> I need shelter if I am to contribute to society. It should be free!

You do need shelter, and those without housing should be provided somewhere to live. If you'd like to live somewhere nicer/bigger, then you can pay for that, but in a just society I don't see why there should be people starving on the streets. Economically, there are multiple studies that show providing housing to the homeless is at least net-neutral, and results in quite positive outcomes for participants [1,2,3]. Although the research is still in early stages and not deployed on a large scale, I think it at least illustrates the point that giving people who need it housing is not the straw-man that your comment implies it to be.

> My own healthcare is extremely valuable to me and I should be allowed to spend money on that. Someone else may decide they'd rather have a new pair of sneakers. Who am I to say they're wrong, that they are not permitted to allocate their capital in this way?

Sure, for some procedures, it may be viable to shop around or neglect them entirely. But for basic or emergency healthcare, there really isn't an open market. I don't think anyone would choose to "allocate their capital" to a new pair of sneakers when they're bleeding out in the street. For many people, even routine healthcare procedures are out of their financial reach, or at least or prohibitively expensive. Frankly, attempting to compare medical procedures to common goods is not really a fair comparison at all.

[1] https://ps.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ps.201... [2] https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1694.html [3] http://isr.unm.edu/reports/2016/city-of-albuquerque-heading-...

1.	Ffcv: Train models at a fraction of the cost with accelerated data loading(github.com) 1 points by bp0017 4 years ago \| 0 comments
2.	Active Learning via Ensembles(bp0017.github.io) 1 points by bp0017 5 years ago \| 0 comments

user:	bp0017
created:	February 8, 2019
karma:	38