Commentary from the liberterrain…
A recent Dallas Morning News blog posed this question as a headline:
“Should a hospital be able to ban obese workers?”
This question would never get asked in a free, libertarian society.
Since libertarianism is based on the zero aggression principle, meaning that a truly just society cannot be based on coercion, intimidation or fraud, all hospitals would be non-government regulated and non-tax funded.
They would still be regulated, of course, by the competitive free market in which people could vote with their feet and their dollars which of many hospitals to use when they needed one.
And it would be funded voluntarily through the profit system or by organizations of people who actually know that “caring” is an action verb, not just a politically correct socially responsible-sounding feel-good emotion, like churches, charities, mutual aid associations, voluntarily funded endowments and so forth.
In a free society hospitals, as every other kind of institution, would be free to set its own policies.
The hospital that wants to present a particular image to the public may decide not to hire obese people, but then they run the risk of losing caring, talented people to other hospitals.
The same applies to smokers, alcoholics, cocaine users and every other category of people.
So, as the article says, “When the Baylor Health Care System announced last year that it would stop hiring tobacco users, the reaction was expectedly mixed.”
Some applauded the move while others were concerned with “slippery slope” hiring discrimination.
The anti-smoking move was justified by a sentence that began with “As a society, we talk a good game about how important preventive health care is…”
But “we” don’t talk “as a society” because “society” can’t talk. We talk as individuals unless we specifically authorize other specific individuals to talk for us.
That doesn’t happen in a collectivist, groupthink society like the United States, that only happens in a voluntaryist libertarian society.
The free society also takes care of that “slippery slope” concern of hiring discrimination. Every decision we make discriminates against every other decision we didn’t make: Who to marry, where to eat, what to read, which car to buy, and so forth endlessly.
Slide too far down that slope and the free society will stop you with public condemnation, media exposure, boycotts, denunciations, and financial loss.
The free society solves the issues this article thinks are problems.
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