It was either stubbornness or vanity. Or a little of both. Regardless, for the past year or so, I found reading to be more trouble than it was worth. Why? After only a few lines of text, my eyes would wander across the page looking for anything in focus.
It was obvious I needed reading glasses. But I refused the obvious. I was tired, the lighting dim, all explained my struggle to read – a struggle that ended this week.
On Monday, I stopped at my favorite drug mart on the way home from work. Besides stubbornness and vanity, I also have a virulent streak of cheapness. So it was a pleasant surprise to find inexpensive reading glasses available without prescription. In fact, I purchased a set of three pair for $10. That means I can keep one pair at home, one at work and the third in reserve.
This a certainly a fruit of a mostly-free market for eye glasses.
It makes me wonder about the fruits a completely free market in health care would provide.
{ 22 comments }
All Hail Dean Edell!!!
There is no such thing as a free market, because nature, through it’s biological instincts, forces us into consumption and demand of certain products and services under the threat of severe and excruciating pain and torture until we give in and buy the product it forces us to buy.
You guessed it, I’m talking about sex drive. Remove sex drive from the equation and then maybe we can have a free market after all.
Life is forced upon us, it’s not free, how can we have a free market in a reality and life that was forced upon us ?
Isn’t life the result of an initiation of force from the part of nature, reality and biology ?
I didn’t realize my sex drive was making me buy these Hershey chocolate bars instead of something of another brand.
I don’t know if I’m more upset that I’m being force into eating these delicious candies, or if it’s some how my sex drive that made me do it! Curse you, devious sex drive!
If you can’t decide your own specie, your own sex, your own epoch, your own country, your own universe, your own God, getting to chose what dessert, food, TV brand and sports car is so trivial and useless in my view. The “free” market thing is a lure, a decoy, shallow and hollow crap.
“If you can’t decide your own specie”
I’m assuming you mean species here*. And remarkably enough, you can change even this. There’s a whole community of people I don’t even pretend to understand, but they act as if they are animals, anthropomorphic or otherwise. Biologically, you are what you are but if you want to pretend you’re a fox… you’re totally entitled to do that. In regards to your sex drive (which I still don’t quite see where that figures in to this, but you brought it up), you can even still find people who want to have sex with you all the same. Again, I can’t pretend to understand the appeal but I know you can find it.
“your own sex”
Gender reassignment surgery is an option that even changes this, nowadays. Even if you don’t go with that option, there’s men and women who crossdress or even make themselves utterly gender neutral. They adopt their own view of the idea of gender and sex and still find partners that agree with them on that.
“your own epoch”
Even here, you can experience time periods you weren’t born to. Strict Amish societies practically live in another era, isolating themselves from our modern technology and adhering to the lifestyle of another time. Renaissance faires and societies allow people in a world of iPhones and Droids and crazy Japanese robots to go back and really study and live in a time that is far past.
“your own country”
Well, you have expatriation, immigration, all sorts of options here. While people often tell me as a libertarian to “move to another country if you don’t like it” and I understand that isn’t easy (it’s hard enough figuring out how to move to the nearest major city), but you have the freedom to make that money and make that leap into a new country.
“your own universe”
Dude, that’s what LSD is for. Or, you know, so I’ve been told. No personal experience.
“your own God”
…The world might be a bit simpler if we couldn’t choose our own God, but we can. We not only choose our own gods, but our interpretation of that God. Christians, Jews and Muslims all claim to worship the same one, but they’re interpretation of who “He” is and what “He” means is vastly different. You can adopt a philosophy that may or may not have a god (Buddhism), that has everything as a sort of god (Shintoism), that has a huge pantheon of gods (paganism).
The point is that you can choose everything. Not all of these things are given to you on a silver platter, of course, but that doesn’t remove your freedom to seek them out.
*And if you meant we can’t choose our own specie, well… lemme namedrop bitcoin for you here.
Thanks for the comment, very interesting.
My point being that the freedoms seeked by libertarians are trivial compared to what we don’t decide.
You can move to another country etc. But you cannot decide which country you were born.
You can pretend to be an animal, but you cannot become a real tiger for example.
You can join the Amish but you cannot time travel.
My point being that the freedoms claimed by libertarians are “cosmetic” at best, we decide almost nothing.
Do you really own your own house if you don’t even own your own life and will eventually have to die ? Is it really worth it to build something while you’re there if you won’t be along very long and somebody else will benefit from it ?
I intend to be here for as long as I can. And relative to everything else in our lives, they’re pretty long. We spend massive amounts of time doing mundane things, yet we still have years and years of life to live.
Cosmetic change isn’t really so trivial either. If I choose to do something as simple as pretending to be a tiger or cutting my hair and I get enjoyment from that, then it’s certainly not useless to have done it.
I also don’t see how it’s a negative if other people benefit when you are gone but that may be my bleeding heart side.
You seem to be lamenting scarcity which I suppose is understandable, but a bit childish really.
And you do seem to “subjectively value existential questions more than relaxing,” which by all means is valid but I value my “trivial” variety of options more than arguing your oddly depressing philosophy.
It also does feel a tad trollish, but maybe I’ve just been on the internet too long.
There is something unacceptable and violent, aggressive and abject about life the way it is that makes libertarianism nothing but a load of trivial pish.
maybe you just need to relax.
Apparently, from an Austrian anarcap perspective, I subjectively value existential questions more than relaxing.
From my life experiences and observation, I see that all life is organized in a hierarchical manner where life is subservient to life. There is always somebody or something owning you. It doesn’t matter if you’re an ant, a spider, a fish, a frog, a tiger, an elephant, a killer whale or a human.
You don’t own yourself. The bad is not that misfortune can happen to you and to say that I look only at the bad and not the good and that I should relax is missing the point.
The point being, the bad, is that we are all being consumed by the universe. This is what revolts me and I will not relax until I have obtained victory.
From a reality perspective your more then a bit detatched.
And a troll. Go back to your hole.
the free market is not about solving all the world’s problems, at the very least not over night. neither is the free market 100% efficient at anything. all we say is that it’s far better then the alternatives.
and i agree with you that pondering existential/moral questions is far superior to indulging in base desires or whatever.
Somehow, existential ruminations aren’t trivial pish?
“…where life is subservient to life.”
“The point being, the bad, is that we are all being consumed by the universe. This is what revolts me and I will not relax until I have obtained victory.”
Comments like this make my head hurt. Reading this made me think of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdKvZDQt96o
It was the libertarianism, limited as it may have been, of the past that allowed us to escape the violence, aggression and abjection of primitivism.
Try returning to nature for a little bit, and you’ll never consider the lives we have for ourselves a bad thing again.
I think it is simply incredibly that life is as good as it is.
Actually, I’m thinking that a hunting and gathering economy might be the most libertarian there could be because there can be no free lunch and bartering is not taxed and directly based on mutually agreeable subjective valuations.
People did not have bosses and punch cards and were all some sort of entrepreneurs that decided when they hunt, when the gather, how much based on their needs and ambition and could freely trade their skills and production with one another.
It’s the whole industrialized statist civilization that created classes and casts of people in a hierarchy of subservience. They way recruiters treat you like merchandise and look down on you.
The term “employment” did not exist in the hunting and gathering ages.
I’m not sure that the division of labor is such a good thing because then you over specialize yourself and you become more and more dependent on others, especially your bosses.
It’s been a full year I’ve been unemployed now and I enjoy it to the max, I can walk around all day, enjoy the freedom to be under no authority and the freedom to do nothing. I keep my needs and expenses to bear minimum and I enjoy it.
Civilization, with all it’s gadgets and goodies, is not worth it if you must lock yourself in the cage of employment.
I bet people were happier during hunting and gathering and there are some accounts of first nation American indians that lived as long as 130 years.
Our fast paced industrialized civilization is not natural and we are making pigs of ourselves.
The rat race ? Never again in my life.
I, too, had no idea you could get really cheap reading glasses, until I bumped into a $4 pair a few years back. I have now discovered I can get them for a buck at one of the “dollar store” chains.
Im afraid the freedom in the eyeglass market is largely confined to reading glasses which correct for longsightedness ( strengths denoted with ‘+’ in front of th enumber) , and for ordinary sunglasses. Just try to get a pair of specs for myopia ( where strengths are denoted with a minus) and see how different it is – and how expensive they turn out to be.
You do not have the option of trying various stengths until you find a pair that works comfortably. No, you are are compelled to consult with have a registered optometrist, who then writes you a prescription ( invariably to be filled by himself), and sells you a massively overpriced pair of lenses – after a lengthy wait of perhaps a week – in even more outrageously priced frames whose style and quality is no different from those surrounding the lenses of cheap over the counter reading specs.
Correct on all counts! The optometrist I use also has a “lab” that makes huge dollars on filling prescriptions for insured patients completely disconnected from the price of the product they are buying. They have the “process” set up so that I need to sit at the lab counter while I wait for my eyes to “adjust”; there they try to pressure me into buying a pair of glasses for a mere $250. I tell them that if they can’t sell them to me for $50 a pair, I’m not buying. Naturally, they look at me like I’m crazy, and when they ask me where I will get such a deal, I point to the Sears right down the street who is running a periodic “Two pairs for $99.99.” Once the lady said, “Oh, I can’t compete with that” and mercifully, the sales pitch ended.
What she meant was “Oh, we don’t need to compete with that because people are ignorant enough to buy at our prices.”
Only one pair for the house with one in reserve? Jim, you need one pair for each room in the house, then hope the cleaning lady doesn’t put them where you can’t find them!
Noah:
There’s a chain of discount-goods stores in and around Ohio named Mark’s that sells good, cheap reading glasses (and has for years) @ 88 cents.
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