Did you follow the thread? Did you read the comment e r was supposedly replying to? The commenter's point was that when somebody is selling you something you need, there is automatically a power imbalance in the seller's favor. To call that "free trade" in the same way as for buying a TV is misleading at best. To say that you are "free" to not pay for a life-saving medication when you are on death's door is literally true but a very incomplete picture of the situation. Nobody in the thread was saying or even implying that the solution is to get someone else to pay for your medications. Injecting a Randian "go pay for your own" missed the point and -- whether you are willing to admit it or not -- betrays a bitterness and antagonism towards people in need. I'm sorry that there are people in desperate need of medical care they can't afford. I'm not at all sorry that people like you and e r have to hear about it, even though it apparently irks you that there is some implied or stated request that you help them out. I brought up e r's parents because Randians have a problem with the self-sacrifice and uncompensated giving to children traditionally required of parents, as is well-known. When someone has the nerve to parade selfishness in public and hide it behind a stupid accusation like "you just want someone else to pay for your stuff" you're damned right I'm going to get nasty and personal. I could say a lot more about the similarities in the relationships between parents and children and between fellow citizens when medical emergencies occur, but I forebear because you are not likely to follow up anyway.

1. I accept the title. 2. Of course parent-child is different from fellow citizen. My problem is with your unqualified "get what you pay for" mentality when it comes to healthcare. Food is a relatively predictable expense; healthcare is not. Expecting people who suffer a sudden or catastrophic illness to come up with the money to pay for their treatment all by themselves is ridiculous and cruel. Insurance. Your unqualified, Randian "go pay for your own" in this particular thread was not only unhelpful, it wasn't even germane. Own your issue; I'll deal with mine.

Sarcasm for sure. We really do need to reduce human population but I'm only in favor of doing it by preventing births, not by ending anyone's life or purposely depriving people of the opportunity for a better life, and not by selecting some favored subset of the human population for the privilege of reproducing. Abiding by those restrictions would make intentional population reduction extremely difficult. As environmental degradation accelerates the temptation to get rid of excess human beings by other means will increase. The people with the power to do this will certainly not volunteer to self-eliminate. We're in for a hell of a century.

Exactly. Why haven't more "Masters of the Universe" realized this and taken more steps to prepare people for civilized transitions? They're over-optimistic about people's ability to make transitions on their own? They've read Bostrom's Superintelligence and decided against him that the singularity has only upsides? They're busy arranging their means of surviving the resource wars and other types of mass dislocation and violence that climate-change, automation, and accelerated income inequality are just starting to trigger now? Beats me.

Considering all the bad consequences of continued human population growth, the loss of all these jobs may be a blessing in disguise. We could issue the unemployed the bare minimum to keep them alive, block them from retraining or other means of becoming economic contributors again, accompany that with multiple, easily-accessible and inexpensive means to accelerate their deaths, and let nature take its course. Under those circumstances, many of these less-employable masses will be more willing to kill themselves and those that aren't willing to do so consciously will end up dying prematurely anyway. Come to think of it, we've already been doing this. We just need to globalize the trend and accelerate the rate of self-elimination. We get rid of some 4-6 billion unnecessary people in the next century -- no genocidal wars, thermo-nuclear winters, or global pandemics needed. What could go wrong?

Glad your parents didn't apply this philosophy to you while you were growing up? Or, maybe they did, and that's why you grew up to be an @$$hole.