Last week Rand Paul compared universal healthcare to slavery. Following on his son's heels, Ron Paul connected Social Security to slavery. Reason editor Matt Welch says "comparing slavery to anything short of, well, slavery, strikes me in the best case as wildly, off-puttingly inaccurate." Matt Zwolinski, another libertarian, is on the same page:
Rhetorically, I strongly suspect that the argument is unlikely to convince anyone who is not already a committed libertarian. And philosophically, of course, it’s just not true that universal health care involves anything like slavery, even if it (like slavery) is morally wrong, and even if it (like slavery) is wrong largely because of the coercive nature of the practice. However wrongful and coercive universal health care might be, no one’s advocating beating down doctor’s doors and hauling them away, no one’s advocating that they be bought and sold or separated from their families or…well, this is really too obvious, isn’t it? There’s a pretty good case to be made that the military draft was a form of slavery. But not everything of which libertarians disapprove warrants that reproach.
Matt Yglesias searches for the roots of the Pauls' beliefs:
[W]hen I hear this stuff I think of my former professor, the late great libertarian political philosopher Robert Nozick who developed the notion (“demoktesis”) that democratic governance is a form of slavery. Nozick is a very smart guy and the position is rigorously argued. That said, regulated welfare state capitalism is clearly not actually the same as slavery. The fact that one can reach the conclusion that it is shows that there’s something deeply unsound with the Nozick-style view of property rights and highlights the extent to which libertarian ideology represents a departure from the values of classical liberals in whose work one finds no support for such a conclusion.
The Dish 