By use of the phrase "public service" I think your question misses the point. Education was considered a national necessity as part of our ability to fight wars (once again, as I was told, it gets more complicated) City governments pick up the trash as a service. Services are optional, nice-to-have things. Education was deemed a requirement, and local schools were left to handle that in any way they wanted (until relatively recently)
There is a large section of the population which believes that education is being done so poorly as to need re-vamping completely -- getting back to the days where the goals were set but the methods were left open to each school. I'm one of these people. I'm all for the national goal of education as being required for war-fighting and citizenship. The current system, however, looks to have quite a few flaws. I'm all for iterating and re-factoring.
Healthcare, or taking care of the sick, has traditionally been seen as a church-related activity in the States. This began to change in the 1930s when FDR enacted legislation to help people in their retirement (although the initial age of benefits was also the average death age, so on average nobody saw these benefits unless they lived longer than most)
You have to remember that in the States, multiple religions and cultures each took care of things like healthcare locally with hundreds of different solutions. There are hundreds of charity hospitals, for instance. In that manner, healthcare is considered a personal moral responsibility, not a public repsonsibility. Public responsibilities are those I owe the state -- voting, armed service, jury duty, etc. Moral responsibilities are those I owe a particular person based on my moral compass -- gifts to the homeless, charities (the U.S. leads the world in charities), etc.
The U.S. is beginning to believe that all of these moral responsibilities must/should be delivered by government. That takes away any personal involvement or critical thinking of mine and lets the government simply "write the check" for whatever moral ills we all agree on. I'm against this and view it as a step backwards -- replacing a distributed, intelligent, self-optimizing system with a rigid centralized one. But this is clearly the direction we've been going over the last 70 years and I would expect it to continue.
I'm not sure that it was a misunderstanding. I'm trying to get a better idea of what you were trying to represent. I think I have.
I meant, do you consider that there are things that are a public responsibility, things a society owes to its individual members, that are not The Governments place to provide?
I think you answered no. These things should be personal not public.
In a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious secular environment, personal mores and values should extend quite a ways from the minimum amount that we can all agree on. Traditionally communities have addressed moral issues through the use of volunteer-based civic groups.
I like this idea because the majority is not forcing it's definition of morality onto the minority. It also does not involve going to a local or national politician to make a moral case why charity money should be spent one way or another. It does not promote "one size fits all" solutions that are supposed to be applicable in wildly varying conditions. In addition, it seems that politicians can get elected simply on the moral persuasion of their arguments instead of their practicality, which is leading us to make promises we can never afford to pay for.
I'm for doing something about healthcare, for instance, because I think the buying and selling of health services is not happening in anything like a free market. Most people don't have anything to do with the cost of healthcare (other than paying insurance premiums), and there is virtually no shopping around for services. So the buyer doesn't use his own money, there is no open pricing, and there is no competition on price or quality. In addition, if a company developed a pill that cost a million dollars but let you live to be 150? It's obvious that there are multiple, legitimate players involved that each should have an equal say.
So please don't take my response as "there's nothing wrong." It's broken, but not everything that is broken needs an immediate, rubber-stamp solution. We work best in complicated environments by setting goals, iterating, re-factoring, trying different solutions -- all things that centralized solutions do not offer.
There is a large section of the population which believes that education is being done so poorly as to need re-vamping completely -- getting back to the days where the goals were set but the methods were left open to each school. I'm one of these people. I'm all for the national goal of education as being required for war-fighting and citizenship. The current system, however, looks to have quite a few flaws. I'm all for iterating and re-factoring.
Healthcare, or taking care of the sick, has traditionally been seen as a church-related activity in the States. This began to change in the 1930s when FDR enacted legislation to help people in their retirement (although the initial age of benefits was also the average death age, so on average nobody saw these benefits unless they lived longer than most)
You have to remember that in the States, multiple religions and cultures each took care of things like healthcare locally with hundreds of different solutions. There are hundreds of charity hospitals, for instance. In that manner, healthcare is considered a personal moral responsibility, not a public repsonsibility. Public responsibilities are those I owe the state -- voting, armed service, jury duty, etc. Moral responsibilities are those I owe a particular person based on my moral compass -- gifts to the homeless, charities (the U.S. leads the world in charities), etc.
The U.S. is beginning to believe that all of these moral responsibilities must/should be delivered by government. That takes away any personal involvement or critical thinking of mine and lets the government simply "write the check" for whatever moral ills we all agree on. I'm against this and view it as a step backwards -- replacing a distributed, intelligent, self-optimizing system with a rigid centralized one. But this is clearly the direction we've been going over the last 70 years and I would expect it to continue.