How to stop the revival of Laissez-Faire?

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    You can start by recognizing that there is no chance of any program getting abolished, except maybe Obamacare prior to it starting up in full. People will fight to the death for their precious entitlement programs.

In some cases it truly is a choice of whether to fight for their entitlements or succumb to homelessness, poverty, or death.

Old people are an important enough voting block that the party which would hypothetically decide to cut Social Security would pay for it dearly.

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We will never lose SS or Medicare. When was the last time a major government program like that was cut? It won't happen, no matter what the tea party believes. They'll never have a large enough majority to enable it, and no President would be stupid enough to be the one that took all medicare away from the seniors or removed their SS checks.

1996, Aid to Dependant Families and Children

That mainly affected people who were so poor that they didn't have very much political clout at all for such a decent sized group of people. It was also easier to scapegoat welfare recipients than it is to scapegoat retirees.

When some politician makes a serious run at cutting SS you'll see even sterner opposition.. since getting rid of it would be taking from everyone.

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Well you know, if those programs did go away, you could always set up similar ones in your areas. But nah, we can't have economic diversity in a nation of 300 million, we must conform to one standard that ultimately only benefits the corporations instead.

Only when people fully embrace decentralized economics will we see any real progress.

Well, yeah, that's sort of doable. But it would, probably, require imposing residence permits, at least on the elderly. Florida, would, probably, require Arizonans over 65 visas to come  w/ their grandchildren to Disney World ) I can just see the line at a Floridan consulate in Phoenix )

Anyway, I am going to bet on the following: if you made participation in these programs voluntary, not even the Utah legislature would vote to withdraw.

I am not talking about making federal ones voluntary though. I'm talking about scrapping federal ones and then letting individual communities set up local ones. So no federal social security, but Los Angeles could have a social security system if they wanted.

I don't support say a single payer health plan federally, but I'd support one being set up in my community.

Likely to be riddled with even more inefficiencies than a national program.

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Seniors wouldn't flee. Again, as I said, the government would subsidize all costs beyond a certain point, it's not like we just drop them entirely. The point is, they get private healthcare with some government subsidies, but not the gargantuan single-payer system we have now.

That's not abolition. That's just diluting benefits somewhat. That will, surely, happen: medical costs have to be contained. But, in the end, it's still Medicare pretty much intact.

The problem w/ private health insurance for the elderly is that the elderly don't, really, present that much of a risk after a certain point: they are a near certain cost. So, after a while it's not, really, insurance, it's paying out of pocket. And you know what out of pocket costs are in the US. So, at the end of the day, it's either the single-payer government paying the doctors, or single-payer government paying the insurers (ok, you can have the elderly themselves pitch in a few percent of the cost), or out-of-pocket medicine w/ most of the elderly on the dole after a few years, or substantially decreased life expectancy. Pick your poison.

If you mandate insurance coverage, and make insurance companies keep the same premiums across all age groups, it could work out.

Essentially, you don't even have the insurance companies look at individuals' characteristics.

Keeping it in public hands is easier than instituting price controls.