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JavaBlack · #7 (**permalink**) 03-13-2006, 06:33 AM

Is the trouble welfare? Or the welfare programs that we have? All bureaucratic creations become bloated and full of loopholes if not watched closely. It's true of welfare. It's true of intelligence. It's true of the military. I would suggest that welfare is overdue for an overhaul and reassessment. But let us not forget that welfare programs exist for a reason. We really as a society have two options: pay some amount to keep people who can't/don't work alive or let them die. Whether we have programs or not, this choice is made.
Without the organization of bureaucratic welfare, people are left on an individual basis to save their loved ones or let them die. Very few can choose the latter and those who would are of a highy questionable moral nature. But for a single person or family, especially if not well-off, taking care of another for whatever reason is excessively expensive. The result is choosing between getting your kids educational advancement or letting your parents or brother live. That is why in some countries, maany considered more socialist than our own, old people are left to die so that parents can feed their kids. Welfare is about destroying the need to make such a choice. Thus it is important for true meritocracy (for the people who would have to support the disabled, old, chronically unemployed, or even useless) and for maintaining moral integrity and unconditional love in the family unit.
The problem is found in determining who is worthy of welfare and then we run into the problem with all bureaucracy. Setting a single, consistent standard is tough. Obviously we take care of the disabled and the old. But what about chronically unemployed and children of impovered? They may not be as "worthy", but they are in need of some kind of help. But how do we determine who is chronically unemployed and why and what kind of help they need? It's tough. That's why we have the current overly-general system.
The ideal free market solution is an end to bureaucratic problems and the use of market forces to supply the most efficient, effective, and customized forms of welfare. But since welfare is a public good, there is no incentive to take up the burden.
So the solution lies somewhere in getting the private sector involved and creating incentive. Somehow the private sector must be able to collect as much as the public sector can, if not more without the inefficiencies of marketing. Furthermore competition as we know it in the market is an inefficiency for such a public good in that all money given to a failed charity is waste.
So what we need is a bureaucracy that's purpose is merely to act as the middle man- the center for charity. I would suggest that the central bureaucracy be run as a private corporation with funding from the government. The overhead would be researchers pinpointing where needs were and studying charities to find the package most deserving of investment. The corporation would collect donations privately and get funding from the government.
And here's another idea. To encourage giving to the corporation, we make a tax form. Taxpayers can give out of their return, and subject to the same deduction rules as other charitable donations, any amount to the corporation. And while general funding for the corporation is distributed by bureaucrats, the taxpayer can check off the kind or scope of service he/she wishes the donation to go to (ie. kind:family services or skills training, scope: local, national, or international). A limited power of the purse for taxpayers willing to give a little more.
Probabl some flaws. After all I doubt this system will be implanted. But I think the cost of a corporation using skilled researchers would be less than the waste of charity competition, charity redundancy, and charity marketing.