|
Survival, yes, and happiness to a certain extent. This is probably one of the most important realisations of the 20th Century, that by providing for the basic needs of everyone (and thereby essentially amortizing those costs over the entire population), we can produce overall better results for the country (measured in efficiency, production, happiness, etc). So by setting up a national health service in the UK, you ensure a base level of health across the whole country. By providing free education (and free higher education), you ensure that the workforce is more skilled, and able to make a wider range of choices. By providing basic housing, food, etc to those who need it, you prevent people having to opt out of society in order to survive. This sort of safety net is cheaper in the long run (it's worth watching Unlearning Economics' video "Free Stuff is Good Actually", which goes into detail on this point), but it's also fundamentally about freedom. If you have access to free education, you can make choices about your career and life that you just couldn't before. If you have free healthcare and financial support if you get sick, you can continue working for longer, but you'll also have more time to make bad choices and weird choices - the sorts of choices that are fundamental to healthy entrepreneurship. If you have a financial safety net, you can take more interesting risks, because the consequences are less severe. So yeah, I think if you believe freedom is a virtue, then I think you also need to see it as a virtue for people to be supplied with the tools that can give them freedom. |