Theoretically, the government has an interest in seeing their dollars spent wisely, because if they don't, then people will get angry and vote them out of office. Currently, thanks to a generation of media exploitation, we have an ill-informed public and two parties which don't represent a healthy, balanced set of choices for American citizens – but I don't blame the government for that so much as I blame Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, and the 70s-80s paleoconservatives that spent decades building misinformation into our media.
Very few things in life are willingly entered into. You didn't choose to be born in the place that you did, to the parents that you have, in the race or gender or of the sexual orientation which are yours, in the economic strata that you did. Simply being a user on Hacker News suggests that you've had at least a streak of good luck in your life that's given you the know-how and the comforts that enable you to post on a forum, to know which forum you'd like to post in, to understand the subjects well enough that you've decided you want to participate. We disproved that the heavens rotated around the earth, much less any one specific person, a long time ago; and with it, we began to throw out the notion that any one individual is entitled to rights or to privilege that are not derived from the consensus of her fellow citizens.
This is the basis of all civilization, of every society that's ever been; and progress has been a process that involves making "fellow citizens" as diverse a group as possible. Right now there are arguments over whether we should consider economically disadvantaged people our fellows – while we all would like to say we think they're our equals, we don't seem to think they have the rights to things like flu shots with the rest of us are allowed to take somewhat for granted. And it's not "equal" to tell them they ought to wait around for good people to give them things, because frankly there has never been a society in the world in which good people are so prevalent that there has been enough charitable donation to go around.
Private citizens giving to charity is great. If you have the money for it, donate money; good on Larry Page for this. But people being good doesn't preclude government from being a good idea, and it makes sense to point out, as we laud Page for being such an upstanding citizen of San Francisco, that it's a tragedy how costly even flu shots are, how terrible it is that in the 21st century it's still possible for kids to die of the flu for reasons entirely beyond their control, and that we should all be thinking about how, perhaps, we might make this issue a permanent thing of the past.
Very few things in life are willingly entered into. You didn't choose to be born in the place that you did, to the parents that you have, in the race or gender or of the sexual orientation which are yours, in the economic strata that you did. Simply being a user on Hacker News suggests that you've had at least a streak of good luck in your life that's given you the know-how and the comforts that enable you to post on a forum, to know which forum you'd like to post in, to understand the subjects well enough that you've decided you want to participate. We disproved that the heavens rotated around the earth, much less any one specific person, a long time ago; and with it, we began to throw out the notion that any one individual is entitled to rights or to privilege that are not derived from the consensus of her fellow citizens.
This is the basis of all civilization, of every society that's ever been; and progress has been a process that involves making "fellow citizens" as diverse a group as possible. Right now there are arguments over whether we should consider economically disadvantaged people our fellows – while we all would like to say we think they're our equals, we don't seem to think they have the rights to things like flu shots with the rest of us are allowed to take somewhat for granted. And it's not "equal" to tell them they ought to wait around for good people to give them things, because frankly there has never been a society in the world in which good people are so prevalent that there has been enough charitable donation to go around.
Private citizens giving to charity is great. If you have the money for it, donate money; good on Larry Page for this. But people being good doesn't preclude government from being a good idea, and it makes sense to point out, as we laud Page for being such an upstanding citizen of San Francisco, that it's a tragedy how costly even flu shots are, how terrible it is that in the 21st century it's still possible for kids to die of the flu for reasons entirely beyond their control, and that we should all be thinking about how, perhaps, we might make this issue a permanent thing of the past.