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Source link: http://blog.mises.org/4959/hoppe-in-spanish-article-on-the-cause-of-sickness/

Hoppe in Spanish Article on the “Cause of Sickness”

April 28, 2006 by

In Who Causes Sickness, Jorge Valín, writing in The Spain Herald, notes:

Economist and philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe made similar comments about the Social Security system. For Hoppe, subsidies for sickness or disability lead to more sickness and pain, discourage work, individual effort and solidarity and foster a hedonistic society whose members’ main goal is to live off of everyone else.

{ 3 comments }

John Hepp April 28, 2006 at 2:46 pm

Technically, those sick and disabled parties are responding to market incentives. No one is forcing those individuals to accept disability payments. Establishing and enforcing reasonable eligibility requirements could decrease costs without the adverse effects on the truly disabled who cannot otherwise survive. Isn’t the objective of economics to minimize costs subject to constraint and not to eliminate the constraints?

Paul Edwards April 28, 2006 at 4:58 pm

John,

“Technically, those sick and disabled parties are responding to market incentives.”

Not really. They are responding to coercive state regulations and redistribution schemes which encourage “sickness”.

What we are looking at here is the result of market hampering state regulations which prevent people from interacting in a purely voluntary way. When the state confiscates money from the productive, to subsidize the sick time of the non-productive, it discourages hard work and thrift, and encourages slothfulness.

It’s not the market’s doing, it’s the state’s.

Steven Smith April 25, 2011 at 6:07 am

Disability is encourgaed by physicians inorder to get paid for sure. Many people who are sick are not disabled but are treated like dirt and pushed into disability by the doctros and other “providors of care.” It is an evil syystem. It destroys the human spirt in these people who may temporarily earning less from their temporary bad episode of their illness. Of course these unethical people will try to discourage the person from going back to work. It is a real fight against the medical profvidors that do nto want a patient to go back to work. They just care about maximizing profits in a government scam. Those meidcal people hinder good health, for fear of not getting government money.

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