however the negative externalities (chicken pox, the common cold) do not outweigh the benefits, the vaccine should be optional.
The core libertarian position that my textbook gives is not that "the gov’t should address any and all market failures"; rather "market failures that result in serious negative externalities should be addressed." This is a relatively small subset of market failures.
Consider, the BLS’s “EMPLOYEE BENEFITS IN PRIVATE INDUSTRY, 2006” states that “Sixty percent of workers had access to retirement benefits, with 51 percent participating in at least one type of retirement plan.” The lack of participation in a retirement plan is a serious market failure, however I'm unaware of any core libertarian ethic that allow for compelling participation for all workers. The typical libertarian stance is to allow any individual to prioritize current consumption over future consumption and then reap what they have sown 35 years down the road.
>> Although I admit I find talk of a parent's "right" to choose sub-optimal health care for their child, as an incedent to rearing it, to be a little disconcerting. You, of course, do not suggest this - but others do.
Though I personally agree with you, I object to “health care” the way you’ve used it. Your reference is only to physical health – the mental and spiritual well-being of the child is also for the parent to factor in and decide on. I may not agree with Mr. Smith’s conclusion, but it’s well founded on his sincere religious beliefs and absent a showing of strong negative externalities (remember, our daughters were voluntarily vaccinated so their risk of cervical cancer has been eliminated), I’m inclined to support his right to make this (poor, imo) decision for his family. If his daughter disagrees, she has from age 18 to 26 to make her own choice.
Before I respond in kind to your thoughtful post, I want to also apologize. When I feel unjustifiably attacked, I tend to unjustifiably escalate in return. I'm not always right in my assessment of what is "unjustifiable," but I'm more levelheaded given a little time. I certainly don't want to piss someone off or give a thoughtful person the impression I'm not thinking about what they're saying.
Please allow me to furnish a particularly compelling objection: Mr. Smith is a devout Christian and sincerely believes STDs are part of God’s plan and are His way of encouraging people to behave a certain way. He further believes that mankind’s attempt to reduce the penalty is sinful and he opts not to vaccinate his daughter as a result.
You and I personally believe Mr. Smith has come to a poor conclusion. But he’s living his life according to his religious beliefs, a Constitutionally protected behavior (with exceptions; no right is inviolate). And the default libertarian position is to “preserve choice”.
First off, I would concede the likely unconstitutionality of any law that imposed the vaccine over a religious objection. But that's a constitutional concession, not a libertarian one. Beyond that:
(1) I don't think libertarian rules applicable to adults translate frictionlessly into rules for those adults' decisions over their children. Parents acquire decision-making authority over their children by force of the constitution, not by force of any libertarian thought with which I am familiar. I think all the practical concessions that libertarianism has to make to resemble a workable political theory (increased state authority over the mentally incapacitated or retarded) apply with equal force to children. I can see the argument that if children have diminished capacity, that it should be parents, not the state, making choices for them. I just think that's a significantly weakened argument, when compared to the traditional justification for government abstention.
(2) To be honest, I'm not sure we can get past our priors here, because this hypothetical illustrates why I think libertarianism problematic. I'm not sure why it should ever be read so aggressively as to authorize a parent to gratuitously subject a child to illness. But if the question is just what a pure libertarian could say, I agree that if the child's autonomy is subsumed by the parent's then there's not a whole lot of justification there other than the more traditional externality-based arguments applicable to adults. The one place where I think I have wiggle room here is that I do think that to the extent that the autonomy of a child's choice is premised on some ability to abide by an implicit agreement to behave responsibly, that implicit agreement is less reliable for the child than it is for the safe-sex practicing adult.
I agree that vaccinations generally represent a “quintessential market failure.” Just the same, the CDC can recommend vaccination against hepatitis A, hepatitis B, polio, mumps, measles, rubella, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, HiB, chicken pox, rotavirus, influenza, meningococcal disease, and pneumonia; this does not lead us to immediately conclude that all of these vaccinations ought to be mandatory.
I agree with this. What I guess I said somewhat inartfully was that a libertarian's objection to this has to be all or nothing. I don't see much room for him to parse the different illnesses (although the "extreme market failure" definition below might allow you to). It is in fact my belief that we should distinguish between the candidates for mandatory vaccination that leads me to reject the more categorical method of libertarian thinking here. (You might have a hard time believing this, but I self-identify as a libertarian).
Libertarianism does address the point: if the negative externalities of Choice X outweigh the benefits of preserving choice in general (freedom from coercion, freedom of religion, etc.) and Choice X in particular, it can be outlawed (or conversely, made mandatory). Fraud and polio come to mind. If however the negative externalities (chicken pox, the common cold) do not outweigh the benefits, the vaccine should be optional.
Again, I agree. Suffice it to say I think we disagree about how this math plays out in the mandatory HPV vaccine context.
The core libertarian position that my textbook gives is not that "the gov’t should address any and all market failures"; rather "market failures that result in serious negative externalities should be addressed." This is a relatively small subset of market failures.
I'm not sure I agree with your definition. Obviously any theory with a de minimus exception is dicey, but I would admit to the fact that we can't justify government coercion where the market failure is de minimus (but don't ask me to define de minimus!). I don't quite understand why the state - especially if the state is just an organ of the people - cannot assert interests of those meaningfully and negatively affected by a regime that respects autonomous decisionmaking. In order to buy into that, you seem to have to agree that state coercion is somehow worse than private coercion (by my definition, the involuntary assumption of marginal risk by those burdened by the externality). I don't really buy that argument, but again, that's a prior and I'm not sure either of us wants to hammer that out here.
Consider, the BLS’s “EMPLOYEE BENEFITS IN PRIVATE INDUSTRY, 2006” states that “Sixty percent of workers had access to retirement benefits, with 51 percent participating in at least one type of retirement plan.” The lack of participation in a retirement plan is a serious market failure, however I'm unaware of any core libertarian ethic that allow for compelling participation for all workers. The typical libertarian stance is to allow any individual to prioritize current consumption over future consumption and then reap what they have sown 35 years down the road.
I think we can find some common ground here. I don't think the state should be in the business of discounting future consumption. These types of cognitive failures are distinct from "externalities," and I don't think the state has any right to force people to conform to what it considers to be a rational mix of current and future consumption.
Though I personally agree with you, I object to “health care” the way you’ve used it. Your reference is only to physical health – the mental and spiritual well-being of the child is also for the parent to factor in and decide on. I may not agree with Mr. Smith’s conclusion, but it’s well founded on his sincere religious beliefs and absent a showing of strong negative externalities (remember, our daughters were voluntarily vaccinated so their risk of cervical cancer has been eliminated), I’m inclined to support his right to make this (poor, imo) decision for his family. If his daughter disagrees, she has from age 18 to 26 to make her own choice.
There are a lot of things I disagree with here, but I'll limit myself to the the idea that any disagreement may be corrected by the daughter between 18 and 26. Unfortunately, the daughter may already have been exposed before she's reached the age of 18. I agree that, in a world were everyone were instantaneously offered the chance to "opt in" to vaccination, it shouldn't be mandatory. In those situations, I agree that the risk is more sensibly allocated to the irresponsible person who fails to get the vaccination. But because that's just not a plausible background assumption, you run into problems involving an assumption that others can plausibly defend against HPV risks.
>> So basically, you're free to get a cheap, mandatory vaccine, protect your daughter in the process, or you can invoke some mortally disfigured strain of libertarianism so that you can instead pay thousands of dollars in insurance premiums to subsidize treatment of cervical cancer victims whose afflication was enabled by precisely the wilfull blindness you defend here.
This mingles two issues: First, should the vaccine be mandatory and second, should the vaccine be subsidized, whether it’s mandatory or not.
Should the vaccine be mandatory?
Should the gov’t tell Mr. Smith his daughter will be vaccinated regardless of his (rational or irrational) objections? Well, our daughters will be inoculated and so the negative externalities are not serious enough to merit a truly mandatory law. Texas seems to agree:
Parents' Rights. The Department of State Health Services will, in order to protect the right of parents to be the final authority on their children's health care, modify the current process in order to allow parents to submit a request for a conscientious objection affidavit form via the Internet while maintaining privacy safeguards under current law. from Gov. Rick Perry’s Executive Order RP65 - February 2, 2007
In essence, society decides that because parents are too irrational to care for their daughters’ well-beings, the gov’t should push them down that path. We assume (probably correctly) that a large number of parents would not voluntarily go to their doctor for this vaccine for their kiddos absent a gov’t prodding. But rather than a blanket paternalist mandate, Gov. Perry kindly goes the libertarian paternalist way, aka the “opt-out” route.
Taxing my wealth to fund gov’t paternalist proddings is not, afaik, particularly libertarian. If you disagree, I would genuinely appreciate if you would site an authoritative libertarian source that supports mandatory HPV vaccinations. Alternatively, if I’ve argued on non-libertarian principles, please correct me. If “the gov’t should fix market failures without regard for liberty” is the correction, again I’d like an authoritative libertarian sourcing on that statement.
Should the vaccine be subsidized?
Should the gov’t take a portion of your wealth to pay for my daughter’s protection from cervical cancer by subsidizing her HPV vaccine? I think I know the libertarian response to this, but now I’m guessing you won’t agree with me.
>> you can invoke some mortally disfigured strain of libertarianism so that you can instead pay thousands of dollars in insurance premiums to subsidize treatment of [...] can