>"The only way people in the US get jailed for taxes is by committing fraud; we correctly left debtor's prison in the past" and be done with that, yes?
False. You can be jailed for "tax evasion" which could be as simple as simply saying "yes I owe taxes, no I won't bother calculating and I have put all my money in bitcoins and I'll never give them to you." That needn't be fraud -- everything about that could be 100% accurate and true with no intend to defraud yet still criminal. (btw we still have debtor's prison -- you can be jailed for not paying child support debts and the absurd argument often used you're jailed for violating the court order to pay the debt rather than owing the debt is little more than a legal parlor trick).
>Taxes aren't slavery
They are by your definition, where I need to trade work to pay for them to improve my health (get thrown into a prison, a den of disease and mental health problems). Of course, we could get into a semantic debate about slavery, but it's clear you've already defined slavery not to be literal chattel slavery, i.e. as black people in chains working the cotton fields, rather you appear to be referring to being forced to work under threat of violence which in this case you take the violence to be a threat to your health.
>You do raise the interesting question of funding it by buying bonds though. I don't see an issue with that; the argument against loans is a practical one, not a theoretical one ("the private debt incurred upon patients is, in essence, an involuntary one-sided loan granted to them, and we've seen that lead to massively unfair outcomes"). Voluntarily loaning the government money seems to work great and is miles distant from involuntarily-accrued (or accrued under duress; "sure, that procedure is optional because you always have the option to die") medical debt.
I also find this to be one of the most interesting solutions. Hypothetically if a 22 year old were to have some illness, it's totally conceivable that a bunch of lenders could bid for a race to the bottom so the 22 year old could get a loan low enough that it would easily be both a net positive for him and for the people who helped loan the money that saves him. Of course, if charity or some other option is available instead, all the better.
In any case, the biggest enemy for both of us is overregulation of the health system. Once medical licensing is eliminating and medical regulations eliminated, fights over how to pay become much lower stakes.
Not even remotely related. Yes, if you fail to bother to calculate your taxes you can be liable. If you do calculate them and you can't pay them, the government works out a payment plan. These trains of thought more or less died with Thoreau arguing why he shouldn't pay taxes (while living on borrowed property owned by his rich neighbor).
> Once medical licensing is eliminating and medical regulations eliminated
Independent issue to paying for medicine. If I understand correctly, your thought is that we have artificial scarcity on medical care because we don't license doctors we could. Those regulations are paid for in blood (or in this case, snake-oil); agree to disagree that lowering the constraints wouldn't just return us to the bad practices that required the constraints in the first place.
> If I understand correctly, your thought is that we have artificial scarcity on medical care because we don't license doctors we could. Those regulations are paid for in blood (or in this case, snake-oil); agree to disagree that lowering the constraints wouldn't just return us to the bad practices that required the constraints in the first place.
The "agree to disagree" isn't necessary because it isn't relevant.
People can argue that quacks used to show up to rip people off and then skip town before people caught on that snake oil is snake oil, but they couldn't really do that anymore because now we have the internet which allows your past victims to notify your future victims even if they live in a different city.
But that argument is boring. It doesn't matter if it's true or not, because the laws that really make medicine expensive aren't the ones that require you to register as a doctor so they can more easily investigate quacks. They're the ones that e.g. the AMA has lobbied for to limit the supply of doctors. And we could get rid of those regardless of whether we also get rid of the other ones.
The train of thought didn't die with Thoreau. It lived on in the minds of those such as Murray Rothbard, and to the extent as it applies to universal healthcare, also known fringe character (and nobel economist) Milton Friedman. Of course Locke himself (a major inspiration for the US constitution, which very narrowly constrains what the federal government can spend money on), I suppose too old as he's the oldest of all of them, only justified taxes so far as they allowed the government to enforce negative rights, that is rights for one person not to molest another rather than positive rights like an entitlement to get something from another such as care.
>your thought is that we have artificial scarcity on medical care because we don't license doctors we could
Really all the above. Probably even more so due to stuff like the intertwining of the insurance and pharmaceutical and medical industries with regulatory apparatus creating all the worst regulatory capture incentives to rent-seek patients with the free market destroyed.
False. You can be jailed for "tax evasion" which could be as simple as simply saying "yes I owe taxes, no I won't bother calculating and I have put all my money in bitcoins and I'll never give them to you." That needn't be fraud -- everything about that could be 100% accurate and true with no intend to defraud yet still criminal. (btw we still have debtor's prison -- you can be jailed for not paying child support debts and the absurd argument often used you're jailed for violating the court order to pay the debt rather than owing the debt is little more than a legal parlor trick).
>Taxes aren't slavery
They are by your definition, where I need to trade work to pay for them to improve my health (get thrown into a prison, a den of disease and mental health problems). Of course, we could get into a semantic debate about slavery, but it's clear you've already defined slavery not to be literal chattel slavery, i.e. as black people in chains working the cotton fields, rather you appear to be referring to being forced to work under threat of violence which in this case you take the violence to be a threat to your health.
>You do raise the interesting question of funding it by buying bonds though. I don't see an issue with that; the argument against loans is a practical one, not a theoretical one ("the private debt incurred upon patients is, in essence, an involuntary one-sided loan granted to them, and we've seen that lead to massively unfair outcomes"). Voluntarily loaning the government money seems to work great and is miles distant from involuntarily-accrued (or accrued under duress; "sure, that procedure is optional because you always have the option to die") medical debt.
I also find this to be one of the most interesting solutions. Hypothetically if a 22 year old were to have some illness, it's totally conceivable that a bunch of lenders could bid for a race to the bottom so the 22 year old could get a loan low enough that it would easily be both a net positive for him and for the people who helped loan the money that saves him. Of course, if charity or some other option is available instead, all the better.
In any case, the biggest enemy for both of us is overregulation of the health system. Once medical licensing is eliminating and medical regulations eliminated, fights over how to pay become much lower stakes.