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| Topic | what would happen if hospitals competed like other businesses |
| Balrog0 11/20/18 12:18:35 PM #49: | HenryAllbright posted... Can you explain what you mean by this? Also, are you talking in terms of how our current system works? Just wanting some clarification. https://niskanencenter.org/blog/social-insurance-not-charity/ If private charity is willing and able to step in and do a better job than K-12 then what is it waiting for? The same private dollars that would allegedly jump in when we shut down government schools could jump in today. Existing property taxes are hardly a budget constraint for the kinds of rich households, charities, and foundations that wed expect to fund something like this. I can already begin imagining some plausible libertarian responses to this (again, of the but for regulation and crowd-out variety), but his point stands. The conventional libertarian argument has always been a bit hand-wavey, pointing to eras in history where, yes, government was smaller and mutual aid societies were bigger, but where poverty was nonetheless widespread and abject. Consider Jonathan Gruber and Daniel Hungermans well known paper that estimates the extent to which the New Deal crowded out faith-based charity. Their central finding suggests that church spending fell 30% in response to the New Deal, and that government relief spending can explain virtually all of the decline in charitable church activity observed between 1933 and 1939. Sounds dramatic, right? And it may have been, for the churches. But in absolute terms, church benevolent spending fell a mere 2.9 cents for every dollar that federal transfers increased. As Gruber and Hungerman write, from 1929 to 1932, the last year before the New Deal, annual church benevolent spending in the U.S. averaged about $180 million. This is a little less than 10% as large as the average annual New Deal transfer spending over the 1933-1939 period of $2 billion. My naive interpretation of this result is that, were the entire post-New Deal/Great Society welfare state eliminated tomorrow, we should expect civil society to leave somewhere between 90-97% of social insurance spending unreplaced. And that is probably being generous, since the cultural and institutional capital needed to coordinate a private safety net does not emerge instantaneously, if it emerges at all. --- But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. ... Copied to Clipboard! |
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