Yes, but someone else can get his treatment. There is no net loss of health care in society.
Also, in a free market you can insure yourself against everything, including losing your job and not being able to afford health care.
This is what family, friends, community, religious organizations and charities are for. That is the social safety net. I can’t count the number of initiatives I’ve seen to raise money for a local child dying of cancer and they raise large sums of money this way, just from the goodness of strangers’ hearts. Welfare, on the other hand, systematizes idleness and deceipt and rewards most handsomely those who are most shiftless and conniving. Hardly a recipe for a happy, healthy society.
Clayton -
I still don’t understand the fear that without a welfare state people will be left to die. Why not offer them help if you care about it? Why not find more like-minded people(surely everyone in support of a welfare state love to help the poor) and create a charity? I’d love an answer for this.
Humanity isn’t given enough credit for its generousity.
I live in New York City and in the streets of manhattan people are always panhandling- try befriending one of them and you’ll find that some of them earn $100 a day tax free. There was this one guy in Bryant Park who came up to me and a group of friends and started to make some poetry based on what each of my friends looked like- we thought he had some damn good talent and gave him the cash we had. I saw him go to another table and talk with some tourists and eventually they took pictures with him and gave him $40 for less than 5 minutes of work!
Now imagine the money people would save if they weren’t burdened with so much taxes, they could afford to give more away. Imagine if the purchasing power of the dollar was still strong- that panhandler could find an apartment and eat and dress very well for himself! Things are made so much more difficult thanks to government regulation of life.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I find most people who are pro-welfare state and believe that people are too selfish to help the poor, are usually in a bad situation in life and angry that no one helped them. There are valid reasons for economic difficulty- look towards the people that have the power to redistribute wealth when no one else can.
“People aren’t given much credit for being generous.”
It’s a contradiction. On the one hand, people are too miserly to be trusted to give enough to charity on their own, so they have to be coerced by the government. Yet, on the other hand, people are generous enough to elect the politicians who will coerce them to give to charity. It’s like the contradiction between people being too ignorant and stupid to be trusted to make their own decisions, yet wise enough to elect the right leaders to coerce them into making the right decisions.
Clayton -
Clayton, to be fair to the welfare statist though, they may assume that if the percentage is something like 60/40 altruistic/selfish, then the 60% of altruists can coerce the 40% of selfish people to give to welfare which they see as being effective charity. So they are arguing that without the welfare, it won’t operate as if it had 100% operational support, which they think it should have.
What do you think happens to capital that (1) doesn’t get invested “inwardly”, or (2) doesn’t get stolen and squadered by the government? Gets “outwardly” lost in space, perchance?
If the welfare state weren’t around social safety nets would still exist…RonPaulLOL are you really attempting to prove that there was no social safety net pre-modern welfare state?
Rothbard wrote something that goes along with the whole “you would just let people die under a free market” claim…
“Our example of the “worst possible case” enables us to analyze
one of the most popular objections to the free society: that
“it leaves people free to starve.” First, from the fact that this
objection is so widespread, we can easily conclude that there will
be enough charitable people in the society to present these
unfortunates with gifts. There is, however, a more fundamental
refutation. It is that the “freedom-to-starve” argument rests on
a basic confusion of “freedom” with “abundance of exchangeable
goods.” The two must be kept conceptually distinct. Freedom
is meaningfully definable only as absence of interpersonal
restrictions. Robinson Crusoe on the desert island is absolutely
free, since there is no other person to hinder him. But he is not
necessarily living an abundant life; indeed, he is likely to be constantly
on the verge of starvation. Whether or not man lives at
the level of poverty or abundance depends upon the success that
he and his ancestors have had in grappling with nature and in
transforming naturally given resources into capital goods and
consumers’ goods. The two problems, therefore, are logically
separate. Crusoe is absolutely free, yet starving, while it is certainly
possible, though not likely, for a given person at a given
instant to be a slave while being kept in riches by his master. Yet
there is an important connection between the two, for we have
seen that a free market tends to lead to abundance for all of its
participants, and we shall see below that violent intervention in
the market and a hegemonic society tend to lead to general
poverty. That a person is “free to starve” is therefore not a condemnation
of the free market, but a simple fact of nature: every
child comes into the world without capital or resources of his
own. On the contrary, as we shall see further below, it is the free
market in a free society that furnishes the only instrument to
reduce or eliminate poverty and provide abundance.” page 339 MES
I imagine RonPaulLol would argue that, before governments started providing social safety nets, there was never any “guarantee” that people “in need” would be helped. The illusion of certainty strikes again!
I think the problem that RonPauLoL and other welfarists wish to overcome is uncertainty in life. And while this is a noble goal, it is, unfortunately, impossible.
So there is currently a shortage in charitable blood donations, even though it involves no opportunity cost (i.e. me giving a pint of blood requires no loss,because i can regain that blood), yet we seem to expect that there will enough charitable donations to go round for millions of people who require financial assistance?
some operations cost in excess of $100,000, possibly millions and you expect for every one of these there will be someone who sells their possessions to give these individuals the money? if people cant be bothered to donate blood, why will they be bothered to donate collectively billions of dollars?
if there are these charitable people, then where are they to provide assistance to the 50 million americans without health insurance or to the millions who are homeless now?
Do I smell a Blood Tax? Brilliant!
There’s plenty of people- there are doctors and pharmacists that provide completely free services to all their family and friends(which can easily be 100+ people that the doctor does this for, of course with mandatory insurance on the horizon those people will have to spend money when they didn’t have to before).
You don’t think that if people were allowed to keep more of their income instead of having it taxed away- there wouldn’t be more charity? You don’t think that perhaps if the value of the currency wasn’t dropping every year the heavy burden the poor carry wouldn’t be eased? You don’t think that there are reasons that healthcare costs are so high in the first place? Or that there are reasons that rent is so high and forces homelessness?
Are you doing something about the fact that there is a shortage in charitable blood donations? Perhaps you could even offer them something so that they rather donate blood than sit around at home?
Is stealing really your only solution to life’s problems? So far what I’m hearing is “The only way I can be safe is if I steal from that guy because I need it who cares about him.”
Give me some solutions that don’t involve stealing someone else’s money!
Well according to RonPaulLol’s logic, we should have a mandatory blood-giving day where we are forced by the State to donate blood, even if it is against our will. The greater good and all that jazz.
Can you explain what you mean by “shortage” in the above? Otherwise, donating blood certainly does involve an opportunity cost, namely all the things I could be doing instead of giving blood. You seem to misunderstand the concept of opportunity cost, unfortunately.
See, that’s just it - how much is “enough”? There’s no objective answer to that question, just as there’s no answer to the question “How many people actually require financial assistance?”
Are you implicitly arguing that people are entitled to any and all operations that they want to have, regardless of cost? If so, why?
Speaking only for myself, I would expect people to do what they want with their money, as long as they don’t hurt me in the process. Failing or refusing to give me charitable donations (directly or indirectly) doesn’t hurt me, even if I’m broke.
I’d actually argue that most people are more willing to donate dollars than blood. And people already collectively donate billions of dollars to charity - over $300 billion in the US during 2009 alone.
Perhaps they have a different idea of who’s “needy” and who isn’t. Of course, that’s the real crux of your problem - the notion that other people have different opinions on this and other issues. It’s all about imposing your preferences on the rest of society by force. Whoever disagrees with you is Stupid, if not downright Evil, and You Know Better Than They Do.
Well said, Rcder. But since it’s impossible, I for one hardly consider it to be a noble goal.
As I pointed out earlier, you people don’t quite seem to understand how market pricing works. The reason that an operation costs so much is that society does not have enough resources to produce as many of them as people need. The very function of prices is to make some people unable to afford certain goods, because we do not have enough of them. If 1000 people need an operation, but society can only produce 800 operations, then they will be priced at a level where 200 people can’t afford one. Pricing is a mechanism to ration resources that are scarce. It’s not like the price of a good is some inherent feature of that good and the problem is how to come up with enough money.
Declaring operations “free” through the government does not magically make more operations available. If anything, a nationalized system is going to make them more scarce. If 200 people can’t afford health care in a free market, then 200 people still can’t get health care after we took away the need to pay for it. The only difference is that now people don’t die because they lack money but because they are too far back on the waiting list or drew the wrong number. There is simply no way to get around the unpleasant fact that we do not have enough resources for everyone to get everything they want. We need to ration scarcity somehow.
But the market is the best way to allocate scarce resources. Both history and economic theory have shown that free markets are the best system to make resources abundant. Once we do have enough productivity, operations will naturally be affordable because if there are enough operations to go around then they will be priced so that everyone can afford one. So you see, the way to make health care affordable is not to take more money from the rich, but to let higher productivity raise real wages to the point where everyone can afford operations.
If the Underpants Gnomes were statists:
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Found a government
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???
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Universal happiness!
Clayton -
Thomas Sowell on the function of prices (Basic Economics):
Many people see prices as simply obstacles to their getting the things they want. Those who would like to live in a beach-front home, for example, may abandon such plans when they discover how expensive beach-front property is. But high prices are not the reason we cannot all live on the beach front. On the contrary, the inherent reality is that there are not nearly enough beach front homes to go around and prices simply convey that underlying reality. When many people bid for a relatively few homes, those homes become very expensive becuase of limited supply. But it is not the prices that cause the scarcity, which would exist whatever other economic or social arrangements might be used instead of prices.
Blood is under-supplied because the price of blood is too low. A full-fledged blood donation market would bring the demand for blood into balance with the supply of blood.
Clayton -
Diversity!