But I do think of welfare as a government imposed redistribution that formalizes and mandates charity. That's the key problem with welfare. Formalizing charity that way reframes it as an entitlement causing people to think that it's owed.
As I find your posts on this topic further from places I can engage, I look for sentences with reach beneath the talk to get to more basic differences. So I latched on the notion that you think of social programs like medicaid as charity, public charity.
I obviously don't. I think of them as good social policy which, best I can tell, despite some problems, is reasonably well managed.
To repeat what I've typed on several occasions, I see medicaid as humane, in that it provides for a more liveable old age than would be possible without it. Because it comes from more reliable sources than charity, it reduces the anxiety the elderly poor have. And it, in the most narrow sense of self-interest, you will pardon me if I note that's the way I think of most libertarian approaches to social policy, serves your self interest. That is it reduces, dramatically, the likelihood of contagious diseases spreading through the population.
So it's very far from charity for me. And is a fundamental difference between the way you and I think about social policy. |
