Please rephrase for me in non-textbook terms. Are you suggesting that we can’t determine, for example, that we can’t determine the “worth” of a public sanitary sewer system because we don’t know how many people would prefer to dump their slop in the streets instead of paying for sewers?
Is there any government-run, tax-supported program that is clearly worth the cost?
Not forgetting it at all. Just have never seen a study indicating that average contributions and premiums exceed benefits. IMO far too many elderly receive far too much treatment for far too long, primarily because they do not have sufficient skin in the game. The for-profit medical community thrives on this.
I strongly favor universal health care. I do NOT support universal extension of Medicare as it currently exists.
Any universal healthcare system is going to have to deal with the fee for service dilemma, as well as the inefficiencies of many competing providers all of whom want the latest equipment. Evidence based medicine will help. But at least a few doctors overtest out of caution, not to line their pockets.
And I don’t think that granny is forcing hospitals to give her expensive treatments. You really don’t want to discourage people from making doctor visits too much. Because I had easily accessible care, I went to my doctor when I got rejected from giving blood - and found I had a heart condition, which got missed in my checkup two weeks before. The treatment I got was a lot cheaper than if I had had a heart attack, not to mention dying.
But all this applies to the current system just as well as Medicare. The reason for universal Medicare is that the infrastructure is in place, and it works. But it clearly isn’t the only solution.
To get back more directly to the OP’s question, there is a vast range of very successful government social programs in all civilized countries dealing with social services, income security, housing, health care, and many other important social issues. To cite an example we can start with health care as one of the important and extraordinarily successful ones, even in the US where Medicare is an acknowledged successful program with strong public support despite all Republican attempts to thwart it and despite the fact that it’s just a baby step toward public health care that is rife with unfortunate compromises and limitations. All other civilized countries have enacted full universal health care at little or no individual cost to the citizen and at average per-capita costs less than half of those in the US, often offering better services with better outcomes. But let’s focus here on Medicare as it exists in the US.
I think the OP should ask his libertarian pal how it feels to be living under the yoke of socialist oppression. Because back in the early 60s Saint Reagan (blessed be His name), the patron saint of all Republicans and many libertarians, was predicting exactly that if the scourge of socialist Medicare was ever enacted. Specifically, among other things, speaking on behalf of the health insurance industry, the AMA, and free-market dogmatists everywhere, Reagan predicted the following:
That Medicare was a sure road to socialism and communism:
[INDENT]One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine
That our children will be in proverbial chains and lose all freedom of choice:
From [Medicare] it’s a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay and pretty soon your son won’t decide when he’s in school where he will go or what he will do for a living.
And it will bring the dark scourge of socialism and the end of freedom:
Write those letters now [to Congress] and call your friends and [tell] them to write … If you don’t do this and I don’t do this, one of these days we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.
https://theintercept.com/2015/07/30/medicares-50th-birthday-lets-forget-ronald-reagans-insane-diatribe-trying-stop/[/INDENT]
Those were just some of the dire warnings, and in one of the early examples of fake astroturfing, the doctors’ wives and others in the AMA Ladies’ Auxiliary were exhorted to engage in a Tupperware-party style campaign called Operation Coffeecup to quash this looming socialist scourge, with the assistance of a vinyl record featuring the narration of Saint Reagan himself.
But Medicare was enacted anyway. What actually happened was this (from the same link, above):
Two years before Medicare’s enactment, only 54 percent of Americans 65 and over had insurance that covered hospital expenses, and private insurance companies regularly terminated coverage for older “customers” who’d become too expensive. The elderly faced not just their bodies breaking down, but the simultaneous terror of financial ruin.
Within three years of Medicare’s creation, 96 percent of people 65 and over had hospital insurance, and it could never be cancelled. It’s hard to overstate how large a boon Medicare has been for the whole country.
Other countries, as already said, went much further, and enacted full UHC. None of them has ever reversed that decision, which became politically entrenched and eventually supported in principle by all parties on all sides of the political spectrum, because you can’t argue with success, efficiency, effectiveness, and massive popular support. The spectre of communism and the loss of all our freedoms has yet to manifest itself anywhere, despite dire warnings from Saint Reagan that medical care would be the thin edge of the wedge bringing about Armageddon.
Value is determined by voluntary exchange. If someone points a gun at you and forces you to buy a $2 hamburger, that is not a demonstration of your preference for the hamburger over the $2. It could be in line with your preferences but we cannot know because it was not a voluntary action.
In the case of government, it can not be determined that the coerced “exchange” of taxation and loot distribution is in line with the preferences of taxpayer. My bet is that besides things like USPS services, they do not align.
In a democracy, is voting for your preferred government a voluntary action?
Yes, but doing so provides ideological camouflage for governments to initiate force, which is not voluntary. Voting could be said to be an initiation of force in some cases. Trump voters, in one way of thinking, voted to initiate force on certain immigrants. In another way, voting can be in self-defense. If a particular politician is threatening to come at you when elected, for example Bernie Sanders wanted to throttle the taxpayer, then voting against him could be in self-defense.
Voting in a narrow sense is a voluntary action. If you want to draw comparisons between voting and the type of exchange I was talking about, that isn’t going to work. What if you vote for the loser? Any particular vote for a politician comes packaged with a long list of preferences for interactions between you and the state, and you may not agree with the politician on all of them.
There are three people on the corner and two want to buy a hamburger, so they turn the gun on the third to buy them some hamburgers. The third guy coughs up $2 for two hamburgers. Maybe they pitch in $1 each towards it. Ok so now they have demonstrated a preference for one burger over $1 but still prefer $2 over a burger, otherwise they wouldn’t have voted for it, but purchased it outright. Say the burger costs $1.50 to make. Now we have a system in which more resources are devoted to burger making than is justified by consumer values. This is a system that does not “work”.
That sounds to me like a roundabout way of pushing the standard libertarian dogma that governments are necessarily always evil. That’s a premise badly in need of evidence, and in my opinion is just total nonsense as has been amply shown in this thread. It’s nothing less than a condemnation of democracy. Dictatorships may be tyrannical, but functional democracies are whatever the majority of the people want them to be, commensurate with the people’s level of knowledge and engagement.
Consider the following. After the end of World War II the British people voted for a government that gave them the National Health System. Some years later the people of Saskatchewan voted for the first publicly funded hospitalization program, and later on, for a full-fledged single-payer universal health care system that eventually became the model for the whole country. The citizens of every industrialized democracy on earth have expressed a desire for a system in which health care is guaranteed for everyone, regardless of ability to pay, and they have it. They consider UHC to be one of the pillars of a civilized society, and it has such strong popular support that even conservative parties are onside with it, something that is plainly evident if one follow politics in those countries. No one is running around as Reagan did in the early 60s with absurd declarations that it will lead to communism and tyranny, or trying to push “free markets” or “voluntary” participation when it comes to basic health care.
In contrast, a recent article in the New Yorker analyzing the US health care fiasco interviewed a couple where the husband voted for Trump but the wife, taking issue with that, voted for the Libertarian lunatic Johnson. But they had one thing in common: both were salivating over the repeal of “Obamacare”, and yet both were prime examples of exactly the demographic that benefits from it the most. If they had the option they’d probably vote to repeal Medicare, too. It is said that people get the government they deserve, and I believe it. It is both the strength and the weakness of democracy that people are responsible for their own destinies.
"WillFarnaby Libertarians do not deny that if the government takes resources and disperses the loot that some people will benefit. It’s actually one of the reasons we oppose government intervention. I’m sure someone who benefits from coerced payments into Medicare by prematurely deceased individuals is quite happy with the arrangements. "
WillFarnaby
Are there government programs that are successful in your eyes?
And, the USPS is an oddity – though it’s a Federal agency, it’s been independent since 1971. Its Board of Governors is mostly appointed by the President, but, AFAICT, it receives little or no direct funding from the Federal budget (i.e., no taxpayer dollars). However, it does benefit from Federal laws – such as the law barring other delivery services from using mailboxes, tax-exempt status, and being able to borrow money from the Treasury at low interest rates.
(Final Jeopardy theme continues to play.)
There are plenty that accomplish their stated goals. For example, the government successfully collects a lot of taxes.
yeah, those questions are different.
How about the interstate road system? Would you say that’s successful?
That’s certainly vague enough, but looking at the title of this thread again I see that you have actually managed to avoid the question altogether. Let me clarify:
Are there any clearly successful government social programs, according to your own standards? I shouldn’t have to say that the government inteself successfully collecting taxes doesn’t count…but apparently I do.
I assume the desired takeaway from this is that libertarians do not think that other people being happy is worth anything - certainly it’s not worth them losing so much as a penny of their precious income or other possessions.
Which is to say, we’re intended to see libertarians as sociopaths with no interest in the social contract.
So you oppose public services because some people will benefit from them? In the case of health care services like Medicare or UHC everywhere in the civilized world, everyone benefits. I don’t think the fact that the dead don’t benefit is a valid justification for criticism.
Are Will Farnaby libertarians also opposed to all forms of insurance? Because insurance can only exist if on average people pay more into it than they take out. In the case of health insurance, customers have to pay much more into it than they ever take out, on average, because of the huge overhead that makes the system so incredibly inefficient, yet there has to be enough loot left over to make the stockholders happy and rich. Is that what you favor? Government programs are not there to make stockholders happy or to enrich anyone, they are there to serve the public. I notice that your only response to what I said in #48 is to spout more canned libertarian dogma.
Having no concern about “other people being happy” is the least of the libertarians’ problems. As we saw in the famous exchange with Ron Paul about health insurance, they don’t even care whether other people live or die, as long as they don’t have to pay taxes.
Successful at what, vastly distorting the population growth patterns of the US? Making a vehicle capable of high-speed travel, and the skills to operate one nearly a requirement for life in some parts of the country? Killing many people needlessly? Disincentivizing efficient mass transit, both public and private? Creating armies of special interests? Enabling white flight and destroying urban cultures and large swaths of the bucolic countryside? Burning gasoline? Disrupting ecosystems? Stranding millions upon millions of drivers in traffic jams for billions and billions of unproductive hours?
Life! Don’t talk to me about life.