Author: Michael LaBossiere

Many classic conservatives advocate a broad application of free market principle. This includes an opposition to regulation, or rather regulation that does not favor businesses. As health care is seen as a business in the United States, this view leads to concerns about health care cost regulation in the United States.

Because of the high cost of health care, there have been proposals to limit the cost of health care services. Those who oppose these regulations claim pricing should be set by free competition between health care providers and that consumers of health care should become savvy shoppers. The idea is that savvy shoppers will take their business to providers that offer better services or lower costs, which will force the competition to lower costs or improve quality. This is a stock free market argument.

There are serious problems with the idea of relying on savvy health care shoppers and competition to reign in prices and improve quality. The first is the challenge of finding the prices that health care providers charge. While it can be difficult to predict what services a consumer might need, health care providers often have a range of prices depending on who is paying for the services. For example, insurance companies negotiate prices, and these differ from what consumers without insurance would pay. Health care providers, although they always have a database of billing codes and costs, are often reluctant to provide this information in a readily accessible and comprehensible manner.

A second problem is that health care consumers usually lack the medical knowledge to make informed decisions about health care. While a person might face some challenge in picking the best phone or laptop, sorting out medical care is typically beyond the skill of most. That is why people go to medical professionals. As such, being a savvy shopper is difficult.

A third problem is that it is somewhat misleading to call a patient a consumer. While this might seem to be a mere difference in labels, the difference between consumer and patient is significant.

One difference is that a patient is typically in duress. They are injured or ill and not in a position to engage in savvy shopping practices. While an informed rational consumer will be looking for the best deal, a suffering patient is concerned with getting better. As people say to not go grocery shopping on an empty stomach, it would be best to not shop for health care when one is not healthy. But that is exactly when one needs health care. There are also the more extreme cases. For example, a person who is badly injured in a car crash is not going to be shopping in a savvy manner for emergency rooms during the ambulance ride.

It can be countered that there are cases that allow savvy shopping, such as elective surgeries and non-emergencies. This is a reasonable point and a person who is not in need can take the time to shop around and be a savvy consumer. However, this does not apply to cases in which a person is sick or injured enough to impede such savvy shopping.

Another important difference between consumer and patient is that the consumer often has a reasonable choice between buying a good or service and doing without. For example, while someone might want the latest and greatest iPhone, they can live just fine without it.      

 In contrast, patients usually have need treatment and doing without would be a real hardship or even fatal. When one must buy the good or service and the provider knows this, it makes it much harder to be a savvy shopper. This also provides a segue into the matter of regulating prices.

While free market pricing might work when consumers can easily do without the good or service, it runs into obvious problems for the consumer when the goods or services are necessities. To the degree that the patient cannot do without health, the patient is at the mercy of the provider. So, while a person can easily elect to do without the latest iPhone if they cannot afford it, it is much more difficult for a person to do without chemotherapy. As a personal example, when I was bitten by a dog in September 2023, I had to get rabies shots because if the dog had rabies, then I would die without the shots. And when I had a quadriceps tear, I had to get surgery if I wanted to be able to walk and run.  True, a consumer could do without liposuction or breast implants, but such elective surgery differs from non-elective treatments.

The stock counter to such concerns is that if a consumer finds the price of a good or service too high, they can go to a lower priced competitor. In the case of health care, the opportunity to find a lower priced competitor can be problematic. A patient might not have the time to shop around. In many places, there is not any local competition with lower prices that would allow a patient to engage in savvy shopping. Going back to my rabies shots, the only place I could get them was at an emergency room and I had to pay the emergency room prices each time. I checked with all the local pharmacies and my own doctor, so I did try to shop around. When I had my quadriceps tendon repair surgery, I also did not have an opportunity to shop around for a discount. As such, this free-market advice is not very helpful.

In the case of pharmaceuticals, patients often find that there is no competition. When a company has a patent on a medication, the United States’ government uses its coercive power to enforce that patent, ensuring the company retains its monopoly for the specified time. Because of this, a patient who needs the medication has two choices: do without or pay the price. There is no free market competition, so without regulation on the part of the state, the company can decide to charge whatever it wants. While this can result in bad press and public criticism, patients cannot rely on this to result in lower prices.  

This monopoly system does create a quandary for a principled proponent of the free market. On the one hand, without such state regulation a truly free market of drugs would make it irrational for for-profit companies to invest in costly research. As soon as the drug was developed, the competition would duplicate it and would be able to sell it cheaper because they would not need to recoup the cost of development. A solution, which would not be very free market, would be to have the state fund the expensive research and then provide the results to companies who would then compete without monopolies for consumer dollars. One could, of course, stick with a strict no regulation ideology and let the market be completely free of the state and hope medications would somehow be developed.

If the state steps in to regulate prices as part of the agreement for using its coercive power to protect patent monopolies, then there would also be no free market competition. But the state could see to it that the companies charged prices that allowed profits while not gouging patients.

My own view, as might be suspected, is that since patients are essentially a coerced market when it comes to health care and medication, the state should act to regulate prices. In the case of pharmaceutical companies, this should be part of the bargain with the state that allows them to maintain their monopolies. After all, if taxpayer dollars are to be used to protect monopolies, then they should get something in return and this should include reasonably priced medication. In the case of health care providers, while they do not usually have a monopoly, they do have a coerced market. Just as the state justly steps in to prevent price gouging during large scale natural disasters, it can justly do so regarding personal disasters in the cases of injury or illness.

I know health care providers and pharmaceutical companies want to make a profit and, as such, I would advocate that the regulations on pricing leave them a reasonable margin of profit. While it might be objected that a reasonable margin of profit is hard to define, my reply is that if price gouging can be recognized in other areas, it can (and is) be recognized in the realm of medicine.

Throughout American history it has been claimed that immigrants steal jobs, commit crimes and spread disease. Sometimes, such as with Ron DeSantis, some descendants of immigrants can go on to make the same accusations against current migrants. My focus in this essay is to address the claim that immigrants (and migrants) are stealing jobs from Americans.

One approach is to consider what it means for immigrants to steal jobs. To facilitate the discussion, I’ll offer an analogy to another type of alleged theft, that of stealing someone’s girlfriend (or boyfriend).

While I will change the names to protect the innocent and the guilty, when I was in college Dick was dating Jane.  Jane was at my school and Dick was attending a school in a different state. Jane started spending a lot of time with John, and eventually John started dating Jane. An angry Dick showed up to confront John about “stealing his woman.” Jane’s response that she was not stolen because she was not anyone’s property. She chose who she wanted to be with. In this case, John. For those who are wondering, I am not John, Dick or Jane. But thanks for asking. While there were moral concerns about what Jane and John did, Jane was right. She is not anyone’s property and could not be stolen. So, Dick’s charge of theft did not apply. If John had kidnapped Jane, then that would have been another matter entirely, but still not theft.

Like affection, a job is provided by someone else and not something that can (typically) be stolen. So, when an immigrant is hired by an American employer, the immigrant is not stealing the job. The American employer is choosing to hire the immigrant rather than hiring an American. Going back to the girlfriend analogy, the American worker would be like Dick, he thinks the job is rightfully his. But the employer is like Jane, she is the one deciding who gets her affection (in the case of the employer, the job). So, the American did not have their job stolen; the American employer decided to give it to someone else. The job, after all, belongs to the employer.

This argument could be countered by going back to the girlfriend analogy. Suppose that Dick and Jane are engaged and are committed, but John is willing to do more for Jane and asks far less in return and is much more appealing. It could be claimed that John is not playing fair: he should respect the special relationship between Dick and Jane and not outcompete poor Dick.

The easy and obvious reply is that it would clearly be morally problematic for John to intentionally make a play for Jane when she is in a committed relationship.  However, it is still Jane’s choice whether to stay with Dick or move on to John. As such, most of the responsibility would rest on Jane. It is fair to note that John did outcompete Dick, but Dick could have stepped up to compete if he really wanted Jane to stick with him.

In the case of the job, it is morally problematic for immigrants to cross the border illegally to seek jobs in America. However, the bulk of the moral responsibility lies with the employers. While immigrants might tempt them by being willing to work for far less, it is up to them to stick to their commitment to the law or to break it. As such, it is not the immigrants that are stealing jobs. Rather, employers are choosing to hire immigrants and if any wrong is being done to Americans who want those jobs, most of it lies on the employers.

Turning to the practical matter of immigration, if a political party wants to deter migrants from coming to the United States illegally in search of employment, it makes the most sense to focus on enforcing employment laws and punishing businesses that break these laws. While the border would still need to be secured, cracking down hard on employers breaking employment laws would reduce the number of people coming here to work illegally. But neither party has the will to do this, since they know a big chunk of the American economy depends on not policing illegal employment. But because of their rhetoric and the xenophobia baked into the political apple pie of America, they cannot support a sensible system of legal employment and documentation of workers. They thus get their pie (being able to rail against migrants) and eat it too (having large parts of the economy rest on the backs of migrant workers who are employed illegally). As a closing point, we should speak in terms of illegal employment rather than illegal immigrants; that would be more honest.

While most Americans are not hostile to transgender people and oppose discrimination against their fellow Americans, the Republican party has made them a major target in their endless culture war. While sports have become one of the newest battlefields in this fight, there is still a focus on the bathroom battles. While the legal issues will be addressed by judges, there are also the moral issues.

Utilitarianism provides one approach to the moral issue of whether transgender people should be able to choose which bathroom to use. This involves weighing the harms of denying this choice against the harms of granting it. In a democracy, this approach seems to be a reasonable one, at least if it is believed that a democratic state should aim at the general good of the people (and that America is a democracy).

A utilitarian assessment leads to an obvious conclusion: bathroom choice should be granted. The two main arguments against bathroom choice fail in the face of facts and logic. One argument is that allowing bathroom choice would put people in danger. Since some states have already allowed bathroom choice, there is data about the danger presented by such choice. Currently, the evidence shows that there is no meaningful danger. As some wits enjoy pointing out, more Republican lawmakers have been arrested for bathroom misconduct than transgender people. As such, Republicans worried about bathroom safety should focus on policing their own party.

The other argument is the privacy argument, which contends that allowing people in bathrooms based on their gender identification would violate the privacy of other people. While the focus is on women’s bathrooms, men’s bathrooms have the greater potential for privacy violations because of urinals. Sometimes there are not even dividers between them and someone could simply look down and across at another person engaged in urination. As women’s bathrooms lack urinals and have stalls, there is more privacy. However, someone could obviously peep under a stall. In this sense, bathrooms already lack some degree of privacy. But this could be addressed by enclosing urinals in stalls and making stalls peep proof in ways that would still allow ventilation and ease of cleaning. But making bathrooms peep proof has not been a focus of Republican law makers, so they are probably thinking of privacy in a different way. The most reasonable interpretation is privacy from members of the other sex, this could be called “gender privacy.”

Those favoring transgender rights would point out that allowing people to use facilities based on gender identity would not result in boys seeing girls or vice versa. It would just be the usual girls seeing girls in the girls bathroom and boys seeing boys in the boy’s bathroom. Since the main worry is transgender girls in girl’s bathrooms, I will focus on that. However, the same discussion could be made for transgender boys.

The obvious reply to this would be to assert that gender identification is not a real thing: a person’s gender is set by biological sex. So, a transgender girl would, in fact, be a boy and hence should not be allowed in the girls’ locker room. This is presumably, based on the assumption that a transgender girl is still sexually attracted to girls because they are still a boy. There seem to be three possibilities here.

The first is that transgender girls are straight boys and are sexually attracted to girls (that is, they are just faking) and this grounds the claim that a transgender girl would violate the privacy of other girls. This would entail that lesbian girls also violate the privacy of other girls and since about 10% of the population is gay, then any bathroom with ten or more girls probably has some privacy violation occurring. As such, those concerned with privacy would presumably need to address this as well. The worry that lesbians might be violating privacy could be addressed by making stalls peep proof, but then no transgender bans would be needed since privacy would be protected.  While this could prove expensive, if Republicans are truly dedicated to bathroom privacy, they could provide funding for this.

The second is that transgender girls are not automatically sexually attracted to other girls and hence do not violate their privacy: they are girls like other girls. It could be objected that what matters is the genetic makeup or gender past of the person: someone who was once a biological male seeing a girl in the locker room violates her privacy. Arguing for this requires showing how this matters in terms of privacy, that being seen by girls is not a privacy violation but being seen by a transgender girl who is just going about their business is a privacy violation. That is, if the person looking does not care about what is being seen, then how is it a privacy violation?

The third is that transgender girls are just girls. In which case, there is no privacy violation since it is just girls seeing girls.

While those advancing these arguments might honestly believe them, it might be suspected that the motivation for opposing bathroom choice is a dislike of transgender people. This is the “transgender people are icky and bad” argument. This “argument” has no merit on the face of it, which is why it usually is not advanced as a reason by opponents of bathroom choice. But now back to the utilitarian argument.

One stock problem with utilitarian arguments is that they can be used to justify violating rights. This problem typically arises in when the benefits received by a numerical majority come at the expense of harms done to a numerical minority. However, it can also arise in cases where the greater benefits to a numerical minority outweigh the lesser harms to a numerical majority. In the case at hand, those opposed to bathroom choice could argue that even if bathroom choice benefits transgender people far more than it hurts people who oppose bathroom choice, the rights of anti-choice people are being violated. This then makes the matter a question of competing rights.

In the case of public bathroom facilities, such as student bathrooms at schools, members of the public have the right to use them since that is the nature of public goods. There are, however, reasonable limits placed on access. For example, the bathrooms in public schools, courthouses and government buildings are generally not open to anyone to wander off the street to use. So, while there is a right to public bathrooms, like all rights, it does have its limits. It can thus be assumed that transgender people have bathroom rights just as people who oppose bathroom choice do. What is in dispute is whether the right of transgender people to choose their bathroom trumps the right of anti-choice people to not be forced to use bathrooms with transgender people.

Disputes over competing rights are often settled by utilitarian considerations, but the utilitarian argument already favors bathroom choice. As such, another approach is needed, and a reasonable one is the consideration of which right has priority. This approach assumes that there is a hierarchy of rights, and that one right can take precedent over another. Fortunately, this is intuitively appealing. For example, while people have a right to free expression, the right to not be unjustly harmed trumps it. This is why libel and slander are not protected by this right.

So, the bathroom issue comes down to this: does the right of a transgender person to choose their bathroom have priority over the right of an anti-choice person to not encounter transgender people in the bathroom? My inclination is that the right of the transgender person has priority over the anti-choice person. To support this, I will use an analogy to race.

Not so long ago, there were separate bathrooms for black and white people. When the bathrooms were to be integrated, there were dire warnings that terrible things would occur if bathrooms were integrated. This is a stock conservative approach against expanding rights: if these people get this right, then terrible things will happen. This argument was made in defense of the anti-miscegenation laws, against desegregation of schools and the military, and against same-sex marriage. So far, the claims of harm have turned out to be wrong.

In the specific case of desegregation of bathrooms, these terrible things obviously did not take place. Whites also have argued that they had a right to not be in the same bathroom as blacks. However, the alleged white right to not be in a bathroom with blacks does not trump the right of blacks to use the public bathroom. Likewise, the right of transgender people to choose their bathroom trumps the right of anti-choice people to exclude them.

It can be objected that if this argument is taken to its logical conclusion, then gender mixing will occur in the bathrooms. For example, one common sight at races (such as marathons) is long lines leading to the women’s bathrooms and short lines for the men’s bathrooms. Women runners might start going into the men’s room (they already sometimes do). Then terrible things might happen. Specifically, I might need to wait longer to pee before races. This is a case where my selfishness must outweigh my moral principles: though I have no moral objection to gender mixing of bathrooms, my selfish bladder says that I cannot give up my right to a shorter line. If men want to go to the women’s bathroom, my bladder approves since that means less wait for it.

 

I regularly use AI images in my game products, such as my D&D adventures. I also use such images as illustrations on my blog. This leads to the question of whether I am acting in an ethical manner using these images. As a side note, I use “images” rather than “art” intentionally. While they are clearly images, it is not clear if AI images are art in a meaningful way. But that is an issue for another time and my focus is on whether I am doing wrong by using these images. This question is linked to the broader question of whether AI image and text generators, such as Midjourney and Open AI’s products are ethical. I believe that they are not but need to make this case.

It is often claimed that AI systems were trained on stolen data, be the data images or text. The stock defense offered by AI defenders is that the AI systems “learned” in a manner analogous to that used by humans, by being trained on existing works. On the face of it, this has some appeal. When people learn to draw or write, they usually do so by copying existing works until they are able to produce their own works. But this argument is easy to counter, at least for the data that was stolen in an unambiguous sense. While a human learning how to draw by buying art books would not be theft, stealing books from a bookstore to learn to draw would be theft. And it seems that some AI training data includes commercial works acquired without purchasing copies. While this matter is being hashed out in lawsuits, the ethics of stealing works are clear, especially when the thieves are well funded and intend to use their stolen goods for their own profits. They cannot appeal to the usual arguments floated to justify piracy against corporations since they are corporations.

Many critics of AI go beyond these cases of unambiguous theft to argue that any use of data without consent and compensation is theft. Those holding this view do need to address the argument that AI is not stealing but merely learning as a human would. One reasonable reply is to counter by arguing that while we do not know exactly how humans engage in learning to be creative, AI systems are not replicating what humans do. The analogy also breaks down in various ways when comparing the situation of a human creator with an AI system. Some relevant differences include the fact that AI systems are owned by corporations and are “machines” for churning out products at an inhuman rate.

While not a great analogy, AI image generators are doing something like what I do when I use cartography software like Inkarnate and  Campaign Cartographer. These programs come with premade map symbols, such as trees, rocks, and castles. When I use them, I can combine premade assets to make maps. This does require creativity and some skill on my part, but I am mostly relying on the work of others. This is morally acceptable, since I paid for the software and the people creating the symbols gave their consent and received compensation for this use.

Even if it is assumed that the AI is being creative in a way analogous to my creativity in making maps, AI is working with a vast set of images that are being used without consent or compensation. That is, it would be like me using stolen symbols to create my maps while claiming that my creativity in combining the symbols means that I am not acting in an unethical manner. It could be countered that my analogy is flawed since AI is not creating collages of stolen pieces but is creating original works it learned to make through training. If someone looks at all the symbol sets for the maps and then creates their own maps using symbols that are different from what they learned from, then it would be hard to call that theft. That the symbols might look alike would not be surprising; after all symbols of rocks, castles and trees will all tend to look somewhat alike in that they will be of rocks, castles and trees. But in the case of AI, I suspect that the main reason to think that it must be theft is that the AI is believed to be engaged not in creation but recombination—that it is combing stolen pieces based on probabilities and algorithms that are also stolen.  This is probably true. But this is but one of the many moral crimes of AI.

Anyone familiar with how the modern economy works will not be surprised that AI is built upon underpaid and exploited labor, and this has been going on since before the latest AI surge. Amazon’s aptly named Mechanical Turk is a good example of how this works in that “people are paid pennies to train AI.” In some cases workers are never paid.

AI also unsurprisingly comes with a large environmental cost, much of which is a result of the energy required to train and maintain AI systems. This energy usage is expected to increase so dramatically that some are claiming that there will need to be breakthroughs in energy technology just to keep up with the demand. This environmental harm contributes to AI being unethical to use.

Given that I just argued about the evils of AI, it might be wondered how I can still use it. The unsatisfying answer here is that using AI is just one of a vast number of evils involved in my work. While those who dislike my views might see this as an admission, this is true of almost everyone. If you are reading this, you are also involved in evil. As a quick illustration, I use gaming books that were bought printed in China (using cheap labor) and shipped across the sea to be sold by Amazon, which exploits its workers. Shipping the books created pollution. I do my work on a computer that I built, but the parts were made by exploited workers and bought from corporations. My computer also uses energy. I am wearing clothing made by exploited workers and I eat food created in a horrible system that exploits and pollutes. And so on. This is not to say that my use of AI images in my work is good. Far from it, but it is but one of the many evils involved in creating and distributing anything. Now on to some more evil.

What people tend to talk about the most is how AI will take jobs, something that technology has been doing since the beginning. In the case of AI image generators, the concern is that it will take jobs from artists, and this is a reasonable concern. This problem arises because of capitalism and the need of artists to work to survive. After all, if people were free to create from their love of creation or just as a hobby, then AI image generation would be irrelevant. As such, AI image generation is just a specific problem of the current capitalist economy. It is here that I am probably doing the least evil.

Prior to AI image generators, I created my own images, used royalty free images and purchased stock images. The main problems with the free and stock images are that they generally did not match what I wanted, and they were obviously used by many other people. Over the years I have attempted to hire artists to create custom images for my works, but this has never worked out. In most cases they rightfully wanted to charge me more than I could ever hope to make on my works. When the price was affordable, the artists inevitably failed to deliver and dropped out of contact after a rough preliminary sketch or two. So my earlier works generally include few images and these are often only vaguely relevant to the content of the work. As such, I did not “fire” human artists and replace them with AI; for the most part where I use an AI image in my work there would have otherwise been no image.

When AI image generators became available, I tried them and found that they could rapidly generate relevant images that just needed a little work in Photoshop. Before the revelations about the evils of AI, I thought this was great. But after learning about the evils of AI, I realized that having unlimited relevant images came with a moral price. But I already knew, as noted above, that my work already came with a high moral price (think of the energy cost and pollution arising from the device you are using to view these words, from the device I used to type them, and so on). I did consider going back to works with just a few pieces of mostly irrelevant art but decided on another approach. My moral solution is to make my game products (and obviously my blog) available for free. Which is something I was already doing for Mike’s Free Encounters and Mike’s Free Maps.  I do have a “pay what you want” option for many of my works (which I was also doing before AI image generators) and this allows people who think that creators should be paid for their work to get my work without paying for it.

It might be objected that this is like giving away stolen property for free along with my own property, which is a fair point. But the economy is built on theft, so everything I create and distribute is grounded in something that involves theft from someone and is probably hurting people in some other way. This is not to say what I am doing is right, that would be absurd. All I can say is that I am minimizing the evil I do. To be honest, I could be convinced to abandon AI images and go back to reusing the same stock images and scouring the web for royalty free images.

In conclusion, my use of AI images is wrong, but it is one evil among many that are part of creating in the world as it is. But not what it could be or should be.

Trump seems likely to be re-elected president and he will certainly return to his support for religious freedom and is promising a harsh crackdown on immigrants.  This combination leads one to think about people protecting migrants due to their religious convictions and offering sanctuary. The idea of churches serving as sanctuary from the state was developed in Western Europe during the Middle Ages and is a part of Western culture. Of course, even if the Democrats win, they seem inclined to take a harsher stance on immigration.

Sanctuary is morally appealing when it is granted to protect a person from injustice on the part of the state. Judging who is worthy of sanctuary (as with any moral assessment) can be complicated, but the basic principle is clear enough. If our country’s immigration policies and practices are  unjust, I believe that immigrants who have committed no other crimes would be worthy of sanctuary. Since they typically lack the resources to defend themselves, church sanctuary can provide them with the protection they need to make their case and seek justice. Even if sanctuary proves ineffective for a particular immigrant, the granting of sanctuary can make a moral and political statement that might influence public perception. As a practical matter, the effectiveness of sanctuary depends on the reluctance of the state to use force to remove people. This reluctance might be grounded in many things, ranging from the power of the institution to the negative public reaction that might result from violating sanctuary. 

While the notion of sanctuary does enjoy the support of tradition, it could be argued that churches should not be be allowed a special exemption from the enforcement of the law. It should not matter whether migrants are seeking shelter in a church, a Starbuck or a private home. Law enforcement officials should be able to arrest and remove them because they are, by definition, breaking the law. This view is grounded on the idea that all institutions, religious or not, fall under the laws of the state and are not to be granted special exemptions. But, if exemptions from laws were granted to religious institutions in other areas, then this could be used to justify an exemption for sanctuary. 

In the United States religious institutions enjoy special exemptions from taxes and some laws. For example, the Catholic Church is not subject to certain anti-discrimination lawsuits despite restricting certain jobs to men. As another example, there is also an exemption for religious employers regarding coverage of contraceptive services. There has also been a push for new religious liberty laws that are aimed mainly at allowing people to discriminate against same-sex couples on religious grounds. Such laws grant exemptions based on religion and the arguments used to defend them could, in many cases, be pressed into service as arguments in favor of granting sanctuary to illegal immigrants. For example, if it is argued that exceptions to anti-discrimination laws should be granted to churches and businesses because of religious beliefs about gender and sex, then it would be challenging to argue that an exception to immigration laws should not be granted to churches because of religious beliefs.

The obvious challenge in using the religious liberty and exemption arguments to justify sanctuary is showing that the situations are analogous. This is super easy to do. Christians who oppose same-sex marriage usually cite Leviticus, but Exodus 22:21 is quite clear about how strangers should be treated: “Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Scholars also point to Matthew 25, especially Matthew 25:40 when justifying granting sanctuary to immigrants: “And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.’” As such, granting churches a sanctuary exemption to immigration laws seems at least as well founded as other cases of religious liberty. From a moral standpoint, an exemption for sanctuary would seem superior to exemptions for discrimination, for it is better to help people than to discriminate against them.

A way to counter this reasoning is to argue that there should not be religious exemptions to laws. While this would argue against a religious exemption to immigration laws, it would also apply to all other exemptions and is thus not an option for those who support those other exemptions. Since many of those who are anti-migrant do favor religious exemptions and religious liberty in general, this option is not open to them in a principled way. Fortunately for them, there seem to be no meaningful consequences for holding inconsistent views.

Another way to object is to contend that while religious exemptions should be allowed in other cases, it should not be allowed for granting sanctuary migrants. One approach would be a utilitarian argument: the harm done by allowing sanctuary would be sufficient to warrant imposing on religious liberty. As I have used this argument myself against “religious liberty” laws that make discrimination legal, I must give such an argument due consideration. So, if it can be shown that granting migrants sanctuary would create more harm than would violating the religious liberty of the sanctuary churches (and the harms done to the migrants) then religious liberty should be violated. But this approach would need to be applied in a consistent manner: those who argue against sanctuary on the grounds of harms must apply the same principle to all religious liberties.

My overall view of the matter is that since Congress and the President have consistently failed to create a just and rational immigration policy, then citizens have the moral right to offer protection to migrants who need protection from injustice. This must be done until our elected officials create a rational, realistic and ethical system. If Trump gets elected, then this will be especially important because his followers seem to  believe in themselves and America first but not that God was serious when He said, “this is my commandment, that you love one another, as I have loved you.”

As discussed in the previous essays, Trump and some of his followers claimed that God intervened to save Trump from being killed. If this is true, then it would follow that God decided to let one person die and two others get critically injured when He could have intervened. This raises the classic problem of evil, a stock Atheism 101 argument.

The simple version of the argument is that if God is all good, all powerful and all knowing, then there should be no evil. But there is evil, so God does not exist. A slightly more sophisticated version concludes that either God does not exist, or He is lacking in at least one of those three attributes. Much more sophisticated versions consider, in depth, how to reconcile God’s qualities with the existence of evil. I will look at each of these three attributes and how they might be reconciled with evil.

Philosophers usually present God as being omnipotent, but there is debate about what it means to be all powerful. The famous question of whether God can create a rock He cannot lift is part of this discussion. Some philosophers, the Intellectualists, claim that God’s intellect is his primary quality and that He either will not or cannot do the impossible. On this view, God can do anything that is possible, but His omnipotence is thus limited.  For example, God cannot make a triangle that has 4 sides. Those accepting this view often try to use this logical limit to solve the problem of evil. For example, God cannot create a perfect world and hence the world must be imperfect. One version of this reasoning points out that if God created a second perfect being, that being would also be God. But there cannot be two perfect beings (because each being would lack what the other has and for various other reasons) and this is why there can only be one God and why the world must be imperfect. On this view, evil (imperfection) is a necessary part of the world and that is why God saved Trump but lets other people die. The usual response to this is to point out that the world is worse than imperfect, and God could make things better while the world remained imperfect.

People also try to explain evil by limiting God’s powers in other ways. A classic move is to embrace a form of polytheism and attribute evil to the Devil. But this requires accepting that God and the Devil are comparable in power or coming up with some explanation as to why God lets the Devil cause evil. Another classic gambit is to invoke free will and use that to explain human caused evil. Free will limits God’s power and that is how evil can occur. The challenge is explaining how free will works and then explaining why God could not allow free will but mitigate the evil it is alleged to cause. Others also speak of God’s plan; that the evil that occurs is necessary for His plan. This also postulates a limit on God’s power, since He cannot reach His goal without allowing evil.

 Reducing God’s power in various ways to explain evil is an option that can solve the problem of evil, but it comes with the obvious cost of diminishing God. On this view, God could save Trump, but because of whatever limits His omnipotence, He could not have prevented the other people from being shot.

There are other philosophers, the Voluntarists, who claim that God’s will is supreme and He can will anything, even the impossible. This means the logically impossible and not just things that are very difficult. For example, God could will that triangles have 4 sides while still being triangle. It is not that we would call squares triangles, it is that the necessarily three-sided figure would be four-sided but still a triangle. He could also make all contradictions true and all tautologies false. He could make it so that if A is bigger than B and B is bigger than C, then A is smaller than C. None of this makes any sense to our mortal minds, but a God that can do the impossible can do all that and infinitely more impossible things. It might initially seem that being a Voluntarist would make it more difficult to solve the problem of evil. After all, the Voluntarist would have to accept that God could create a perfect world. But one consequence of God being all powerful in this sense is that He also defines morality, so He can make anything good or evil, even if it made no sense to us. This moral view is called divine command theory, on this view what God commands is good and what He forbids is evil. People who like divine command theory tend to think that God commands what they themselves want and forbids what they dislike, but that is not how the theory works. God could, at any moment, chose anything to be good or bad and He can obviously lie about it. So, for all we know, God just decided that being a woke transgender vegan advocate of renewable energy is the very best thing to be. Or maybe it was that way all along. Given that God can change logic and truth at will, our reason is useless in sorting any of this out. Or anything at all, since God’s will also applies to physics, chemistry and so on.  On the plus side, the problem of evil is solved: whatever God wills is good, so everything that happens is good. On the minus side, reason is useless. On this view, God saved Trump, killed one person and let two people be critically injured. But maybe this is all good? We do not and cannot know. While most thinkers focus on God’s power, His knowledge can also be relevant to the problem.

As with God being all powerful, philosophers debate what it means for God to be all knowing. Does this mean that God has all possible knowledge or that He even has impossible knowledge? In terms of the problem of evil, it could be argued that evil occurs because God does not know that it is occurring. On this view, perhaps God suddenly knew that Trump was in danger and acted just in time to save him. As might be guessed, free will could also figure in here: because humans have free will, God does not know what we might do. So, God did not know that the shooter was going to shoot until he started shooting. God will also need to require time to gain knowledge and act on it, otherwise He could just intervene instantly, which would raise the question of why He did not act. While claiming that God has epistemic limitation would explain evil, it does create its own problems in terms of diminishing God and making prophecy more difficult to explain.

The easiest solution to the problem of evil is to abandon the idea that God is all good. The two usual options are to simply reject that God is all good or to argue that our conceptions of good and evil are wrong. Rejecting that God is all good, that evil also comes from God, solves the problem. Evil exists because God is not all good. For Trump’s followers, God did a good thing in saving Trump but letting the other people get shot is not a problem because God does or allows evil as well.

If it is argued that our conceptions of good and evil are wrong, then the problem is solved because we are wrong about there being any evil. On this view, everything that happens is good, but we might not realize this. This is sometimes explained in terms of God’s plan (which ties back to limiting God’s power) or the big picture argument. The big picture argument often uses an analogy to looking at a beautiful painting by pressing it against your face. It will look awful. But if you move back from the painting, you will see its beauty. So, while the person dying at Trump’s event seems bad, it would be seen as good once one sees the big picture. This view might also involve accepting that God has a limit on His power since His big picture must apparently be made with a lot of events that seem evil up close. This approach is appealing to many since it explains away any evil that occurs, which is the solution most look for.

 

Trump and some of his followers are claiming that he survived the shooting because of divine intervention. Some even claim that this proves he is chosen by God. In the previous essay I looked at the metaphysics of God’s causal relation with the world in general terms. In this essay, I will focus on the metaphysics of God protecting chosen people.

For some, divine protection is described in terms of the armor of God. While this is not literal magical armor (like +3 plate), it is an appealing way to describe divine protection. While there are various theological views on this matter, my concern is with the metaphysics of how God’s armor might protect those chosen to wear it, such as Trump (according to some of his followers). In more general terms, this is an exploration of divine protection.

Throughout human history people have told stories of gods offering supernatural protection to mortals. A well-known example is when the goddess Thetis magically protected her son Achilles. This protection was imperfect, and Achilles was slain at the battle of Troy. Prior to the concept of a perfect monotheistic God, the gods of the polytheistic faiths were usually limited in their powers and subject to opposition from other supernatural beings (and even mortals). They were not omniscient or omnipotent and they tended to be portrayed as very powerful human-like beings, complete with human flaws. So, if a god protected a mortal (such as a child, spouse or favored one) this protection could be overcome or defeated, and it would make sense for a protected mortal to still be cautious. But things are rather different with God.

On the usual philosophical conception of God, God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. He is sometimes presented as having character defects, such as being jealous or wrathful (although some people see these as virtues and not vices). But being all knowing, God would be aware of any threat to those He has chosen to protect. Being all powerful, there is no threat that God could not neutralize. Being all good, God would want to protect His chosen from evil. As such, if Trump is wearing God’s armor, then he would seem to be immune to all harm. After all, God knows of every threat to Trump and can prevent them all. He presumably also wants to prevent them, given that it is claimed that He intervened to save Trump because Trump is chosen, and God has a purpose for him. Conveniently, this provides the basis for an empirical test for whether Trump is chosen or whether God has a purpose for him that will ensure divine protection. If Trump has God’s protection, then Trump should be unkillable until he fulfils God’s purpose. Since God is all powerful, Trump could open the door of his jet at 10,000 feet and leap out or crash it into a mountain and be fine. He could go into the lion exhibit at a zoo and hug the lions and they would be like kittens. He could drink a gallon of bleach and it would be like drinking Diet Coke and so on. After all, keeping Trump alive through all this would not even be inconvenient for an omnipotent being. But, of course, Trump will do none of these things and his followers would probably be angry at my proposed test.

As criticisms, some might say that to put divine protection to the test would be arrogant and disrespectful to God. It would be like Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane doing something intentionally dangerous to prove that Superman is protecting them. While this does have some appeal, it does seem to be a way of avoiding testing the claim of God’s protection under the pretense of it being disrespectful. After all, God presumably would not get pissed off and just decide to let Trump die if Trump has a purpose to God and is Chosen. But maybe God would do just that, so those protected by God must take care to remain protected. That is, God could decide to withdraw His protection if He is disrespected. But if God could pick a new chosen one and replace Trump, then Trump is not very special. Fortunately, there are tests that do not require that Trump try to harm himself.

If Trump is protected by God’s armor and God will, for example, deflect bullets away from him, then Trump does not need mortal protectors. If Superman is guarding Lois Lane, she does not need a cop with a gun to protect her. If Trump and his followers truly believe that God is protecting Trump, then he should forgo the protection of the Secret Service and law enforcement. These mortals are not all knowing or all powerful, so they provide infinitely inferior protection. And adding them to God’s armor would do nothing and they cannot make Trump any safer. So, he could save a lot of taxpayer money and forgo the protection.

Trump’s followers could argue that this would, once again, be arrogant and disrespectful to God. But that is absurd, since insisting on the protection of mortals when one has divine protection would be what would insult God. Trump’s followers might try to argue that God’s protection is fallible, which would require accepting a limited and fallible God. They could also argue that someone trying to harm Trump might be aided by the devil and hence Trump needs the mortal protection. There are two obvious problems with the devil gambit. One is that the devil cannot do anything that God does not allow, unless God is not omniscient (so the devil can be sneaky) or not omnipotent (so the devil can overpower God). The other is that if the devil can beat God, he can easily beat any mortal guardians of Trump. So, he and his followers face the dilemma of rejecting protection or admitting that God’s protection is not adequate.

Trump and his followers do have one good argument they could use, and this is to argue that the protection needs to be present not for Trump but for all the unfortunate souls who God does not care about. Those people can, as we have seen, be wounded or killed and God will not do anything to save them. While this does have some appeal, this would entail that the approach at Trump events would need to change; they should ignore any threats aimed directly at Trump and focus entirely on protecting everyone else. In fact, it would be best for Trump to be on stage alone, with clear paths in front of and behind him. As God will save Trump, this will make it less likely that divinely deflected bullets will kill or injure bystanders.

One might be wondering what his followers would think if Trump was killed. I suspect that it would be claimed that this was God’s plan and purpose, perhaps to allow J.D. Vance to become president. From a practical standpoint, there is probably nothing that would disprove beliefs about God’s plans, who He has chosen or what His purpose might be. Since Trump survived the attack (by someone believed to have really bad aim), this was attributed to divine intervention. If Trump gets killed or dies, this would presumably also be attributed to God’s plan.

 

Trump and some of his followers are claiming that he survived the shooting because of divine intervention. Some of his followers are also taking this as evidence that God has chosen him. In the previous essay in this series about the epistemic issue, I argued that there is no evidence of divine intervention. The gist of this argument is that explaining Trump’s survival does not require a divine element because the fact that shooters can miss their target suffices. I now turn to the metaphysics of divine intervention.

Many philosophers have attempted to discern the nature of God and how He interacts with the world. Some, like Spinoza, claim that there is no chance and no choice in the world. Each event that occurs must occur and could not be otherwise. God does what He does because He is what He is and He cannot do otherwise. On this sort of view the world is deterministic.

While Leibniz rejects Spinoza’s pantheism (that everything is God and God is everything), he also embraces a metaphysics devoid of chance. On his view, God chooses to create the best of all possible worlds because He is good. He knows which world is best and has the power to make it so. God also decides what people will exist in this best of all possible worlds. Interestingly, everything a person will think, feel, do and experience is already part of them—their existence will unfold in accord with this. After all, this must unfold as the best of all possible worlds.

While a somewhat crude analogy, all things and people are running their pre-written scripts, and they operate without chance or choice. On these sorts of deterministic (or pre-determined) views, then no divine intervention was needed to save Trump. There was no more chance of him dying than there is for a triangle to have twelve sides. It can, of course, be argued that God did save Trump. On this view, that would be true, but there would be nothing special about Trump in this regard since God is the cause of everything that occurs. So, he “saved” Trump, but also killed Corey Comperatore. Leibniz would not say that Trump living and Corey Comperatore dying were the best individual outcomes, since he argues that the best of all possible worlds is different from a world in which everything is the best. As such, Trump living is part of the best of all possible worlds, but it must be noted that Hitler, Stalin, earthquakes, tuberculosis, cancer and mosquitoes are also part of the best of all possible worlds. The point is that just because something occurred or exists in the best of all possible worlds it does not follow that it is therefore the best. This causal model of the world does entail that whatever occurs is caused by God. While this entails that God is the cause of all that is good, it also seems to entail He is on the hook for all the evil, which I’ll discuss in that essay.

George Berkeley, in addition to owning slaves, tried to defeat the atheists and deists with his metaphysics. One of his concerns about deism is that it does not give God much of a role in the world. On one form of deism, God is seen as creating a clockwork world and then walking away. On this sort of view, while God created the world in which Trump survived, God did not intervene to save Trump; it was just the machinery of reality operating like clockwork. Berkeley worried that this conception of God was a threat to piety and morality, so he had a different notion of God.

Berkeley’s conception of God is that He must be constantly active in the world. Rather than having a clockwork world that takes care of itself, Berkeley’s world is “manually operated” by God. For him, God “watches over our conduct and takes care of our minutest actions and designs” and “directs incessantly in a most evident and sensible manner.” Berkely also holds that this conception of God allows for miracles to be easily explained: all natural events are directly caused by God so He can deviate from the usual order as He wills, which is something Spinoza and Leibniz reject.

On Berkeley’s conception of God, then God did save Trump. But this conception of God entails that God has also saved everyone in every situation in which they did not die, which would make Trump just one among billions and nothing special. But one could argue, Trump not dying was a miracle because it deviated “from the usual order.” The challenge would be to prove this deviation, since people surviving being shot at because the shooter fails to score a fatal hit happens relatively often. One the downside, while this view does allow one to argue that God saved Trump, this view also entails that God killed everyone who has died or at least let them die. So, to claim that God saved Trump is to claim that God killed Corey Comperatore. While Berkeley believed that his “hands on” God solved various problems for his theory, this conception of God leads into the problem of evil. After all, God could have saved everyone at the Trump event but did not.

Berkeley’s conception of God seems to be close to how those who claim God saved Trump might think of God. After all, their claim is that God had to intervene to save Trump and that it was a miracle because, one must infer, God had to “deviate from the usual order.” This seems to entail that God chose to leave the “usual order” in place for everyone else and hence chose to allow one person to die and others to be badly injured. This entails that God could always intervene, but usually choses to not do so. This leads to the moral aspect of the issue, which I will examine in the  essay on the problem of evil

Some of Trump’s followers claim divine intervention saved him during the shooting in which Corey Comperatore died protecting his family. Trump initially credited himself, explaining he had turned his head to look at a chart and thus narrowly avoided death. He soon embraced the narrative that God had saved him. While there are psychological and theological issues here, my focus will be on the philosophical aspects of the issue of whether God saved Trump.

Looked at philosophically, three of the domains of concern are epistemology, metaphysics and ethics. A key epistemic issue is how one would know whether God saved Trump. The metaphysical challenge is sorting out the mechanics of reality and divine intervention. The ethical aspect is the classic problem of evil or, in this case, the problem of good. I will start with epistemology.

The details of the shooting have been reconstructed in detail,  but the key facts are that Trump suffered a minor wound to his ear, Corey Comperatore was fatally wounded, and David Dutch and James Copenhaver were both critically wounded. Assuming the shooter was trying to hit Trump, Trump was lucky to escape with only a minor injury. That is, he survived as a matter of chance. Some of his followers are denying that it was chance and are claiming that God saved Trump. Some are even taking this as a sign that Trump is the chosen of God. From an epistemic standpoint, the key question here is: how do we know that God saved Trump? That is, what evidence is available that would prove divine intervention as opposed to alternative explanations, such as chance? I am asking these as serious epistemic questions.

One approach is to attribute the knowledge to some special epistemic ability possessed by some of Trump’s followers that enabled them to somehow know that God saved Trump.  They cannot point to any empirical evidence in the shooting that would prove this, but they know. They could appeal to divine revelation or other avenues of knowledge. The problem is, of course, that there is no way for anyone other than his epistemically special followers to have such knowledge. Which is certainly adequate for Trump’s purposes. On this view, the way divine intervention is determined is via a special epistemic capacity possessed only by dedicated followers of Trump. But what about everyone else? They would need to rely on more mundane means of discerning divine intervention.

I will assume that evidence of divine intervention would require something unusual that could not be better explained by alternatives. To illustrate this, I will present a few examples of how this process might work. They will also involve shootings.

Imagine that Margorie is at the range and sees that a shooter has set up some cans. The shooter aims at a Diet Coke can. One shot grazes the can and other shots hit nearby cans. Margorie tells you that God intervened to save the Diet Coke can. At first you think she is joking, but she is serious and starts talking about the can being the chosen of God. On the face of it, her claim would be absurd. We know that people often miss what they aim for, and these results are not unusual. They can be explained in purely mundane terms and there is no need to posit divine intervention.

Now imagine that Margorie is at the coast when someone is duck hunting. The hunter shoots at some ducks, grazing one with a pellet, killing another duck and wounding two others. Margorie tells you that, once again, God has intervened. This time, He has chosen to save one duck while letting another die and two more be wounded. She insists that God has chosen the duck. This would be absurd, since the fate of the ducks is explainable in mundane ways that do not require divine intervention.

It could be objected that my examples involve objects and animals, and God does not intervene for them. Given that Aquinas argued that it is no sin to kill animals, this does have appeal.  But we can turn to countless examples of people being slightly wounded rather than killed in situations that might have resulted in their death. This happens all the time in wars but is also something that happens in everyday life with hazards such as falling, vehicle accidents, workplace accidents, falling and so on. On any given day there are probably thousands of people who could have been killed but were only slightly injured. But these are usually not presented as cases of divine intervention. And, presumably, Trump’s followers cannot attribute these cases to divine intervention. After all, if God intervenes so much, then there would be nothing special about Trump’s survival and this would not be proof that he is chosen. It is also worth thinking about people who did not suffer even a slight injury in the shooting. There were many people around Trump who were not hurt at all, yet Trump’s followers do not say that God singled them out to spare them or that they are thus marked as chosen. This is only being applied to Trump, despite their being no evidence that his survival was beyond mundane explanation. On the face of it, the best explanation is that shooters can miss their targets and it just so happened that Trump was grazed while another person died, and two others were badly injured. There seems to be no miracle here. But what would divine intervention look like?

In the bible, divine intervention is usually presented as being clearly outside of the usual workings of the world. Things like the parting of the Red Sea, walking on water, curing of blindness, raising of the dead, destroying cities, and turning people into salt are good examples of divine intervention. As such, it would seem reasonable to expect that if God intervened to save Trump, this would be done in a suitably divine manner. This might have involved turning the shooter into salt or sending an angel to smite him. But nothing like that happened. It can, of course, be countered that God now does low-key interventions that are indistinguishable from cases in which He does not intervene. But the flaw with this response is that we would have no way to distinguish cases of divine intervention and we would be engaged in wishful thinking when attributing it to any outcome. As such, there is no evidence that God intervened to save Trump.

When I was a kid, I believed if a person was shot by a criminal, their treatment would be paid for.  I wasn’t sure how this would work, but I reasoned it would be unjust for them to have to pay for the misdeeds of another. As has turned out with most of my beliefs about American justice, I was wrong. Shooting victims are usually presented with the bills for their treatment and unless you are a presidential candidate, being shot comes with a high cost.

Dr. Joseph Sakran, who had been shot in his youth, co-authored a study of what shooting victims are charged for their treatment. Since gunshot wounds range from relatively grazing wounds to massive damage, the costs vary greatly. While the average is $5,000 it can be as high as $100,000. While such costs are often covered by insurance, uninsured or underinsured shooting victims become victims again: they must either pay or pass on the cost. When the patient cannot pay, their credit can be damaged and the cost is passed on in the form of premium increases. There can be costs beyond the initial medical bills, such as ongoing medical bills, the loss of income, and psychological harm.

In addition to medical expenses, there are also the costs of the police response, the impact on employers, and the dollar value of those who are killed rather than wounded (and dying in the hospital does not automatically clear the bill). While estimating the exact cost is difficult, a mass shooting like the Pulse Nightclub shooting will probably end up costing almost $400 million. While mass shootings and assassination attempts get the attention of the media, gunshot wounds are a regular occurrence in the United States with an estimated cost of $600 million per day. While some might dispute the numbers, it is indisputable that getting shot is expensive and it would be rational to reduce the number of shootings and address the high cost of being shot.

While the rational approach to such a massive health crisis would be to undertake a scientific study to find solutions, the 1996 Dickey Amendment bans the use of federal funding for gun research. There is also very little good data about gun injuries and death, and this is no accident. Efforts to improve the collection of data are routinely blocked by such things as the Dickey Amendment. Efforts to impose more gun control, even when there is overwhelming public support for such things as universal background checks, are consistently blocked. While this shows how much say the people have in this “democracy”, it also shows that trying to address the high cost of getting shot by reducing shootings is unlikely to succeed. As such the most practical option involves finding ways to offset the medical costs to victims. While victims can bring civil suits, this is not a reliable and effective way to ensure that the medical expenses are covered. After all, shooters are rarely wealthy enough to pay all the bills and are sometimes killed.

Some victims have set up GoFundMe pages to get donations to pay their medical bills and this has become a common practice for many medical expenses. One problem with this approach is that it is not reliable and depends heavily on luck and being appealing to the crowd. There is also the moral problem of people needing to beg so they can pay the bills arising from getting shot. I have two proposals to address this problem.

My first proposal is that gun owners be required to purchase a modestly priced insurance policy that is analogous to vehicle insurance. In the United States, people are usually required to have insurance to cover the damage they might inflict while operating a dangerous piece of machinery. This helps pool the risk (as insurance is supposed to do) and puts the cost on the operators rather than on those who they might harm. The same should apply to guns. They are dangerous machines that can do considerable harm and it makes sense that the owners should bear the cost of the insurance. Naturally, as with vehicles, owners can also be victims.

It could be objected that owning a firearm is a right and hence the state cannot impose such a requirement. The easy and obvious reply is that the right to keep and bear arms is a negative right rather than a positive right. A positive right is one in which a person is entitled to be provided with the means to use that right (such as how people are provided with free ballots when they go to vote). A negative right means the person must provide the means of exercising their right, but it is (generally) wrong to prevent them from exercising that right. So, just as the state is not required to ensure that people get free guns and ammunition or free TV or radio time to exercise their freedom of speech, it is not required to allow gun ownership without insurance, provided that the requirement does not impose an unreasonable infringement on the right.

Another reply is that rights do not free a person from responsibility. In the case of speech, people cannot simply say anything without there even being consequences. In the case of gun insurance, people would be acting in a responsible manner. They would be balancing their rights with a rational amount of responsibility. To refuse to have such insurance is to insist on rights without responsibility, something conservatives usually pretend to hate. As such, both liberals and conservatives should approve of this idea.

My second proposal, which is consistent with the first, is that there be a modest state fee added to the cost of firearms and ammunition. This money would go into a state pool to help pay the medical expenses of the uninsured who are injured in shootings. Yes, I know that this money would probably be misused by many states. The justification is that the people who buy guns that could hurt people should bear the cost for the medical expenses of those who are hurt. People already pay sales taxes on these items; this would merely allocate some money to help offset the cost of people exercising their second amendment rights. To go back to the vehicle analogy, it makes sense to add a fee onto the cost of gas to pay for roads and other infrastructure, that way the people who are using it are helping to pay for it. Likewise for guns.

An obvious objection is that this fee would be paid by many people who will never engage in a gun crime. This is a reasonable concern, analogous to other concerns about paying into anything that one is not directly responsible for. There are two reasonable replies. One is that the funds generated could cover uninsured medical expenses involving any firearm crime or accident and anyone can have an accident with a gun. Another is the responsibility argument: while you or I, as gun owners, will probably never engage in a gun crime, being able to exercise our right to own guns allows people who will engage in gun crimes to engage in those crimes. For example, the person who tried to kill Trump was operating under the protection of the same gun rights that protect all gun owners up until the moment he started firing. This fee would be our share of the responsibility for allowing the threat of gun violence to endanger everyone in the United States. Such a modest fee would be a very small price to pay for having such a dangerous right. Otherwise, we would be selfishly expecting everyone else to bear the cost of our rights, which would not be right. So, to appeal to principled conservatives, this would be a way for taking responsibility for one’s rights. As people love to say, freedom isn’t free.