Steven E. Landsburg may know the meaning of the word 'compassion' but...

Look, it doesn't really bother me that Steven E. Landsburg seems happy that Tirhas Habtegris is dead because she couldn't pay her medical bills. What bothers me is that he seems to be deliberately asking the wrong questions as an argument against people who were upset by the circumstances surrounding her death.

Steve asks "Should poor people be given ventilator insurance?" Who the heck, apart from S.E. himself, said anything about ventilator insurance? (What the hell is ventilator insurance, anyway? Perhaps we don't have it because we have a working health system.)

Landsburg hazards a guess that if you'd given her $75 on her 21st birthday she wouldn't have bought 'ventilator insurance', she would have bought something she wanted more at the time. That, to him, is the only relevant economic consideration.

I'm going to hazard a guess that if, on her 21st birthday, you'd asked Tirhas to select her own $75 present AND you told her that ventilator insurance costs $75 AND that in six years she was gong to be ventilator dependent AND that her ventilator was going to be switched off, causing her death, because of unpaid bills, she bloody-well would have bought the insurance.

The only relevant question is "Should a person's ventilator be turned off merely because they cannot afford to pay for it?"

That's a relevant, valid question. My answer is no. That's because I think a human life is worth something. It seems strange that in the land where they insist a bunch of cells is human, they don't insist a human is human.

I assume Landsburg is an economist. He really should go off to see the wizard to help deal with that whole "lack of a heart" thing he's got going.

Note to Landsburg - take your definition to its extreme and you can claim that killing anyone is compassionate because you're permanently alleviating their distress.

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