Healthcare Without Government

Who Takes Care Of The Poor If Not The State?

“Without public health, then those without insurance would be left out to die. Right?”

This “argument” is false on many levels.

Firstly, it’s an appeal to emotion, not an intelligent logical argument.

Second, it is hypocritical. It self-righteously pretends to be morally superior for considering the poor people who couldn’t or wouldn’t get health insurance, or who don’t have money to pay for ad hoc medical attention. It conveniently ignores the immoral act of forcing workers to pay, with their labour, for people who don’t pay for themselves. Being forced, under threat of violence, to pay with your labour for people who don’t work is called slavery. And the irony is that some people who pretend to be so against slavery seem to conduct Olympic medal-level mental gymnastics to justify their support for taxes.

Also, this “argument” ignores the first cause of why someone would be unable to afford health insurance. The first root cause of poverty is taxation, government intervention, inflation from money supply manipulation, restrictions and licensing that create monopolies/oligopolies, which in turn increase prices across the board.

It’s worth mentioning yet again the effects of taxation on the economy: Taxation decelerates money velocity, which manifests in less overall demand compared to what an economy supplies. We know this because the economy already produces an outcome, but taxation acts as a brake in the economic cycle that prevents a large portion of that supply to turn into demand. This means unemployment (oversupply of labour), and with unemployment, desperate employees competing for fewer job vacancies have little negotiating leverage. So, wages go down, as per the law of supply and demand. With low wages, less money circulates in the economy.

Taxation also reduces corporate profits, which in turn shrinks re-investment and growth that create more jobs, wealth and prosperity.

Not only that, but due to taxation, corporations try to evade taxes through money laundering, which means a large chunk of wealth, at any given time, is out of circulation, which means less demand. Tax money is also out of circulation, because it sits around to be paid then budgeted, and still waits idle until corrupt government bureaucrats decide what to do with it. In other words, tax money slows the economic cycle because it is spent much later than it would have been spent if left to circulate freely in the economy.

Government embezzlement is yet another facilitator of poverty. The pooling of resources in a centralized authority begs for corruption. Power corrupts all, and there is no greater power than having vast amounts of spending power in your hands. Corrupt government officials spend money where they know they can get a cut. One might argue that this won’t slow down the economy, because they’ll spend that money either way, thus continuing the economic cycle. This would be true if the entire process of laundering their embezzled wealth, and constantly transferring it from here to there so as to hide it, wouldn’t mean that at any given time large sums of purchasing power remains uninitialized outside of the economic cycle that produced it.

Taxation’s decelerating effect on the economic cycle slows down money velocity, which means less wealth to go around, and thus more poverty.

Taxation also brings poverty because government spending (tax money redistribution) goes to arbitrary projects conveniently chosen by corrupt government officials. This is hardly efficient for the economy, because only the free market driven by supply-and-demand incentives can dictate optimal use of wealth in an economy. Government spends according to corrupt interests, lobbying bribes, ego projects, and whatever some useless government bureaucrat thinks is best in his mind. Just think of how fully centrally planned economies (communism/socialism) have brought massive starvation to their people just because a group of self-appointed “experts” thought they could decided what the market needed at any given time better than the free market itself. Sub-optimal use of wealth is a further brake on the economic cycle, which drives poverty. This is why socialist states, every single time, do much worse than mixed economies that at least allow some market freedom.

Taxation is the reason poverty exists. To think that taxation can solve poverty is to delude oneself that poison can cure the sick. So no, public healthcare funded by taxes is not the solution for “the poor who somehow can’t afford healthcare”. It’s the other way around: the reason some can’t afford healthcare is taxation. Not only that, but the consolidation of healthcare resources into on big chunk of public monopolistic healthcare system means that pharmaceuticals can easily lobby corrupt politicians to up their prices, since competition is not an issue. And this is what happens. See the failing NHS and Canada’s healthcare systems. They offer horrible service, and people get taxed to the bone for it. With such high levels of taxation, they could have easily had the best private insurance instead.

The argument that “we need government to help the poor” is stupid because it also ignores those who willingly choose to not have public healthcare. Maybe they like living dangerously, or they prefer to pay ad hoc for any medical attention they might need. That’s their choice, and no one should presume to be the divine arbiter of morality to choose for them.

The false assumption that “government helps the poor” ignores voluntary charity. If a society is sensible enough to consider “the poor” who supposedly cannot afford healthcare, and if said society is sensible enough to be the majority so that democratic processes enforce public healthcare, then surely this majority is enough to voluntarily offer support for healthcare for those who claim to not afford it. In other words, if we voluntarily vote to be taxed for charity, why don’t we avoid the embezzling middleman (the state) and organize private charities instead? Surely that would be better than using government as a vampire in charge of a blood bank. And people are willing to give to private charities despite being taxed to the bone for forced government “charities” (welfare) that are abused and don’t seem to ever work. Without government-enforced “charity”, the minority of people who don’t want to participate in voluntary healthcare charities would be more than offset by the inefficiencies and corruption of government. Also, government welfare creates welfare abusers who take resources from those who truly need them. Private charities are harder to cheat people, because donors aren’t forced by the threat of violence to contribute.

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Private charities are real, and more efficient and more fair than government forced false charities. Couple this with the economic prosperity of non-taxation, wouldn’t poverty be far less, or even non-existent without government intervention supposedly to fix it? You ask me to prove it? I would be happy to, were a free society allowed to exist by the violence of the state. State violence forbids cessation movements. Besides, asking me to prove how a free society is more efficient than authoritarianism is a burden of proof fallacy. I don’t have to prove the default; the non-existence of the state. If you have to enforce the state, then you it becomes the alternative to the default. You have to prove how better the alternative is (the existence of the state) compared to the default (the non-existence of the state). You have to prove that governance, which is an arbitrary construct that deviates from the norm of it non existing, is somehow more efficient. Do we have a scientific study on this, or do we make ad hoc fallacies about “people eating each other” without any form of governance to “keep the peace?”

Government is the guy who breaks a window and then makes tenants pay the repair bill. He then parades as the savior as the gullible tenants applaud him.

Lastly, if government wanted to help the poor, why does poverty still exist, and why is the wealth gap exponentially increasing? One would think that, with trillions upon trillions of dollar spent on war, one could invest in economic infrastructures that would boost prosperity across the board rather than give free handouts that make people complacent in their inaction.

“Give a man a free fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man how to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”

Free money is not the solution to poverty; an environment of prosperity and opportunity is. And government erodes prosperity and opportunity with taxation, embezzlement, inefficient spending, corrupt regulations, economy-suppressing restrictions, inflation from money supply increases, economic crises from interest rate manipulation.

If we really care for the poor, then the moral thing to do is end government intervention.