That's certainly the best case for your position

But what about the people who are not at fault?

Like, someone set fire to their house and they got caught in it or something

i would offer to help them. but i would resent them if i was forced to help

that resentment grows the less i have, therefore the more precious my time and labor become

because at a certain point, helping them means i now am in trouble

What if forcing everyone to pitch in a tiny amount helped them?

Let's say your lone contribution wouldn't

what is tiny?

Well, to keep things in context

tiny to one person is massive to another

Let's say you could cap it at 10% of everyone's income

And if you're concerned about the ability of the poor to pay, let's say they get a reduced amount, compensated by the corresponding wealthiest

then suddenly everyone else would need to pay another percent to give some of those people that 10% back, because some people need that 10%.

so now really you are taking 11% from perhaps even most of everyone

I don't follow

Why would you need that extra 1%?

but now what happens when say a natural disaster happens? and its not 1 person, its half the population of an area?

I'm not sure that's a good counterpoint

That's an issue in any scheme

There are rules doctors follow about how to handle this that _do_ involve choosing who gets help and who doesn't

I'm not sure that it either strengthens or weakens the case for federal intervention

1 person has 10 resources, 1 has 100, 1 has 1000, the last has 0 now. You need 10 resources to live. You take 10% from everyone and give it to the last person, great.
now you have 9, 90, 900, and 111. But you need 10 to live. So either you have 10, 89.5, 899.5, and 111. or that first person doesn't give 10% so you have 10, 90, 900, 110.

it makes no sense to take 10%

from everyone else

Sure--so anyone who has 10 pays nothing, and their 1 is covered by the guy with 1000

but now say something happens, and the economy is bad. So you have 8, 10, 100 and 0.

can't take from 8 or 10. now only 100 can lose 10%. which they still are okay. so now its 8, 10, 90, 10.
but wait, 8 has less than it needs to live, lets take more... can't take from 8, can;t take from 10, can take from 90, can't take from 10. So now its 10, 10, 85, and 10

now lets say, through no fault of their own, that last guy is back to 0 again because of something chronic.

to we just keep taking by force from the guy who had 100?

what happens if we can't get back to 100 faster than the last guy keeps going back to 0?

what happens if 100 guy suffers and drops down to 15? now we have a problem

Force currently has a problem: its slow to react

Correct--but in this situation no scheme has a satisfactory solution

correct

I don't think that's the situation healthcare intervention proponents seek to address

i don't think there is a solution really.

I'm not convinced it even matters to them if it makes it worse (it's a weird utilitarian tradeoff between steady-state improvement and worse exceptional situations)

the intervention proponents don;t take choice into account

lets go back to the force issues. we have 20, 10, 100, 0. Guy 0 has 0 because of choice. And his choices keep him at zero.

so you take 10%, 18, 10, 90...but guy 0 stays at 0 because all those resources he wastes

so all that happens is 18 and 90 keep having stuff taken from them