Healthcare and the Resourceful Poor

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The real problem holding back the poor in the world today is not discrimination and racism; it is the tax bite and the regulatory bite and the credentials bite of the liberal welfare/regulatory state

The minute that you propose to touch a penny of the trillions of our money that liberals spend on their patronage state, the cry from the modern Tapers and Tadpoles goes up: You are balancing the budget on the backs of the poor! Everyone knows that the poor are helpless, and that without government programs the poor would go to the wall, or worse.

But are they?

We have seen James Tooley in The Beautiful Tree describe how the Third World poor pay for the education of their children when the government schools are no good. Then there is Dr. Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh and his Off the Books: The Underground Economy and the Urban Poor. He describes the urban poor African-Americans of Maquis Park on Chicago's South Side.

They appear to be anything but helpless. [snip]

The big problem of the modern poor is that they can't afford to go legit. The system is set up to force them outside the law. For the employer, it's the tax bite that cranks up the costs of labor. For the would-be employee, a legitimate job in the private sector would terminate welfare or disability payments.

The same problem was faced by the school entrepreneurs in James Tooley's Beautiful Tree. The only way they could keep their schools open was by bribing the city inspectors.

The poor are resourceful and they have the will to make it. But they can't afford to pay full freight on all the bells and whistles that the modern state hangs onto every product sale and every employee labor hour. When you insist on all that stuff then the poor have to go off the books.

Then they become victims of the police, the politicians, and the gangs.

Yet our liberal friends are even now straining every sinew to increase taxes, regulations so they can give us health care. It's a pity that the increased bite will make it even more difficult for the poor to go legit.

Here's a mad conservative vision. Imagine a world in which the poor got a few breaks. Imagine an America where the cost of government was radically smaller, and they didn't have to go off the books to hide from the tax bite, the regulation bite, and the credentials bite.

Then maybe they could support themselves instead of living as wards of the state on the liberal plantation.

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