Man. I mean, just, man. Three quick things on the essay I feel safe to crown frontrunner for most assholish article of 2006:
• There's no such thing as ventilator insurance. There's health insurance. Making up ventilator insurance with a cost of $75 is a cheap trick -- I wouldn't take that deal either, it'd be like buying knee replacement insurance, or sideswiped-by-Toyota-RAV4-on-rainy-night-beneath-crescent-moon insurance. On their own, most every health problem is too remote to justify individualized insurance, but taken in the aggregate, serious health problems asymptotically approach certainty as you age, and most everyone would like health insurance to protect against being pulled from their ventilator, or feeding tube, or antibiotics, before seeing their mother.
• Landsburg defines compassion as "sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it." He then says there's nothing compassionate about giving his made up "ventilator insurance" to a 21-year-old who wants something else. Which has nothing at all to do with the relative compassion of ripping a 27-year-old terminal cancer patient from her ventilator before her mother can arrive to say goodbye. Also, you know what else isn't compassionate? Setting up false choices.
• Steven Landsburg is a dick. And I respect that. If only all folks with his opinions were as blithely, publicly evil -- we'd have national health insurance tomorrow. Instead, the rest couch their cold-eyed cruelty in sympathetic pap and smooth lies. The obviously demonic are always less dangerous than their media-savvy cousins. And Landsburg, while infuriating, has not only made a pathetically poor argument relying on an imaginary position ("ventilator insurance"), but has managed to render an already wronged victim all the more sympathetic by laying bare the calculations that led to her death. He's either the world's best practitioner of progressive political performance art or the left's most accidental ally.
