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That relies on the presumption that conservatives seem to have where government spending is nothing but a deadweight loss. You see this in things like "Tax Independence Day", which is the day, usually in late May, where the average American "Stops working for the government and starts working for himself". Except this "working for the government" is really just financing one's own consumption. The idea is as ridiculous as "Mortgage Independence Day", when you "stop working for the bank and start working for yourself". Well, I do pay the bank, but I'm the one living in the house, not the bank manager. By the same token, I spend the first five months of the year driving on highways and sending kids to public school and enjoying police protection and all the other things that are provided by the government. And yes, this includes all the social welfare programs that some assume are for other people, but aren't really; I voluntarily spend a lot of money on insurance that I hope to god I never have to use, and social programs are no different. Are private insurance companies a deadweight economic loss?
No, transfer payments are financing other people's consumption.
Not ridiculous at all; there's a reason there used to be mortgage-burning parties.
Social welfare programs are called "insurance" in order to bolster arguments such as this, but they really aren't. For one thing, if they were like private insurance (other than extremely regulated forms like health insurance), there would be some actual underwriting involved. Premiums would have some relationship to risk. There would likely be policy limits. Incurring a loss deliberately would be fraud; failing to mitigate a loss would also result in loss of benefits. They don't look much like insurance at all, except when insurance is turned through regulation into a social welfare program.
Of course it doesn't resemble private insurance because it only exists to provide coverage that isn't economically feasible for the private market to provide. You listed a number of features that you see in private insurance markets, but none of them are truly essential. You mention premiums based on risk profile and underwriting, but if you found out tomorrow that your car insurance company was charging the same rates to everybody, or charging based on income, you might question their business sense but you wouldn't think that you didn't have insurance. Same with deliberate losses and loss mitigation. Not all policies have loss mitigation requirements (and when they do they're kind of difficult to enforce unless it's something easy and obvious), and the kind of fraud you mention isn't an issue the way the system is currently set up. People aren't intentionally quitting good jobs so they can collect welfare payments, and studies have shown that benefit amounts haven't affected the total number of claims since AFDC was at its peak in 1975.
The whole moral hazard aspect is priced into the system. People intentionally cause losses on auto and homeowners policies because, in many cases, the insurance payout is greater than the amount the asset is worth. If you lose your job and go on public benefits, you aren't getting anywhere near what that job paid, and most of those benefits are going to be restricted to vouchers for specific items. Hard insurance fraud wouldn't be a crime if the maximum you could get was a $3,000 voucher to use at a dealership. This is why I'm not sure what you were getting at with respect to policy limits, since public benefits have pretty clear policy limits, and they're often much lower than the actual cost of the misfortune. At the other end of the spectrum, I would add that making a claim for public benefits is significantly more difficult than making a private insurance claim. Some programs can take months.
Yes you’ve distinguished insurance (ie something that makes economic sense for both the insured and the insurer) with a government subsidy (ie something that on net does not make economic sense).
If the social safety net story actually made people take more risky bets that on balance produced materially higher returns, why couldn’t private insurance cover it?
As Saint Luigi would tell you, it's only supposed to make economic sense for the insurer.
And we're supposed to believe that the welfare system is insurance, despite about the only aspect that matches is that some people get paid and others get the shaft.
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They're essential to insurance being a good idea to purchase.
People are certainly avoiding getting legal jobs and working under the table so they can continue to collect welfare payments.
In theory, yes, but have you ever questioned an insurance company's underwriting standards before purchase?
And those people are prosecuted for fraud. Here in PA, the OIG has an entire section dedicated to public benefits fraud that prosecuted between 30 and 100 cases per month, most of them felonies, most of them for making these exact kinds of misrepresentations regarding eligibility requirements. The liberal appointees running these agencies don't shy away from this, and they talk in press releases about how fraudsters divert funding from people who actually need it. People complain about welfare queens that they know, but if they have specific knowledge of fraud they should report it, just as they would any other crime, not complain about it on the internet.
This is just an anecdote, but my father happened to work in another state's equivalent department, and he once (three or four years ago, I think) complained to me about how his bosses would regularly fail to prosecute the fraudsters that it was his job to uncover. IIRC, he said that over multiple years he nagged his bosses to prosecute one particular person, and eventually the culprit was diagnosed with cancer and his bosses used that excuse to close down the investigation as bad PR.
But this was in a different state, and he may be biased against the department. But on the third hand it's the same state as @The_Nybbler's.
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I haven't actually purchased any insurance I wasn't required to.
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