Austerity has a bad reputation. The (thoroughly unsuccessful) attempts to balance the books in western democracies – who for decades have been spending more than they collect in taxes – have led to difficult budgetary decisions.
In the UK, the religiously revered National Health Service was exempt from the steep cuts that other departments had to make and was endowed by a funding increase totalling £20.5 billion in real terms by 2023. But other social care budgets have been impacted and the Conservative government stand accused of being responsible for people’s death because of austerity. In its austerity efforts the government has cut services people rely on to live, so it follows they are simply killing people in an ideologically driven purge of big government.
We are going to put our instinctively libertarian arguments to one side for now and forget that it’s not the government’s money to spend in the first place. So, let’s just look at the argument that budget cuts kill people. Is it true?
Well, if you “kill people” by cutting social budgets, don’t you also kill people by not increasing them? Is a budgetary decision which takes money away from front line social services worse than a decision which just doesn’t allocate even further funds? Unless you are currently spending the exact amount which prevents any suffering that would logically seem to be the case. And given the inevitable fact that people die, can you afford to spend on anything which is not directly life-saving? What is the justification for libraries and museums when people pass away from preventable causes or kids go hungry? And how do you choose between two lives, only one of which you can afford to save? Or between a life you prolong by 10 years and fifty lives you can improve for a lifetime?
There simply is no final answer to the question of how much you should spend to prevent loss of life. It is a qualitative judgement, depending on priorities which are personal to the decision-makers. And of course, we know that politicians and bureaucrats are hardly immune to being swayed by special interests. But what is clear is that we seem to at the very least start at the current policy. “The tyranny of the status quo”, as Milton Friedman coined it, means future policy is almost always debated relative to current policy. But it makes no logical sense.
Now we can put our libertarian spectacles back on and look at the more fundamental question of whether anyone can demand care from others?
When the left talk about a “right” to healthcare or any other social service, they are confusing concepts. What they mean is that you should be able to demand services from the government, but they are obviously not “rights” in the original meaning of the word. As Ayn Rand put it:
Any alleged “right” of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, isn’t and can’t be a right.
The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism, 1961
If the government must collect taxes to provide public healthcare, violating property rights to do so, then public healthcare isn’t a right.
That’s the philosophical argument, but there is a practical one as well: rights are to things which you are naturally endowed with and which cannot be taken away from you. They can be violated, but they continue to exist. But take healthcare. We have already touched on the fact that not everyone has the same “right” to care, simply because some health problems are met with an offer of best-in-class care whereas others are not (for example because they are very expensive to treat or because the drugs are not approved for distribution). And if the government healthcare system broke down completely, everyone would be left with no healthcare. You can’t have a right to something which cannot exist with absolute certainty, so public healthcare is more of a limited aspirational guarantee: not a right. The left wants us to have a right to many things, like housing, food and healthcare, but they compete for limited resources, so they constrain each other.
On a fundamental level, the question of whether we have an obligation to save our fellow man boils down to how you view the concept of rights. Positive rights imply an obligation on third parties to intervene. But look closer and it makes no sense, as it is effectively a limitless obligation. “You can’t save the world,” goes the saying, but that’s scant consolation if you are morally obliged to try. Negative rights, on the other hand, mean that individuals have the right to non-interference with respect to their persons and property, but it puts no obligation on them to act in the aid of others. Murray Rothbard and other libertarian thinkers were firm believers in negative rights, and this is the concept of rights which is compatible with individualism and personal responsibility.
So back to austerity. The accusations that it “kills people” simply makes no logical or practical sense and it is based on a flimsy rights argument. To claim that human suffering is due to lack of government spending is obviously foolish: that would be an open-ended obligations to spend until all problems are solved – which is self-evidently impossible. It is, as with so many of the left’s postulations, complete nonsense.