So what % of gross income were you spending for healthcare before you had a preemie baby? Were your insurance rates raised dramatically?

The point is that based on the evidence the government-run system is 10x more efficient when it comes to controlling administration costs. The US Medicare program actually even rates poorly when compared to some of the other UHC systems out there too.

So yeah, for you to claim that private entities are more efficient that government in this regard is pretty much the opposite of what the evidence out there shows. Can you explain that?

Here's a cite too, from the WP article poasted earlier...

Almost the same, the only increasse are co-pays for his doctor visits and medicine he might need as I had a family plan before, adding him didn't increase my primium.

I'm curious as to what people have to say about this. My fundamental assumption is that government does not deliver services as cost effectively as private companies but I have virtually no information about how things work in the healthcare industry. I've been reading some stuff today about how our system is much more expensive than Canada's due to their single payer system whereas our system has hundreds of different insurnance companies (with hundreds of different rules and regulations on what each company covers, etc so providers had a ton of crap to wade through since each patient has different coverage rules).

I really am not educated on these things at all so am interested in learning.

That depends on who made study. Medicare fraud was $47.99 billion according to Wikipedia. I've seen other estimates at $90B.

I don't believe in making decisions purely on principle. I'm alright with the Government taking my money and spending it on things that we, as a society, agree are important. Providing a social safety net (in terms of welfare, EI, health care, etc.) is one area where I think the Government can do the job better than all other practical alternatives.

The US system is pretty much the worst possible system. There is a cartel, so you get all the "bad" things that come from a monopoly with none of the good things. There are arguments to be made on the economic efficiency of a single payer system, but there is no free market to compare them to.

John Stossel disagrees. And he has a special showing how government usually does it all wrong and inefficiently.

Do you mean in general or for social programs or just for health care?

Because I range from probably agree - to pretty skeptical - to downright disagree depending on which of those he's talking about.

The program was on FBN. My cable network doesn't carry it.

Much of Medicare fraud can easily be stopped. Stop blindly approving claims by new doctors not associated with known businesses.
In the area of education require the for profit schools to have regular students who aren't on aid. A large percentage of their students shouldn't be going to college. They don't qualify.

Surely that's not enough to make the US system as efficient as many of the other top health care systems. I don't understand the implications of the for profit schools having regular students on aid.

More Proof We Can't Stop Poverty By Making It More Comfortable
by Michael D. Tanner


Michael D. Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of The Poverty of Welfare: Helping Others in Civil Society and "Bad Medicine: A Guide to the Real Costs and Consequences of the New Health Care Law."
Added to cato.org on September 20, 2010

This article appeared in Investor's Business Daily on September 17, 2010.

On Jan. 8, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson delivered a State of the Union address to Congress in which he declared an "unconditional war on poverty in America." Then, the poverty rate in America was around 19% and falling rapidly. Last week, it was reported that the poverty rate this year is expected to be roughly 14.3%, and is climbing.

Between then and now, the federal government spent more than $13 trillion fighting poverty, and state and local governments added another couple of trillion. Yet the poverty rate never fell below 10.5%.

The federal government now has 122 separate anti-poverty programs (defined as either means-tested programs or programs whose legislative language specifically refers to their purpose as combating poverty).

Michael D. Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of The Poverty of Welfare: Helping Others in Civil Society and "Bad Medicine: A Guide to the Real Costs and Consequences of the New Health Care Law."

More by Michael D. TannerThese range from Medicaid, the largest and most expensive anti-poverty program, to the tiny Even Start Program for Indian Tribes and Tribal Organizations. Combined, these 122 programs spent more than $591 billion in 2009, and are projected to cost even more this year.

That amounts to $14,849 for every poor man, woman and child in America. Given that the poverty line is $10,830, it would have been cheaper just to mail every poor person a check for $11,000.Welfare spending increased significantly under the Bush administration, but President Obama has thrown money at anti-poverty programs at an unprecedented rate. Just during his first year in office, Obama's administration increased spending on welfare programs by more than $120 billion.

(By way of comparison, President Bush increased welfare spending by roughly $80 billion over his entire second term).

Some of the increase, of course, is due to the recession. But the administration has also made conscious policy choices to ease eligibility and expand caseloads. For example, the stimulus bill included a provision that created a new "emergency fund" to help states pay for added welfare recipients, with the federal government footing 80% of the cost for the new "clients."

This was an important change because it undid many of the incentives contained in the 1996 Clinton welfare reform for states to reduce welfare rolls.

Under the new rules, states that succeed in getting people off welfare would lose the opportunity for increased federal funding. And states that make it easier to stay on welfare (by, say, raising the time limit from two years to five) were rewarded with more taxpayer cash. The bill even let states with rising welfare rolls still collect their "case-load reduction" bonuses.

The end result is that one out of every six Americans is now receiving some form of government assistance.

Of course all this welfare spending could arguably be justified, if we were actually reducing poverty. But, as the most recent numbers make clear, we're not. Clearly we are doing something wrong. Throwing money at the problem has neither reduced poverty nor made the poor self-sufficient.

Instead, government welfare programs have torn at the social fabric of the country and been a significant factor in increasing out-of-wedlock births with all of their attendant problems. They have weakened the work ethic and contributed to rising crime rates.

Most tragically of all, the pathologies they engender have been passed on from parent to child, from generation to generation.

In fact, the whole theory underlying our welfare programs is wrong-headed. We focus far too much on making poverty more comfortable, and not enough on creating the prosperity that will get people out of poverty.

Observers have known for a long time that the surest ways to stay out of poverty are to finish school, not get pregnant outside marriage and get a job, any job, and stick with it. That means that if we wish to fight poverty, we must end those government policies — high taxes and regulatory excess — that inhibit growth and job creation.

We must protect capital investment and give people the opportunity to start new businesses. We must reform our failed government school system to encourage competition and choice. We must encourage the poor to save and invest.

More importantly, the real work of fighting poverty must come not from the government, but from the engines of civil society. An enormous amount of evidence and experience shows that private charities are far more effective than government welfare programs.

While welfare provides incentives for counterproductive behavior, private charities can use their aid to encourage self-sufficiency, self-improvement, and independence. Private charities can individualize their approaches and target specific problems that are holding people in poverty.
One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Perhaps that's something to keep in mind the next time we hear a call for more welfare spending.

Wow, now that's a sidestep.

For starters, I'm sure you can explain the Scandanavian countries and how not self sufficient those people are, or were, through the years, followed by contrasting it with countries with very little safety net and how self sufficient they are, thereby exceeding those with safety nets. This shouldn't be too difficult, especially since it's 'very probable.'

Start off by using countries whose people are highly self sufficient yet have very little safety net. There should be a plethora of them, since it's so 'very probable.'

b

Replacing Welfare with Private Charity

Private efforts have been much more successful than the federal government's failed attempt at charity. America is the most generous nation on earth. Americans already contribute more than $125 billion annually to charity. In fact, more than 85 percent of all adult Americans make some charitable contribution each year. In addition, about half of all American adults perform volunteer work; more than 20 billion hours were worked in 1991. The dollar value of that volunteer work was more than $176 billion. Volunteer work and cash donations combined bring American charitable contributions to more than $300 billion per year, not counting the countless dollars and time given informally to family members, neighbors, and others outside the formal charity system.

Private charities have been more successful than government welfare for several reasons. First, private charities are able to individualize their approach to the circumstances of poor people in ways that governments can never do. Government regulations must be designed to treat all similarly situated recipients alike. Glenn C. Loury of Boston University explains the difference between welfare and private charities on that point. "Because citizens have due process rights which cannot be fully abrogated . . . public judgments must be made in a manner that can be defended after the fact, sometimes even in court." The result is that most government programs rely on the simple provision of cash or other goods and services without any attempt to differentiate between the needs of recipients.

Take, for example, the case of a poor person who has a job offer. But she can't get to the job because her car battery is dead. A government welfare program can do nothing but tell her to wait two weeks until her welfare check arrives. Of course, by that time the job will be gone. A private charity can simply go out and buy a car battery (or even jump-start the dead battery).

The sheer size of government programs works against individualization. As one welfare case worker lamented, "With 125 cases it's hard to remember that they're all human beings. Sometimes they're just a number." Bureaucracy is a major factor in government welfare programs. For example, a report on welfare in Illinois found procedures requiring "nine forms to process an address change, at least six forms to add or delete a member of a household, and a minimum of six forms to report a change in earnings or employment." All that for just one program.

In her excellent book Tyranny of Kindness, Theresa Funiciello, a former welfare mother, describes the dehumanizing world of the government welfare system--a system in which regulations and bureaucracy rule all else. It is a system in which illiterate homeless people with mental illnesses are handed 17-page forms to fill out, women nine months pregnant are told to verify their pregnancies, a woman who was raped is told she is ineligible for benefits because she can't list the baby's father on the required form. It is a world totally unable to adjust to the slightest deviation from the bureaucratic norm.

In addition to being better able to target individual needs, private charities are much better able to target assistance to those who really need help. Because eligibility requirements for government welfare programs are arbitrary and cannot be changed to fit individual circumstances, many people in genuine need do not receive assistance, while benefits often go to people who do not really need them. More than 40 percent of all families living below the poverty level receive no government assistance. Yet more than half of the families receiving means-tested benefits are not poor. Thus, a student may receive food stamps, while a homeless man with no mailing address goes without. Private charities are not bound by such bureaucratic restrictions.

Private charity also has a better record of actually delivering aid to recipients. Surprisingly little of the money being spent on federal and state social welfare programs actually reaches recipients. In 1965, 70 cents of every dollar spent by the government to fight poverty went directly to poor people. Today, 70 cents of every dollar goes, not to poor people, but to government bureaucrats and others who serve the poor. Few private charities have the bureaucratic overhead and inefficiency of government programs.

A Saftey Net, Not a Way of Life

Second, in general, private charity is much more likely to be targeted to short-term emergency assistance than to long-term dependence. Thus, private charity provides a safety net, not a way of life.

Moreover, private charities may demand that the poor change their behavior in exchange for assistance. For example, a private charity may reduce or withhold benefits if a recipient does not stop using alcohol or drugs, look for a job, or avoid pregnancy. Private charities are much more likely than government programs to offer counseling and one-on-one follow-up rather than simply provide a check.

By the same token, because of the separation of church and state, the government cannot support programs that promote religious values as a way out of poverty. Yet church and other religious charities have a history of success in dealing with the problems that often lead to poverty.

Finally, and perhaps most important, private charity requires a different attitude on the part of both recipients and donors. For recipients, private charity is not an entitlement but a gift carrying reciprocal obligations. As Father Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute describes it, "An impersonal check given without any expectations for responsible behavior leads to a damaged sense of self-worth. The beauty of local [private charitable] efforts to help the needy is that . . . they make the individual receiving the aid realize that he must work to live up to the expectations of those helping him out."

Private charity demands that donors become directly involved. Former Yale political science professor James Payne notes how little citizen involvement there is in government charity:

We know now that in most cases of government policy making, decisions are not made according to the democratic ideal of control by ordinary citizens. Policy is made by elites, through special interest politics, bureaucratic pressures, and legislative manipulations. Insiders decide what happens, shaping the outcome according to their own preferences and their political pull. The citizens are simply bystanders.
Private charity, in contrast, is based on "having individuals vote with their own time, money, and energy."

There is no compassion in spending someone else's money--even for a good cause. True compassion means giving of yourself. As historian Gertrude Himmelfarb puts it, "Compassion is a moral sentiment, not a political principle." Welfare allows individuals to escape their obligation to be truly charitable. As Robert Thompson of the University of Pennsylvania said a century ago, government charity is a "rough contrivance to lift from the social conscience a burden that should not be either lifted or lightened in that way."

Civil Society

That is the essence of the civil society. When George Washington warned that "government is not reason, it is not eloquence--it is force," he was making an important distinction. Government relies on force and coercion to achieve its objectives, including charity. In contrast, the civil society relies on persuasion--reason and eloquence--to motivate voluntary giving. In the civil society people give because they are committed to helping, because they believe in what they are doing.

Thus private charity is ennobling of everyone involved, both those who give and those who receive. Government welfare is ennobling of no one. Alexis de Tocqueville recognized that 150 years ago. Calling for the abolition of public relief, Tocqueville lauded private charity for establishing a "moral tie" between giver and receiver. In contrast, impersonal government relief destroys any sense of morality. The donor (read taxpayer) resents his involuntary contribution, while the recipient feels no gratitude for what he receives and inevitably believes that what he receives is insufficient.

Perhaps the entire question of government welfare versus private charity was best summed up by Pope John Paul II in his recent encyclical Centesimus Annus.

By intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, the welfare state leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase in public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending. In fact, it would appear that needs are best understood and satisfied by people who are closest to them and who act as neighbors to those in need. It should be added that certain kinds of demands often call for a response which is not material but which is capable of perceiving the deeper human need.
Better yet, consider this simple thought experiment: If you had $10,000 available that you wanted to use to help the poor, would you give it to the government to help fund welfare or would you donate it to the private charity of your choice?

This article originally appeared in the November/December 1996 edition of Cato Policy Report.

I'm not going to delve into any international programs or whatever because I know nothing of them.

And I'm ready for you to start posting evidence demonstrating that government programs are more effective than charity, looking forward to it.

And I'm still waiting for an answer to my question: What kind of evidence will it take for you to agree that charity is more effective than government programs at helping the poor?

Lot of words, little substance.

Bold: False. Hard to believe anyone still seriously trying to push this stance.

Italics: Save and invest what, all that disposable income they have? Another sign of gross detachment from reality.

Underlined: Citation needed.(that doesn't mean just another post of someone saying it's possible, it means including examples and/or contrasts)

Underlined/Bold: Another definition of insanity is making claims, over and over, saying how simple, easy and obvious it is, yet show no support for the stance...especially in contrast to other countries who've succeeded with strong safety nets, including our own during certain times in our past.

But what he conveniently leaves out is how the system has changed from back when our results were much better, instead acting as if nothing existed pre-1975 and our condition today is representative of the countries entire past existence.

I guess we can't say you didn't try.

b

And there never will be, unless you want to end things like Medicare, coverage for the military and veterans, and the practice of providing emergent care to anyone in an ER. That being the case you'd think the theoretical arguments would dissipate but they continue to get stronger.

Face facts, the USA will NEVER have a totally market-based system, no matter how much better you think it might be. The politics will simply not allow it.

You won't provide it. Because of this:
Somehow you think this strengthens your stance.

Maybe you should look into this a little instead of just spewing unsupported conjecture. Again, if it's so easy and obvious, it shouldn't take you long to find examples. Does no one who supports your stance have examples of little safety nets coupled with increased self sufficiency/prosperity of the people?

Until then, spew on...

b

This.

bold: See medicare and how much people are fighting to keep it.

But some fun proof of the propaganda machine is the chants of 'keep the gov't out of my medicare.' Along with the same people, in this system, fighting against UHC.

<not to forget: Dems had their part in the propaganda also>

b

Jude Blanchette
The Shortcomings of Government Charity
Private Charities Offer the Best Cure for Chronic Poverty
May 2007 • Volume: 57 • Issue: 4 •

In their book, Myths of Rich and Poor, W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm observe, “Some part of human nature connects with the apocalyptic. Time and again, the pessimists among us have envisioned the world going straight to hell.” To be sure, “pessimists” apparently run most national newspapers. Headline after headline screams about the brutality, avarice, death, and inequality that infest our world. Be it violence in the Middle East, droughts in Africa, drug wars in South America, or airplane crashes across the globe, there seems to be little to celebrate in our modern world.

Because it lacked the typical journalistic flair for the dour, a story appearing on the website of the Examiner last December 18 might have been passed over by most casual readers. “Charitable giving in ’06 predicted to outpace ’05 record,” was the headline. It reported that “total donations in 2005 hit a high of $260 billion and 2006 should top that.” For those who noticed the article, it provided a perhaps brief pause in the bad news, but little more. To more-interested parties, however, it was a simple reminder of the longstanding crusade by America’s private charities and individual philanthropists to mitigate one of the world’s oldest social ills: chronic poverty.

For large charities such as the Salvation Army and smaller local charities run by churches and other private organizations, the fight against poverty has been going on for the past 150 years. Tragically, standing in their way has been the federal government. Besides an effort to wage “war” on poverty beginning in the 1960s, the federal government has attempted to intercede and dole out aid since the beginning of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. These interventions have proven costly and yielded disastrous results. By continually siphoning funds away from the private sector, lawmakers and bureaucrats further diminish the ability of civil society to deal with the problem of poverty. (As Charles Murray shows in Losing Ground, poverty was declining steadily through the 1950s and 1960s up until the Great Society programs kicked in during the early 1970s.)

If the plight of the poor is to be truly addressed, Americans should study the lessons of the past. Earlier in the twentieth century, private charities offered a more effective cure for chronic indigence, and it was through mutually beneficial activities and voluntary funding that the spirit of American compassion was unleashed. In the best interests of the poor, the government should withdraw itself completely from all activities designed to help them and allow civil society its full range of motion.

Unfortunately, most social commentators see increased state action as the best (indeed, the only) way to fight poverty. With apologies to Ian McEwan, the welfare state has become “the repository of collective fantasy.” Private charities, they often argue, financed by volunteers and private donations, cannot meet the immense burden of welfare provision. Advocates of public assistance see “private enterprise” as an economic system that functions on Hobbesian self-interest and that would leave the poor to suffer if profit could not be squeezed from their labor.

Many proponents of laissez faire recognize these common protestations, but are unable to provide cogent rebuttal. On the surface it would seem that only government, with its vast infrastructure and immense financial resources, can improve the plight of the poor. Private charities, subject to the vagaries of voluntary donations, are a far less reliable source of income.

Yet if this were the case, how is it that after more than 40 years since the Great Society and more than $8 trillion spent (in 2000 dollars) so little headway has been made by the government in alleviating poverty?

This is not to say that poverty has not diminished in America. Indeed, the market economy has virtually eliminated extreme poverty in the United States. The average poor American lives a lifestyle that would be envied by most of the world’s citizens. But this is a product of the market economy not government handouts. It is only through wealth creation, not wealth distribution, that we see the wellspring of human progress.

Most Americans today were born after the New Deal and therefore have no memory of American social policy before the 1930s. Those then alive will recall that before the policies implemented by Roosevelt, there effectively were no social-welfare programs provided by the federal government. State and local government programs in place during that time, such as soup kitchens and state-run orphanages, were meager affairs in comparison to the welfare programs of today. The question must then be asked: If the government wasn’t helping the poor, who was?

To put it simply, neighbors and religious communities helped the less fortunate, and members of different races, ethnicities, and occupations expressed solidarity to improve their financial independence. In effect, it was private voluntary cooperation that came to the aid of the poor. In the absence of government assistance, the social net cast by private charities, organizations, and businesses reached farther and remained much stronger than federal welfare programs.

According to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, poverty is “a lack of money or material possessions,” and on the surface money would seem to be the obvious remedy. But if reducing poverty were simply a matter of transferring funds from rich to poor, then the “War on Poverty” should have been won years ago. In Losing Ground, Murray chronicles the failures of federal social policies from 1950–1980, concluding, “The first effect [of government policy] . . . was to make it profitable for the poor to behave in the short term in ways that were destructive in the long term. Their second effect was to mask these long-term losses—to subsidize irretrievable mistakes. We tried to remove the barriers to escape poverty, and inadvertently built a trap.” The “trap” was built through the largess of the federal government, which exacerbated the dependency of the poor on handouts, and supported decisions that furthered damaging behavior.

Observing the English Poor Laws in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Memoirs on Pauperism: “Man, like all socially-organized beings, has a natural passion for idleness. There are, however, two incentives to work: the need to live and the desire to improve conditions of life.” In effect, the government destroys both of these incentives. By receiving food, shelter, and most other necessities, welfare recipients aren’t faced with the need to provide for themselves. Likewise, by supporting all lifestyle decisions, both good and bad, government insulates the poor from having to face the consequences of unfavorable choices. Tocqueville was prescient in his critique of government welfare, forecasting, “I have said that the inevitable result of public charity was to perpetuate idleness among the majority of the poor and to provide for their leisure at the expense of those who work.” By traditionally allocating the bulk of its resources as cash payments, the government increased dependency and neglected to address the causes of perpetual poverty.

Welfare Reform
The idea of entitlement has been rectified to some extent by the federal government’s 1996 welfare reform. Officially named the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), it has succeeded in decreasing the federal welfare caseload. Individuals are no longer “entitled” to receive aid now that states must choose among its population who is to receive cash payments. According to a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) news release in 2002, “Between PRWORA’s enactment in August 1996 and December 2001, the welfare caseload fell nearly 57 percent from 12.2 million recipients to fewer than 5.3 million. This is the largest welfare caseload decline in history and the lowest percentage of the population on welfare since 1965.”

Yet in many ways PRWORA has failed. HHS can claim success since its enactment because of statistical chicanery. Fewer and fewer individuals are now eligible for cash assistance, and since only those receiving monthly payments are counted on the welfare roles, the program is deemed a success. Yet as Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute concludes, “[W]elfare reform has done little to make individuals self-sufficient. Even after leaving welfare, most former recipients continue to rely on a wide variety of noncash government assistance programs.” At the same time that cash assistance has decreased, noncash handouts have increased markedly. According to the New York Times (2003), “[F]ederal and state welfare money spent on cash assistance declined 44 percent in 2002, from 77 percent in 1997. The proportion allocated to various types of noncash assistance shot up to 56 percent, from 23 percent in 1997.

And the Associated Press reported in February,

The welfare state is bigger than ever despite a decade of policies designed to wean poor people from public aid.
The number of families receiving cash benefits from welfare has plummeted since the government imposed time limits on the payments a decade ago. But other programs for the poor—including Medicaid, food stamps and disability benefits—are bursting with new enrollees.
The result, according to an Associated Press analysis, is that nearly one in six persons rely [sic] on some form of public assistance, a larger share than at any time since the government started measuring two decades ago.
How, Not How Much
The primary reason private charity is more effective and more humane in providing for the poor lies in how aid is given, not simply how much is given. If administered indiscriminately, any type of aid renders the recipient in a worse predicament than before, for now he is dependent on the handouts of others. As Isabel Paterson wrote in The God of the Machine: “[T]ake the case of a truly needy man, who is not incapacitated, and suppose that the philanthropist gives him food and clothes and shelter—when he has used them, he is just where he was before, except that he may have acquired the habit of dependence.” Economist and Freeman columnist Walter E. Williams comes to a similar conclusion in More Liberty Means Less Government, labeling indiscriminate aid “animal compassion.” Writes Williams: “Compassion towards animals includes making sure the animal has adequate food and water, medical attention and when needed, suitable shelter, and a toy or two for entertainment. . . . Animal compassion bears none of the hardships and complexities of human compassion. You don’t have to instill lessons of independence. In fact, independence is a negative.”

Like any other government monopoly (public schools, the post office), public charity is insulated from competition and financial loss, and thus inefficient spending is inevitable. Indeed, bureaucrats have an incentive to recruit recipients in order to justify bigger budgets. With the need to control costs diminished, aid can be handed out regardless of conditions or situations facing potential recipients. By way of comparison, private charities, churches, and mutual-aid societies are faced with economic realities and must attempt to decide who truly merits aid, as well as how to best bring about the recipient’s economic independence. An admittedly subjective process, this helps to eliminate freeloaders, thus allowing more resources to be directed to the deserving poor. As law professor Richard A. Epstein writes in Principles for a Free Society: “Since charitable budgets were—as they are today—limited, if not fixed, a primary concern was how to maximize the benefits over all the indigent: that is, how to prevent scarce resources from being drained off by those who were not really needy or who had, in fact, resources of their own; and then to channel those resources to those who were most in need.”

Only private institutions, however, can turn down aid applicants using self-imposed criteria. Conversely, government programs often operate under the belief that humans have a “right” to aid. Marvin Olasky, author of The Tragedy of American Compassion, believes that this entitlement is the problem. He writes: “The War on Poverty of the 1960s was a disaster not so much because of its new programs but because of their emphasis on entitlement rather than need. Opportunities to give aid with discretion disappeared as welfare hearings became legal circuses and depersonalization triumphed. Freedom came to mean governmental support rather than the opportunity to work and move up the employment ladder.” Over 150 years ago, Tocqueville reached the same conclusion:

I am deeply convinced that any permanent, regular administrative system whose aim will be to provide for the needs of the poor will breed more miseries than it can cure, will deprave the population that it wants to help and comfort, will in time reduce the rich to being no more than tenant-farmers of the poor, will dry up the sources of savings, . . . and the indigent, no longer being able to take from the impoverished rich the means for providing for his needs, will find it easier to plunder them of all their property at one stroke than to ask for their help.

Values Stressed
In stark contrast to the “cookie-cutter” approach of government, private charities such as that maintained by the Mormon church stress personal responsibility, spiritualism, and good character as the most effective combatants of indigence. In its 1936 “Church Welfare Plan,” the Mormon church formulated the guidelines that underpinned their policy on charity. The plan was “a system under which the curse of idleness would be done away with, the evils of a dole abolished, and the independence, industry, thrift and self-respect be once more established amongst our people. The aim of the Church is to help the people to help themselves.”

Likewise, Olasky points out, during the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, a multiplicity of Jewish- and Christian-run charitable activities arose in America’s major cities as populations began to urbanize and poverty became more visible. Organizations such as the United Hebrew Charities, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, and the Olivet Helping Hand Society stressed the importance of self-help, family ties, and living a prudent lifestyle if the individual wanted to regain self-reliance. They believed that aid given without nourishment of a man’s character would accomplish little except to demean him. As the founder of New York City’s Charity Organization Society, Josephine Shaw Lowell, wrote (quoted by Olasky), “Nothing should be done under the guise of charity, which tends to break down the character. It is the greatest wrong that can be done to him to undermine the character of a poor man.”

Perhaps the most extraordinary example of self-help and social cooperation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the mutual-aid movement characterized by fraternal, or friendly, societies. As historian David Beito has shown, until the onset of the Great Depression and the resulting increase in government assistance, fraternal societies played a vital role in the welfare of the poor. It is estimated that by 1910, over one-third of the American adult male population were members of or had some affiliation with a fraternal society. The primary role of fraternal societies was to provide sickness and death benefits, which served as forms of health and life insurance. The function of the fraternal system is best characterized by a spokesman for one such fraternal society, who wrote (quoted by Beito): “[A] few dollars given here, a small sum there to help a stricken member back on his feet or to keep his protection in force during a crisis in his financial affairs; a sick Neighbor’s wheat harvested, his grain hauled to market, his winter’s fuel cut or a home built to replace one destroyed by a midnight fire—thus has fraternity been at work among a million members in 14,000 camps.”

Through a system of local lodges where charitable and social events were held, fraternal societies represented a plethora of races, religions, ethnicities, and occupations, according to Joseph P. Blanchette, my father, in The View from Shanty Pond. The Ladies of the Maccabees, for example, was a white, all-female society that provided health benefits, Beito writes. The Independent Order of Saint Luke was a black fraternal society that, in addition to providing for the sick and the survivors of its members, founded the Saint Luke Penny Savings Bank of Richmond, Va. Tired of the racist attitudes exhibited by some white merchants, the order went on to found the Saint Luke Emporium, which provided an opportunity for blacks to spend their paychecks in a black-owned store.

In addition to the financial services provided by fraternal societies, the individual lodges made it possible for immigrants to socialize and participate in activities together. When a member was sick or near death, his “brothers” or “sisters” felt a social obligation to help the victim’s family by either providing medical care or paying for burial. Blanchette quotes the motto of the Irish Benevolent Society, “We visit our sick, and bury our dead.” When members needed to borrow money during rough times, they were obliged to regain financial stability as quickly as possible. Much of the fraternal society’s appeal was due to its being one of the few avenues through which immigrants and the poor could assure themselves some financial stability. Not surprisingly, the demise of the fraternal society as a primary provider of mutual aid corresponded to the rise of the New Deal era of federal welfare policies.

If this voluntary social safety net was so wide and so pervasive, why did government step in? Ludwig von Mises’s analysis of interventionism accurately describes the rise of the welfare state: programs that were originally instituted to fill the “gaps” in the private safety net eventually exacerbated the problem at hand. This in turn produced a call for more intervention to fix the new problem. The latest round of intervention created its own unintended consequences, thus creating yet another demand for a “solution.” And on and on. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society propelled the welfare state to even greater heights (or depths, depending on how you view the issue).

History shows that it is only through private voluntary solutions that we see true human compassion. Organizations and individuals, in the spirit of compassion, provided poverty relief that embraced generosity, but recognized the dire consequences of haphazardly given aid. Most social workers of a century ago understood that good character, self-reliance, and strong social ties were virtues that must be instilled in the poor if there were to be any gains made in alleviating poverty. Before the Depression private solutions played an important moral and material role for the poor. Whereas government relies on coercion, charities and fraternal societies embody the qualities that make volunteerism socially advantageous.

Conversely, the past 70 years have shown that government has not prudently handled, and cannot prudently handle, the plight of the poor. Rather than help those in need of assistance during times of trouble, the federal government has imprisoned them in a political power game, resulting in increased dependence. Only abolition of the government dole will allow the private sector to once again achieve the levels of social welfare seen in the past.

So your unwilling or unable (or both)? to demonstrate how government is more effective than private charities at helping the poor? You expect me to convince YOU but you don't need to convince me? How convienent.

What was to stop private charities for the entire history of civilization when we had abject poverty that's much much worse than what the US has now with govt safety nets?

If your not willing to try to pursuade me that govenment is better than private charity at helping the poor I'm not interested in trying to convince you that private charity does a better job. Consider any future posts I make in this thread to be general posts and not at all an effort on my part to convince you of anything. Nice chatting with you.

Adam Smith's invisible hand?