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Comment by yequalsx | Hacker News Reader

Providing a base minimal level of living for each person tends to produce nice societies. What people with money get in return for supporting the deadbeats is definitely worth the, not large, cost. Having a massive security/punishment apparatus is the inevitable result of not doing this unless one doesn't mind living in a shitty society.

Paraphrasing H.L. Mencken: U.S. Libertarians/Republicans can almost be defined as someone with the irrational fear that some poor person, somewhere is getting something they don't deserve.

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> Providing a base minimal level of living for each person tends to produce nice societies. What people with money get in return for supporting the deadbeats is definitely worth the, not large, cost.

Hate to do this to you, but if you were on the other side of the issue someone would have asked, and I honestly haven't seen data on it. Do you have any stats/facts/references to back this up? To be blunt, I'm just old enough that I remember societies that tried this, and in their implementations it drove everybody's standard of living toward what we would consider poverty, so I am expressing a bit of doubt here. "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work" (old Soviet political joke).

From what I know of world it appears that being a country that is a great place to live for the average person is strongly correlated with having a good social welfare system. (I understand that correlation does not always imply causation.) If this is true, and my perception of the world tells me it is, then it's reasonable to desire a society with strong social welfare programs.

I think we all win when each of us, even the undeserving, get to live at a base level of existence without fear. Off the top of my head my understanding of history is such that societal stability is best accomplished when there are lots of people living in misery. It's worth the expenditure of tax money to ensure my neighbor is not living in misery.

Solzhenitsyn said that the quality of a society can be determined by how it treats its prisoners. I expand upon this a bit by including the poor and powerless.

Once again, I ask for hard statistics and facts, with references. Data, my friend, show me the data.

I believe I gave enough information for the basis of my position. One makes a list of countries they think are good societies to live in for the average person. Then look to see what their social welfare policies are and see if there is a correlation. I can't do this for you because your definition of what constitutes of good society to live in for the average person will differ from mine. Similarly my definition of an acceptable level of social welfare will differ from yours. Thus I can't make this list for you. I can only tell you how I arrived at my conclusion.

What other data do you want? You ask for hard statistics but don't specify exactly what you statistics you want. I have no expertise in the area of social development, economics, or other social sciences. I'm a mathematician. The only hard data I can possibly give is to do a Google search. But you are just as well equipped to do this.

This forum is not an academic journal article. It's a collection of non-experts giving their opinions based on their perceptions of the world. The goal is to have a well reasoned position but the expectation for every opinion to be backed up by hard data, references, and statistics is not reasonable. No one can possibly be held to such a standard for all opinions.

Many, many issues are so complex that there is no obvious statistic that can be used to settle the matter. In such a case all one can do make a conclusion the best they can with the knowledge that they don't have all the information. But one is not then precluded from holding or expressing and opinion.

I'd take a few of countries that you think are good examples, why, and their median PPP household income and/or examples of the life of a typical person. For example, here are some negative examples:

- USSR:

The USSR had a centrally planned economy, with centrallly planned wages designed to limit differentiation between those at the top of the income scale and those at the bottom. A typical family lived in a ~10x10 single room apartment. Often these apartments did not have kitchens, and never 'bedrooms' (I do mean 'single room.). Even though the workers were 'paid', they often could not buy basic things like food, soap, and toilet paper due to chronic underproduction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communal_apartment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Soviet_Union

http://reason.com/blog/2015/04/06/revealed-the-final-stage-o...

http://articles.philly.com/1989-07-21/news/26131831_1_soap-p...

- Cuba

Cuba's economy is dominated by state-run enterprises, with 76% public sector employment. In Cuba, employees in some skilled professions that are not favored by the state, like medical doctors, work in slave-like conditions. GDP per capita is only $10k PPP, less than 1/5th that of the USA. References:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/mary-ogrady-cubas-slave-trade-in...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Cuba

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States

- China

In the mid 1990s, China's state-owned economy was teetering on bankruptcy. As an experiment, China began to allow select cities to ignore the old rules on enterprise management, wages, guaranteed employment, etc. By the late 90's, these cities had spawned some of the largest appliance manufacturers in the world, and China began to implement these policies more broadly. Since the reforms, China's GDP has risen tenfold, with productivity increases accounting for nearly half of the rise. During the reform period, PPP per capita incomes have grown at ~6.6% annually.

http://www.economist.com/node/21528262

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform

That is what I would consider two well-documented examples countries with large social apparatuses that resulted in disaster, and one that significantly improved the standard of living for everyone by scrapping their old guarantees. I was hoping that you could provide me with something similar to support your views.

The claim I made is that countries that are nice societies to live in for the average person are strongly correlated with countries that have good social welfare systems. None of the countries you listed fall under what I consider to be nice societies to live in for the average person. China does not meet my standard due to lack of freedom, pollution, level of grinding poverty, corruption, etc.

It seems as though you are under the impression that I was claiming the converse is true. I was not. Canada, Japan, Denmark, France, UK, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Austria are examples of countries that are nice places to live in for the average person that have a strong social safety net for the people.

I see. Many of the countries you listed are actually 'workfare' systems, as this article proposes, and not true 'welfare' systems.

Canada - much of the 'welfare' is paid by the province, not the federal government. The social assistance program is aimed at temporary financial need, and requires people to seek employment:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_programs_in_Canada

http://www.mcss.gov.on.ca/en/mcss/programs/social/

UK: https://www.rt.com/news/uk-welfare-jobless-benefits-535/

Japan - Japanese society actually attempts to shame people into going back into the workforce: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2011/09/25/national/media-n...

I don't have time to go down the rest of the list, but my point is that there are few, if any places where somebody can get a 'free ride' while doing little/no work, and certainly no place that's nice to live in (I'm assuming that since you think workfare is a bad idea, you consider 'good' to be the absence of a work requirement).

Welfare is more than just payment while unemployed. Access to cheap higher education, strong programs promoting raising of children (family leave is an example), access to healthcare without fear of bankruptcy and things like this are part of welfare in my opinion. Also adequate prison programs to decrease recidivism, strong laws protecting workers from exploitation. The list goes on. These are all forms of welfare and they help to ensure a healthy environment for living for everyone.

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