Ok, I gotcha. I think there is some logic to this. What comes to mind when I read it is the standard Libertarian claim that private charity would take care of everything and everyone that needed taking care of if the government didn't do it.
That's a mischaracterization of libertarianism. Libertarians do not make this claim in general. The goal isn't to create some utopian society whereby no one starves and every free adult has its needs met for it, whether by charity or whatever else. Repeat: Libertarians do NOT envision a society in which "all needs be met" as a pre-condition. This is utopian and unhealthy for people to get used to. And anyone who suggests private charity WILL meet all needs is being an idiot. Of course it won't. But that's not the point.
I do not want our society to be one where people have no need to be concerned about poverty, starvation, homelessness, etc. Healthy fear of these things
motivates us to be more valuable to others and
contribute to a better society. But it's not "better" when we insist that there be no chance for anyone to suffer. That is demotivating and leads us to expect our society to contribute to our individual needs, rather than the other way around.
I have issues with that claim, but suffice it to say for this discussion that I don't think private charity would be anywhere near enough.
There is no "enough." If "enough" means that no one dare suffer, then you're already providing
too much, rather than letting people find ways to provide for themselves. If you only require that they pout and say "I can't" and then reward them with a daily ration, then you've started to make a livelihood out of saying "I can't." It is an inescapable dilemma, unless you allow there to be some chance for failure.
However, if we were to do something along the lines of what you're saying here, I can see a scenario where private charity would pick up most or all of the slack. I think that would be very doable. I do not see a scenario where people would be "left to die" as someone put it above.
This comes more in alignment with what I'm talking about. People are too short-term focused. "Eliminate welfare?! Then we'll all die in the streets!" or so they always say. If you yank the government safety nets out from under people, yes, some people will suffer and some will die earlier than they would have if they had a blank check from the taxpayers. But over time people adjust to their environments, and their freedom to self-regulate adds up to create some significant social change. If something is getting oppressively expensive, or the the companies providing it no longer have a consumer base because the jobs are all gone or too low-paying, then let there be the blowback from that. There NEEDS to be blowback from that.
I have no idea the degree to which privately charitable causes would pick up over time if we eliminated the "safety net." But I'll say this: there is greater resentment in forced charity than there is in voluntary charity. So personally I resent some people's insistence on devaluing charity as some pathetic failure of a thing. That's sick. The spirit of giving is not in paying taxes for welfare programs. The spirit of giving is in an individual's decision to help another. I think fostering a greater sense of charity requires dismantling the government schemes that keep people hooked into free money, and letting the consequences play out, and letting our citizens see the benefit in organizing themselves to improve their own communities.
But to dismiss charity as a failure because it won't meet ALL needs EVERYWHERE, and then look to government redistributive schemes, is like planting a sapling for natural shade and then stomping on it because it didn't grow fast enough, and then saying that trees in general do not provide natural shade. We crush the potential for a genuinely charitable society when government says "let me do it" and people all fall in line and, as a part of empowering that government, devalue genuine, charitable acts as insufficient failures because they don't accomplish some unrealistically lofty standard. That is a toxic, self-defeating attitude.
