Collective Conscious

Lati­co­nom­ics, via Cato@Liberty, says it would:

I also worry about the “crowd­ing out” effect that this vast expan­sion of the gov­ern­ment into health care will have on vol­un­tary char­i­ta­ble action. Some­where along the line we have lost sight of the fact that char­ity and health care was not an inven­tion of Wash­ing­ton bureau­crats.… Faith is the source of these works, not pol­icy initiatives.

Stand­ing research is sup­port­ive of this con­clu­sion, and Cato’s own brief on the issue echoes the con­cern. The mag­ni­tude of the effect, how­ever, is lower than one would expect — a 2007 paper found that an addi­tional dol­lar of increased gov­ern­ment wel­fare spend­ing decreased pri­vate char­ity by just 12 cents.

Evil gov­ern­ment doc­tors pre­pare to do the jobs of hard­work­ing Chris­t­ian ones.

Such a con­clu­sion sup­ports my own line of thought on the mat­ter: pri­vate giv­ing is likely to fall well short of the “effi­cient” level of char­ity because char­i­ta­ble giv­ing is a clas­sic case of a pub­lic good and is there­fore sub­ject to clas­sic prob­lems of over­con­sump­tion and under­sup­ply. For that rea­son, the crowd­ing out effect is far from com­plete, and actu­ally has the poten­tial to add to total soci­etal welfare.