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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

Government paid healthcare is still a big expense that's covered.

His point is that if people grow up in a country with a strong safety net (and enjoy the benefits of that upbringing), then move away to start businesses or earn money away from that country to avoid paying into the cost of that safety net, there might not be so strong a safety net when they plan to return.

Which makes perfect sense; if it happens at scale, how would that safety net survive?

Right now, the few who do this are free riders on a system everyone staying behind is supporting. It's not a problem if a thousand people leave Germany to go make money outside the German tax regime and then return in their old age, their system can absorb it.

What would happen if a fifth of the population did that? It might be harder to sustain that level of social services with that loss of tax revenue, i.e. payment for those social services.

What do you mean by safety net? If you haven't paid into pension funds (as required for employees but not eg freelancers), then you aren't receiving anything out of it. The situation for pensioners is actually very different: many can't live on regular pension so they're going to southern EU countries, or eg Thailand for much lower cost of living compared to central EU. Also, Germany's SPD party wants to buy pensioner votes by giving long-time employees additional tax money ("Grundrente"), but not eg freelancers who actually paid these taxes - a corrupt and unconstitutional plan. Their pension story is completely bankrupt anyway; in Berlin they're putting limits on housing rents and all other kinds of unhelpful restrictions on landlords, when renting property is one of the few ways to make a living when retired due to the ECB's zero interest rate policies.

If you did not contribute to the pension funds, you get money as social care, at least in my Eastern European country (part of EU). You never have to work a day in your life, this is what a number of people are actually doing.

Are they uniquely free riders or just joining the rest in their free riding? The majority of people are not net tax contributors. There's a fascinating gender difference as well, with only men as a group being net tax contributors.

Being shackled to the mediocre majority is never fun, some feel the shackles more than others.

There are entire political philosophies that acknowledge this.

They don't like the safety nets.

Or they don't want one. I like safety nets, they are needed for some people that cannot make a living on their own, but I don't want one for me. It's a huge difference between "like", "need" or "want".

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