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As someone who is old enough to have known people who had to make do prior to the safety net, I can tell you that you have underestimated the hardness of those times. For example, it was not uncommon for those who could no longer work to lose it all including their lives. I would strongly recommend the book by the archivist Otto Bettmann on the "good old days" to gain a better understanding. https://www.amazon.com/Good-Old-Days-They-Terrible/dp/0394709411

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You argue against perfection. You also are ignoring the countless change in society since those time (including vastly greater wealth and vastly better ability to communicate and to find those who need help).

And, as I replied to Bennie below, the real question is whether the harm done by today's safety nets is worse than the imperfections of private-only. Or by a much-reduced safety net.

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You are assuming that those with the wealth would help those less fortunate. In a time when "greed is good" is a common belief I have doubts that the aid would be sufficient. Government welfare spending is well over eighteen times what private charity spends on aid to the poor according to the latest statistics. The current system is in many ways a failure but reliance upon private charity would lead to even worse outcomes in my opinion.

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We can theorize all we want, we can debate which end-state would be wore, but the way you're presenting presumes a binary and all/nothing choice, which is not even remotely reality. As I noted in my comment to Benny, the current system is a destructive and counterproductive disaster, and much of that comes from the sheer size and breadth of it all.

The original goal of the Great Society was supposedly to reduce poverty (i.e. War on Poverty). That it's institutionalized rather than reducing is the true outrage.

As for the wealthy being cheap about philanthropy, that's a product of the safety net itself. If we are told over and over that our taxes are helping the poor, isn't it disincentivizing?

Besides, Americans have a long and deep history of charity and giving.

Disagreements over whether an end-state private system of charity would be better ignore the multiple elephants in the room. I've presented this as an argument from principle, but even in a utilitarian sense, the current system is terrible. An all-up private-only approach (which will never happen) is still apt to miss some people, but it wouldn't be remotely destructive the way the current system is.

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Given that we have no historical example of where private charity was sufficient to meet the need, I would strongly suggest that there will continue to be a role for government. Given too what I know of human nature, I do not expect that the demise of government programs would lead to a surge in private charity. However, I would love to be wrong about that because I have also seen the harm done in the current system.

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The historical example overlooks the role of government in displacing and suppressing private efforts, it overlooks the vast increase in societal wealth across the decades since, it doesn't account for the far greater ease of getting money to people in need (crowdfunding is a totally new animal), or of identifying those in need.

History offers lessons, but there are countless variables that must be accounted for.

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A cold hearted libertarian pragmatic argument for a safety net: those who finish last in the Game of Life will not necessarily be good sports about it.

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But, it's not really a libertarian argument, is it? It's a utilitarian one, and it is also, forgive me, toppling a straw man.

The straw man first: My arguments are born of principle, which is generally what I try to focus on in this blog. But, I've also discussed what I call the "A to B" problem many times, which is about how we get from the current state of affairs to the full-libertarian form, and I've also discussed, many times, how that end state is an impossibility.

That it's an impossibility doesn't mean trying to move toward it isn't a good idea. As with capitalism, even imperfect forms are better than the alternative, and the less-imperfect capitalism gets, the better the results overall.

Thing is, the safety net has done and continues to do massive harm. It destroys untold amounts of productive capital, it creates perverse incentives and moral hazard, and it traps people in dependency. Any alternative must be compared to that reality, not to the utopian "no one can ever go hungry," because even with this massive safety net, we can find people who do. But, anecdotes are not data, and the appearance of one person insufficiently helped by private charity does not support a conclusion that the private approach is worse than the public approach.

Since unraveling the safety net would take decades, there's ample time to judge whether that unraveling goes "too far..." provided, that is, that there's a true desire to get to a better state of affairs. As it is, it's about buying votes with Other People's Money, which is about as far from principled liberty as can be.

As for preemptive payoffs - that's how protectionist rackets work, and there's nothing principled or free there. That's a fear-based approach, a form of corruption, and it's destructive.

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