Socialized Health Care in the USA

[Chesspiece_face]

Why are so many of these now provided by the government if the free market can do it better? Could it be that the free market failed? That your model of how the free market works is based on a false assumption -- the assumption that the majority of people are reasonable, intelligent, informed, compassionate, responsible, etc. The Jeffersonian assumption. Indeed, the Marxist assumption. But history shows us, over and over, that Jefferson was wrong, Hamilton was right. The average person is a stupid, selfish, indifferent brute who cares only for his own desires and pleasures and that will allow the world to go to hell around him rather than give up one beer to save it.

--Pete

There are some social research studies which demonstrate this wonderfully. Unfortunately I cannot recall who originally did these studies but the general framework of the research went like this:

The study participants are assigned to either group A or B then they are given an array of options of how to assign resources between the two groups. There is never a definition of what the groups are or what the resources are they are just told they are in a group and to pick how they would like the resources assigned. Resource totals are abstracted on a scale of 1-10 so that some assignment options would be like Group A: 3, Group B: 6. Or Group A: 8, Group B: 5. Interestingly in all of the questionaires there was an option for Group A: 10, Group B: 10. If the participants chose to they could have given both groups all the resources the highest possible allocation, or in other words chosen an "Everyone Wins" option. Subjects pretty much never chose that option, however. They would choose to hurt their own group by choosing options which offered less resources for them only to make sure that the other group ended up with less resources than their group. The subjects would consistently and constantly chose a more harmful option for themselves instead of allotting "resources" to a group outside of their own or one they felt undeserving.