ManusJustus said:
There definately forms of 'helping' that do worse in the long term. However, healthcare and education are not one of those. Healthy people are more productive workers, which benefits both the individual and the overall economy. The same argument goes for education. In regards to the bottom quote, its my opinion that both union workers and CEOs make more money than they are worth. |
Education is a very different situation from most forms of government social programs ...
There is a point where rapid diminishing returns follow with education (which moves over time), and there are certain types of education that provide little benefit, but a well educated workforce leads to a stronger and more advanced economy which benefits everyone. The money spent on giving a child a quality education from kindergarden through highschool is easily made up over their career because they're able to do more work of higher value. The combination of globalization and the continued ability of man to automate jobs ensures that every generation will need a better education than the previous generation to maintain or improve their standard of living; and this will probably be true for the next several generations.
Healthcare is a different beast than education ... The vast majority of healthcare costs are associated with preventable illness and bureaucracy (regardless of who provides the service), and the growth in costs over the past 60 years have motsly been related to the cost of delivering better healthcare to people (better diagnosis, treatment and an ability to treat more diseases). Until our mindset on health changes, and we can control the costs, we're on a path where healthcare will be unaffordable or unavialable to people regardless of who provides the services.
