Ian Murray has fine article on the evolution of insurance (must stay awake, falling into soup, bzbpftsssss). But seriously, it's a great article that covers 4 centuries of people trying to figure out how to manage risk. He shows that quite a bit of what we consider to be the 'welfare state' is simply government hijacking risk management activities that private industries were already handling. For example, fire brigades used to be owned and operated by insurance companies and provided public goods by putting out everyone's fires, not just the ones who had paid insurance.
He points out that by carefully reigniting some of these markets (social insurance, education, for example) we could keep quite a bit of the 'social democracy' everyone seems to want at a vastly freer and lower price.
Read the whole thing here.
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