Quote from: hilariousandco on January 20, 2014, 05:17:53 PM

Quote from: bitlancr on January 20, 2014, 05:06:20 PM

Quote from: hilariousandco on January 20, 2014, 03:59:13 PM

Most people won't have any wealth anyway when they're expected to pay for everything like roads, police, hospitals, schooling and their garbage being collected so it won't matter, so you might as well be living in a jungle because that's what it'll turn into.

A free market could deliver those services cheaper and more efficiently, and we'd all be better off.

I don't believe it would, either more cheaply or efficiently. What happens to the people who can't afford all the services I mentioned above?

No, I don't believe it would either.

I could cite a thousand reasons why - but I'll just mention School meals in the UK.

"If there was ever a golden age of school meals, it began with the 1944 Education Act, which made it compulsory for local authorities to provide school meals, free of charge to poorer children and at no more than the cost of the raw ingredients to the rest. The aim, as declared in a government circular in 1955, was a lunch suitable in all respects as the main meal of the day. Free school milk was also provided from 1946 to all schoolchildren."

Certainly, when I was growing up in the seventies, I have to say that the school meals were superb - provided and subsidised by the Local Education Authority (ultimately by the taxpayer of course) - and if you played for the school sports teams (football in my case) you got to drink as much milk as you could manage after a match Cheesy

"In 1980, Margaret Thatcher - now prime minister - started to run down the school-meals service. Nutritional standards were scrapped and local authorities were now only obliged to provide meals to poorer children. Free school milk was abolished altogether. Competitive tendering meant that many school meals were contracted out from local authorities to private contractors and the number of children eligible for free meals was further reduced by the Social Security Act 1986."

Thatcher, it should be noted, was a big fan of Hayek apparently (though I couldn't say wether the respect was mutual or not)

End result of competitive tendering was that nourishing meals that provided all a child needed as a main meal of the day were superseded by a "bums on seats" ethos - and this :-