Pessimistically, it's easy to predict that the government will abuse welfare as a means of controlling people. As such, we predict there will be people who will sense the puppet strings and refuse government welfare, willing to pay that price for freedom. Perhaps they voluntarily choose to live in poverty, voluntarily choosing to have nothing to lose, that is, nothing that the government can take away from them. How much of such an attitude and behavior is happening now?
Income disparity, including wide disparity, will persist, along with its seemingly undesirable effects. (Inspired by the inability for society to punish drunk drivers who have nothing to lose, especially in the context of alcoholism being correlated with poverty.)
In the grand scheme of things, society benefits by having (at least some) individuals with freedom. There's a tradeoff between benefits of freedom and benefits of homogeneity.
There is no easy answer.
Do people make a socially optimal choice in the price they choose to pay for freedom? Probably not: freedom has an externality. The behaviors someone with liberty does affect others. For example, someone free to experiment with a new way of doing something may find a better way of doing it, which is knowledge (a public good) that can be passed on to many people. Because of this externality, society cannot simply rely of individual decisions regarding whether to pay for freedom or give it up to reach the socially optimal allocation of freedom. The amount and type of government welfare affects the evolution of society.
A consequent political angle is, people with freedom induce change, and many people and institutions don't like change, preferring the status quo, so will resist social planning that grants, or increases, freedom, or will prefer planning that decreases it. Do political mechanisms achieve a socially optimal outcome?
No comments :
Post a Comment