They also incentivize problematic behavior. When there's no chance in hell that you won't get the money, you have little incentive to change your ways to become a productive member of society. Moral hazards are a thing.
Case in point: USA has a very well-developed bankruptcy system. Losing a business frequently means your business debts are absolved and you can start anew. One may think that such a system will encourage people to throw money at bad decisions: however, a bigger effect is that people are encouraged to cut the loss at a reasonable point and start a new business, because you can take calculated risks.
There are (or used to be) arcane economic systems based upon the reverse principle: if your business fails your life is ruined, so you have every incentive to stick to it until the bitter end, using up every resource, including your personal money, your family money, and your relatives' money. (South Korea used to be like that.) And guess what? It didn't bring more successful businesses, just more suffering.
They're not all positive though, they are incentivizing a part of the population to not contribute. I live around such people, and I have no doubt that they'd contribute if the alternative was going hungry and sleeping outside. But since the alternative is a 70sqm flat, a tv, xbox and smartphone, utilities paid for and food in the kitchen, they don't see a reason to contribute - it would just mean spending time doing things they don't like for more money. But as they already have their needs and most of their desires covered, that's not a good offer to them. They're perpetually relying on the safety net, and it tends to become intergenerational.
If you want to install a safety net, it's wise to address that issue.
Not all will, obviously. Some actually need the safety net (e.g. disabled people), others fall into it and then get up again. It's the ones who don't want to get up again that are the issue.
I'd rather have them return to contributing than pretending that, if we didn't have people who are lazy, we'd invent them.
Those carers are often entirely dependent on safety nets.
That is far from lazy! It's an exhausting thing to do.
Heck, for some even getting out to the shops is difficult, as how do you go out if you need to stay with your cared for person all the time.
Maybe you'd consider it solved if you count the benefits on which so many carers rely; certainly not without them.
Even then, I find it striking that benefits for carers where I live are lower than benefits for an unemployed person. As though a carer needs less to live on.
So asking for charity is bad, but forcing the government to use it's monopoly of force to take money from others for you is good?
Would you rather replace this with a system where children had to beg on gofundme for middle school tuition, where funding is implicitly decided by who has the best sob story and appeases the FB algorthim for that day.
Replace school with health care and his point is clear.
Absolutely. I will, with no hesitation, be fine with that trade.
A government, or more broadly, a society has no requirement to earn a profit and every incentive to keep its citizens healthy and happy so as to be positive members of society in order to perpetuate that society.
Remember that, in some areas of the country, fire protection is for-profit and if you didn't pay your fire company dues, your house will burn while you watch. Meanwhile, in the "socialist" areas with government-owned-and-operated fire departments, everyone's residence will receive at least some protection.
Two, if there's any body who would need to decide that, yes, the government would be a much more appropriate body than individuals - it is at least theoretically a representative of the whole population.
I don't think the entire point of society is to force people to participate in your choice program under threat of jailing
people who don't share your (presumably) anti-state views probably think this is basically what government is.
if you rephrased to something like "government action ought to be the last resort for solving the problems of a community", I could agree with you.
In my personal position, I want to "force" the government to "use it's [sic] monopoly of force" to accept a little more tax money from me in exchange for making sure that my fellow citizens, whether they're less fortunate or not, don't literally die because they don't have enough pieces of paper to pay for healthcare.
A majority of citizens, including those who regularly give to charity, are not equipped to properly allocate their charitable contributions. I'm not talking about making sure their money goes to the right problem area, I'm talking about making sure it's not funneled into a con man's pocket. Take a look at the financials on major charities and you'll quickly realize that philanthropy doesn't work all that well.
Side note - the government collects taxes, and must continue to do so in order to exist. If you're against taxes as a concept, you're against government existing altogether. If that's the case, your political ideology is effectively anarchism.
Higher taxes and government provided safety nets are less biased than charities. Why would I be proud of a country where people beg on Facebook for donations when their family gets cancer, and a significant portion of those go on to vote against things like universal healthcare, parental leave, minimum sick leave/vacation leave, etc.