Mhmm. Why would private charities step in more than they do now, or did in the past? If my 80 year old grandmother falls and breaks a hip and ends up with a 100k hospital bill, exactly what charity is she supposed to go to?
Does your grandmother not have insurance? I know mine does and I'm very glad for it, because last year around Thanksgiving she fell and broke her wrist. Kind of a big deal for an 87-year-old woman living alone in an old two-floor house in Massachusetts. Her insurance, paid for out of the savings that my grandfather kept so that they could retire(quite modestly), fully covered the costs of her treatment and recovery.
What if she didn't have insurance though? Why would that concern you at all?
Or is it her fault she doesn’t have a nest egg of a couple million?
In America today, if you retire without a huge chunk of money in the bank, you're not really "retiring", you're quitting work and hoping that nothing serious happens to you medically, and that your savings and social security payments are enough to pay your bills. You either failed to save responsibly, or you planned to live off of others, or you plain had bad luck and, say, lost half your worth in a housing market crash.
The first two situations could reasonably be called willfully negligent, and in the third situation, everybody else is probably hurting as badly due to the same market crash.
If, however, you spend and save wisely like your parents(hopefully) told you to, you'll probably be alright. Like most anything else, retirement costs money.
I dunno man. If private charities were a viable alternative to a government safety net, I don’t think a government safety net would have ever been created. Oh yea, evil socialist conspiracy right?
Existence is not proof of validity. I'm not calling you stupid, and I know what you're getting at, but to say that a government program, of all things, is worthy and necessary simply because it exists is just not the way to make a point in this company :)
Also, I have specifically included both organized and individual charity in my responses. A neighbor can help a neighbor, and that's still charity, even though it's not a big nonprofit. I bring that up because you keep mentioning private charities, but you neglect to consider the possibilities of the individual or community level.
*sigh*
Your entire point seems to rest on the idea that if we have any government interference, we have communism. I'm sick of hearing about how all our problems can be fixed by making sure the government does nothing, just like I am sick of people on the other side saying anything a private company does is evil by default. Obviously you need social safety nets and obviously you need incentives to perform. Show me a society that has operated at your ideal level and I'll show you why most people wouldn't want to live there. Has there ever been a society that operates in your ideal?
It's still not obvious why we need government-administered social safety nets, and what more incentive need there be than personal gain or profit?
No society has ever operated at my ideal level. The 19th-century U.S. came close, with the obvious(but clearly necessary to mention) exclusion of slavery and general racial injustice, foreign involvement, etc.
I fully admit that life might suck in the libertarian utopia of my dreams - certainly it would be difficult - but we can be confident from history that socialist experiments don't go well.
Can you provide an example of a society operating at your ideal level? I don't mean that sarcastically; I would be interested in seeing something you'd consider even close to ideal.
