Editor’s note: I’ve been skull-deep in a home improvement project this week (and the week before, and the next week), so today I’m cranking the WABAC machine to May 2016, where I pondered how government’s response to the opioid epidemic mirrored its approach to other “help the public” matters.
We've already had this discussion before and so I'm not going to start it over again since we'd end up in the same place as before. However, it was through an act of private charity that I learned I could work miracles. No lie! When I lived in Chicago, there was a homeless lady who always had her oxygen mask and bottle with her. She would position herself daily on the block where I worked. One day things had gone especially well and feeling good about myself and bad for her, I gave her a twenty dollar bill (this was back in the days when twenty dollars was "real" money) and then the MIRACLE occurred. This lady who could hardly take a step without her oxygen bounded up on her feet and started running somewhere with the money in her hand like a track star with a baton at the Olympics. Needless to say, I did not give her any more money even though she showed up the next day looking just as pitiful as before.
This piece is about moral hazard, counterproductive incentives, and the falsehood of "helping others" by proxy coercion.
You got feedback for your act of charity, and through that you figured not to help her again. Do you think government charity has such feedback mechanisms?
Excellent!
We've already had this discussion before and so I'm not going to start it over again since we'd end up in the same place as before. However, it was through an act of private charity that I learned I could work miracles. No lie! When I lived in Chicago, there was a homeless lady who always had her oxygen mask and bottle with her. She would position herself daily on the block where I worked. One day things had gone especially well and feeling good about myself and bad for her, I gave her a twenty dollar bill (this was back in the days when twenty dollars was "real" money) and then the MIRACLE occurred. This lady who could hardly take a step without her oxygen bounded up on her feet and started running somewhere with the money in her hand like a track star with a baton at the Olympics. Needless to say, I did not give her any more money even though she showed up the next day looking just as pitiful as before.
This piece is about moral hazard, counterproductive incentives, and the falsehood of "helping others" by proxy coercion.
You got feedback for your act of charity, and through that you figured not to help her again. Do you think government charity has such feedback mechanisms?
There are feedback mechanisms but they are faulty and expensive.
And far more susceptible to rent-seekers.