In an America without social security, when a person develops some treatable life threatening illness such as HIV or Brittle Diabetes, and the person in question has not been able to maintain employment as a result of complications from their illness, what happens to that person? Are they left to die? I know anarcho-capitalists might disagree, but surely constitutionalists agree that the government has an interest to protect life, liberty, and property?
i think this where charity would come in
especially if you deregulate the entire market and lowered taxes to smallest ever
Your question cannot be answered. Might this individual be left to die? Certainly possible. It’s also possible they will be left to die even with the existence of a welfare state. That there exists no state which pledges to treat the poor and sickly does not mean that the poor and sickly will necessarily be “left to die.”
We can imagine that, with or without the state, there are people interested in helping this individual, whether due to contractual or business or religious or moral reasons. But there is no guarantee either way.
We support charity. We wish everyone in the market were more charitable because the world would be a better place. But if there’s some scrooge out there who’s got tons of money because he knows how to run a company, we’re not going to attack him and sieze his assets to pay for public welfare. You might be able to get away with this once, but it would discourage future entrepreneurial activities which serve other consumers.
Another point is that his assets are not homogenous. You cannot feed anyone with his 100 sports cars. You can probably turn his butler into a farmer, and raid his fridge for food for the hungry… So just because rich people have 500x as much “money” as everyone else does not mean we could take their stuff and have 500x as much widgets.
We can only speculate as to what would actually happen. Perhaps, there would be philanthropic people who fund clinics and stuff to treat people with illnesses. For example, Bill Gates and churches. Perhaps, there would already be a cure for HIV if weren’t for the market distortions created by the state.
It has some interest in doing but it has shown that hardly cares.
If we hadn’t had the social security tax encouraging capital consumption and taking resources out of the realm of economic calculation all these years, every individual in society would be much richer. This wealth would have helped prevent the incurring of such diseases in the first place, and would have funded both family and non-family charity to such an extent, that the degree of suffering caused by such ailments would have been much less than they are now.
What sick people need is more capitalism, not less.