Liberal Economics Political Debating Forum

             Imagine a situation in which there were two people with a rare liver disease, (not liver cancer), and both were in need of a liver transplant. One of the people was poor and rarely applied himself to achieve any more than it took to sustain himself from day to day. The other one was wealthy due to the fact that she had found a cure for liver cancer and made a good living providing rehealthy livers to people with cancer.

              Now imagine that under a gov’t run healthcare system both are deemed equally worthy of the one liver available, even though the wealthy woman can, and is willing to, pay for all of the surgical procedures out of her own pocket, thereby leaving more gov’t resources available for lazy sick people.

              The conditions of the rare liver disease are such that whomever receives the donated liver will resume a normal life while the other will be able to live for about a year, but will not be able to do much more than get out of bed to eat or go to the bathroom. (I sense the Austrian economists already see where I’m going with this).

              Under the gov’t run system the “head bureaucrat in charge”, to show their compassion for the less fortunate, not to mention their disdain for the greedy capitalist, would likely award the liver to the deadbeat, and all the socialists would then bask in the belief that true justice had been served. On the other hand suppose the healthcare industry was “free market” and the woman outbid the deadbeat, got the liver, went back to work, developed a cure for the very disease for which she had needed a transplant, and then cured the deadbeat.

              In a free market, the people reward the productive because the productive reward the people. In a socialized system the gov’t rewards the nonproductive because… Why was that again?

                                                 Big Daddy Don