Public Ends Private Means

Great progress has been made in recent years in securing better access and financial protection against the cost of illness through collective financing of health care. Managing scarce resources effectively and efficiently is an important part of this story. Experience has shown that, without strategic policies and focused spending, the poor are likely to get left out. The use of purchasing to enhance public sector performance is well-documented in other sectors. Extension to the health sector of lessons from this experience is now successfully implemented in many developing countries. Public.

What government activities should be contracted out to private companies? This thoughtful book by a Harvard policy analyst shuns global answers and explores how to examine individual cases.

LARGE PRINT EDITION! More at LargePrintLiberty.com This collection of essays daringly challenges the perceived wisdom of government necessity by pointing to instances of the free market fulfilling these functions. The book seeks to illustrate that there are, inevitably, many intrinsic problems with governmental attempts to plan and implement these functions. Moreover, governments operate on the leverage of coercion -- whether that be in the form of laws or taxation. These essays suggest that the private alternatives not only tend to work better at achieving the desired end, but they also serve to reintroduce the much diminished principle upon which civil society is founded: namely voluntary cooperation between free men.

Crime is one of the most significant political issues in contemporary American society. Crime control statistics and punishment policies are subjects of constant partisan debate, while the media presents sensationalized stories of criminal activity and over-crowded prisons. In the highly politicized arena of crime and justice, empirical data and reasoned analysis are often overlook or ignored. The Handbook of Crime and Punishment, however, provides a comprehensive overview of criminal justice, criminology, and crime control policy, thus enabling a fundamental understanding of crime and punishment essential to an informed public. Expansive in its coverage, the Handbook presents materials on crime and punishment trends as well as timely policy issues. The latest research on the demography of crime (race, gender, drug use) is included and weighty current problems (organized crime, white collar crime, family violence, sex offenders, youth gangs, drug abuse policy) are examined. Processes and institutions that deal with accused and convicted criminals and techniques of punishment are also examined. While some articles emphasize American research findings and developments, others incorporate international research and offer a comparative perspective from other English-speaking countries and Western Europe. Editor Michael Tonry, a leading scholar of criminology, introduces the 28 articles in the volume, each contributed by an expert in the field. Designed for a wide audience, The Handbook is encyclopedic in its range and depth of content, yet is written in an accessible style. The most inclusive and authoritative work on the topic to be found in one volume, this book will appeal to those interested in the study of crime and its causes, effects, trends, and institutions; those interested in the forms and philosophies of punishment; and those interested in crime control.

Philanthropy is big news. In a world where philanthropists can build bigger profiles than presidents, an ever-increasing number have risen to greater fame giving away their money than merely making it. But using wealth to change the world is always controversial, and some have started to question the very notion of philanthropy. In reality, none of this is new: philanthropy has been shaping the way we live for centuries. From religious almsgiving, through the golden age of Victorian philanthropy to the birth of modern charities, many with means have sought to use their wealth to ease hardship, enrich lives and change policy. And this has often met with as much criticism as praise. In today's Britain, where the welfare state uses tax to meet our basic needs and the market offers most things at a price, does philanthropy still have a role, and if so, what is it? More importantly, how can we ensure that it is an effective force for good?This book aims to answer these questions. It tells the story of philanthropy through the ages, the relationship between philanthropists, the state and society, and throws light on the successes - and sometimes spectacular failures - of great philanthropists from the past. It shows what history can tell us about current criticisms of philanthropy, and considers difficult issues such as the link between tax and giving and the motivations of the wealthy. Above all, it shows how the lessons learned from generations of philanthropists - and the good, bad or plain ugly results of their well-meaning endeavours - suggest principles that should guide public policy on philanthropy to help us overcome some of the most complex and deeply entrenched challenges facing our society.

This book is a timely response to the current U.S. crisis in public funding. Offering a new philosophy of public service that defies the old categories of conservative and liberal, this practical book shows how the problem-solving abilities and profit-making discipline of the business community can make it a productive alternative for meeting public needs. Using education as an example of what should be a high domestic priority, the authors argue that business should recognize that it has a major stake in the quality of the product of our schools and should provide support. The book delineates other areas of national concern that merit the attention of American business. It concludes with an insightful discussion of how business involvement might be reinforced by incentive systems.

In this classic study, Alan Brudner investigates the basic structure of the common law of transactions. For decades, that structure has been the subject of intense debate between formalists, who say that transactional law is a private law for interacting parties, and functionalists, who say that it is a public law serving the collective ends of society. Against both camps, Brudner proposes a synthesis of formalism and functionalism in which private law is modified by a common good without being subservient to it. Drawing on Hegel's legal philosophy, the author exhibits this synthesis in each of transactional law's main divisions: property, contract, unjust enrichment, and tort. Each is a whole composed of private-law and public-law parts that complement each other, and the idea connecting the parts to each other is also latently present in each. Moreover, Brudner argues, a single narrative thread connects the divisions of transactional law to each other. Not a row of disconnected fields, transactional law is rather a story about the realization in law of the agent's claim to be a dignified end-master of its body, its acquisitions, and the shape of its life. Transactional law's divisions are stages in the progress toward that goal, each generating a potential developed by the next. Thus, contract law fulfils what is incompletely realized in property law, negligence law what is germinal in contract law, public insurance what is seminal in negligence law, and transactional law as a whole what is underdeveloped in public insurance. The end point is the limit of what a transactional law can contribute to a life sufficient for dignity. Reconfigured and expanded with a contribution by Jennifer Nadler, The Unity of the Common Law stands out among contemporary theories of private law in that it depicts private law as purposive without being instrumental and as autonomous without being emptily formal.