Fellow contributors/commenters, what do you all think?

Thx Quincy:
Yes, the nanny state is so lame! If they had their way we would not smoke cigars for special occasions or drink liquor at all! Now, perhaps I will do a post about this, but I do wonder what the libertarian response to a public health crisis should be. And the categorization of illness to public health issue can be fuzzy, I am thinking of AIDS in the early eighties and what role government should or should not have had in addressing that crisis.

This is a great website and Tarran your work is readable for a simple gal like myself thanks.

Unlike a lot of libertarians, I believe that the government does have a role when it comes to protecting the public from diseases that are highly communicable and highly harmful. And you’re right to call it public health.

What I object to is things like individual cholesterol and diabetes risk being monitored under the rubric of public health. If what I’ve got can’t cause another random person I come in contact with physical harm, it’s not *public* health. Period.

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tarran -

As usual, top notch work.

“Illness is a stochastic process that visits people randomly”

Generally that is true, except your model doesn’t take into account the Black Swan events of mass illness (on the order of the flu of 1918). In those events, who is to provide medical care when a large segment of the population is affected by a contagious and possibly deadly disease?

These events are a public health nusuiance so the free market’s ability to turn away a person if they cannot afford to pay would further contribute to the spread of such illnesses.

From a libertarian perspective, how can we handle PUBLIC HEALTH crises?

Thanks:)