> Aren't these two things pretty essential for civilisation?
Isn't that also true of food?
Isn't that also true of food?
Giving people access to healthcare and fire protection doesn't create any bad incentives. You can't 'use' healthcare for monetary gain.
Giving people food, money etc, gives people incentives to not bother working.
Also I would say that a national health service ensures that the public is 'healthy'. Which affects us all, as diseases are transmitted etc. Just as the fire services ensures fires don't spread and burn down all the houses.
The same isn't true of giving people food.
I also am not sure it makes sense to lump together healthcare (which includes a lot of long-term preventative care like vaccines and lifestyle advice) and fire protection (which is mostly emergency damage control). A better analogy might be if the government provided free fire insurance covering everything citizens own -- actually, the US does this sort of thing with hurricanes and floods, so there's a fairly exact analogy, and it seems clear that it does create bad incentives to build and rebuild in hurricane-prone and low-lying areas.
Well yeah, but according to this kind of economistic thinking, paying a guy $40/hour instead of $20/hour encourages him to work half as many hours. Giving people anything for any reason, including as trade/payment, can always be construed as encouraging less work-ethic.
And likewise, withholding anything or inflicting any suffering or punishment can always be construed as encouraging work-ethic.
I find this kind of attitude totally bizarre. People do not stop having output just because they have food security. The notion that giving away food is bad because of work is a very capitalistic idea that actually serves to perpetuate hunger and starvation.
Giving handouts does far more harm than good. It keeps people down.
You mean, except for all the good incentives like achievement, mastery, purpose, learning, and contribution to a community that actual successful professionals are motivated by, rather than the motive against starvation that you seem to believe is the only reason anyone gets up in the morning?