Yeah, yeah, I've read Ayn Rand too, but she's wrong.
Even from a selfish perspective, public health is so crammed with positive externalities it pays for itself.
Nobody's going to force chemists to make drugs. Instead the way tax works is that you force everyone to pay a fraction of their productivity into a fund that gets spent paying the chemist to make drugs, the pharmacist to deliver them, etc. It's very similar to insurance except that it doesn't have the perverse motivation to deny you care, and it's compulsory because a civilized society values people not writhing in pain and dying from uncured curable disease more highly than losing a fraction of their time working for the state to prevent it.
Even from a selfish perspective, public health is so crammed with positive externalities it pays for itself.
Nobody's going to force chemists to make drugs. Instead the way tax works is that you force everyone to pay a fraction of their productivity into a fund that gets spent paying the chemist to make drugs, the pharmacist to deliver them, etc. It's very similar to insurance except that it doesn't have the perverse motivation to deny you care, and it's compulsory because a civilized society values people not writhing in pain and dying from uncured curable disease more highly than losing a fraction of their time working for the state to prevent it.