Hank Fescue said:
I gave you plenty of examples of the bad things entitlement programs do. Did you not read the story of the Canadian fishermen vs the Americans? Would you call Canada’s social safety net for fishermen a success? Do you think those people are better off in the long run with the assistance?
Here are another couple of universal truths that Conservatives feel Liberals don’t pay enough attention to:
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If you subsidize something, you get more of it. Subsidize fishing, and you’ll get overfishing. Subsidize poverty, and more people will stay in poverty. When the U.S. made it harder to collect welfare (thanks to welfare reform under Bill Clinton - to his credit), fewer people stayed in lifestyles that required welfare to support it. In every country you go to, you can measure the size of the welfare population by how much money welfare provides. Canada has a very generous welfare system - and we have almost twice as many people below the poverty line as in the U.S. Something like 17% or 18% vs 10% or 11%.
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All major changes to the economic decisionmaking of the citizenry will have major unintended consequences. And liberals almost never consider them. All they look at is the problem, and the direct effects of the solution. All the myriad side-effects are ignored.
I will give you a perfect example of this: Universal daycare. This may not be a big issue in the U.S. right now, but in other countries where socialism has advanced farther, the front-lines of the debate include the idea that everyone should have access to free daycare. Let’s looks at some of the concepts by this:
Universality: This is a cherished principle among socialists. They don’t just want a safety net for the poorest, they want universal coverage for all. We already subsidize daycare for the poor in Canada. But to socialists, this ‘stigmatizes’ them. Better to just give it to everyone. Plus, they argue that it’s not fair that anyone should have to pay to have their kids cared for, while others don’t. In Canada, it is also illegal to seek private medical care. EVERYONE has to go through public health care. It’s universal. In the U.S., the prescription health care coverage for seniors is universal, and not means-tested.
This ridiculous yet cherished notion among socialists makes every potential social program orders of magnitude more expensive. It also causes them to fall into the category of:
Legislating wealth: The argument is that day care is very expensive, and people shouldn’t have to pay it. So who IS going to pay it? The money fairy? Same with plans to socialize health care. The argument is, “We can’t afford our health care, so the government must step in.” Somehow, invoking the magic of government is supposed to make health care affordable. Aside from the ludicrous notion that government can make things cheaper and more effective, it totally ignores the fact that we can’t afford all the health care we want, simply because health care is more expensive than we can afford. It also ignores the subsidy effect mentioned above (if you subsidize something, you get more of it). Give everyone free access to health care, and the demand for it will skyrocket. In the meantime, the supply will dwindle as fewer people choose to become doctors and work in a rigid, controlled environment. The result == shortages.
The social side-effects are ignored: Just what do you think the result would be of universal daycare? I can tell you - the result would be an explosion of kids put into daycare. Many, many families have one parent stay home to look after the children simply because the added cost of daycare makes the second paycheck somewhat irrelevant. Remove that economic restraining device, and millions of kids who would otherwise be raised by their own parents will wind up being raised in state-run institutions. Yet, whenever that is brought up in these universal daycare debates, the socialists roll their eyes and go, “Yeah, right.”
But this is just the first, most obvious side-effect. The pernicious ones are the ones harder or impossible to predict, because a complex economy operates somewhat chaotically. For instance, where are all the extra day care workers going to come from? What if there aren’t enough? You’ll have to raise salaries. But if you do that, you’re going to put pressure on the other industries that employ young women (the primary demographic group of daycare workers). Shortages appear elsewhere. And what about the tax burden? What will that do to the economy? Wouldn’t it just be MARVY if the added new burden raised unemployment rates, meaning all these now-childfree women can’t find jobs in the first place? What have we accomplished? And what are the side-effects of millions of kids undergoing fundamental changes to the way they are raised? What will this do to the juvenile crime rate? To divorce statistics? No one knows. But socialists are just fine with rolling the dice. Because they think they have a plan for everything.
I don’t oppose a safety net. My attitude is, “We are a rich society - we can afford to be magnanimous.” But don’t call it an entitlement, and make it clear that no one OWES people a home, a job, a meal. We offer it because we wish to help. There SHOULD be a social stigma attached to being on perpetual social assistance. People should want to work their asses off to get off the dole.
All social programs should be means-tested. Is there a problem with poor people having access to health care? Fine. Provide basic health care for the poorest. But universal health care is a disaster, and unnecessary. Do old people on fixed incomes have a hard time affording their new drugs? Fine. Prove to the state that your drugs are bankrupting you, and we’ll lend a hand. But universal prescription drug benefits? Ridiculous. When Bill Gates turns 65, he can buy his own damned drugs.
Government assistance should operate on the margins. It shouldn’t be the main organizing force of society. And if that’s the case, we’ve already gone FAR past the point at which new programs are necessary, and should be in a phase now where we are going through the programs that currently exist, looking to see how we can trim them and make them more efficient, and also how to install incentives that cause people to want to leave the programs. That’s what welfare reform was all about, and it worked spectacularly.