Life offers us practically unlimited options, but very limited opportunity to experience them. The constraint of a single life is the greatest impediment. There’s nothing we can do about that. We can’t live the single life and the married life. We can’t have no children and few children and many. We can’t devote our lives to literature and be a marine biologist and priest and an atheist. We can’t spend our lives devoted to a single driving passion and deep our toes in everything.
On top of that we have everywhere forces compelling us to limit our already-too-limited options and our already-too-limiting experiences even further. Social approval is one, religion (or any quasi-religious ideology) is another, law is another. Why do we hate slavery so much? Slavery contracts a human’s options to the point approaching zero. But it is only the most severe instance of the same thing that effects and constrains all our lives. It is to life what prostitution is to marriage. It makes disturbingly bald the situation in which everyone already lives.
But law does not have only to constrain. This is why I am in favor of universal, single-payer healthcare. Not only do people without means suffer and die when they can’t become part of the healthcare system, but many others are compelled to limit their lives in unnecessary ways in an all-too-constraining culture (and in one that calls itself “the land of the free”). People get jobs they don’t want, keep jobs they can’t stand, stick to places they don’t want to be because they fear the danger of going without healthcare. We must be clear: healthcare is in industry that shackles everyone. It shackles a few people to the place they are happy to be. No doubt there were a few slaves who, apart from being called slaves, were relatively content with their lot. But where private industry controls any part of access to healthcare, we are all victims. Happy slaves are unenlightened victims.
