How are they making a living and otherwise providing for themselves? (Serious question.)
Is homelessness also skyrocketing, or do the unemployed receive benefits of some kind?
Is homelessness also skyrocketing, or do the unemployed receive benefits of some kind?
In Southern Europe it's not unnormal to live with your parents way into your twenties or even early thirties. And it's not considered embarrassing either. In the cafés of Barcelona, Rome, Athens, you will meet the well dressed 31 year old guy with a smart phone in his pocket a laptop on his knees and a girlfriend by his side. He drives a nice little car, goes on vacations once or twice a year, has a master in something soft, which he got for free, and he is covered by free health care. He lives with his parents or - if he is lucky - in one of their spare apartments (lots of Southern European families have more than one home). He may have a low paid job or he may be unemployed living with a bit of government welfare and occational help from daddy.
I mean, most of these states aren't raising taxes, but are playing with monetary gears to keep money injection from spurring inflation (albeit they have had huge taxes for decades).
Notably, the well doesn't care whether or not you steal water from it. The water was never 'owned' by it in the first place.
This isn't to say that an ownership-oriented society is bad because it is unfree; just that it is inherently unfree, like any other formal system for living in cooperative groups.
So in my view, the argument for private ownership-oriented societies from freedom falls apart. And we're back wondering why we shouldn't 'steal' from the well.
Education pays for itself because it is an investment. The average person will be more productive and earn more (thus increasing GDP and also their personal tax payments) if they have an education rather than being illiterate. ROI for education is extremely good. Countries like Switzerland and Germany do not subsidize education just because it's a nice thing to do, but because it's a positive sum game.
Furthermore the free education is a hugely false fact. For almost 20 years now if a child is not getting education outside of the public school system he/she will not be getting anywhere close to getting onto the 3rd educational level (College or University). The funding and the personnel is inadequate to say the least.
Mind you the public sector is governed by the 5-out-1-in rule (5 people leave 1 gets assigned a position) in general but in the education sector this analogy is rounding up to 10-out-1-in.
As I understand it unemployed Greeks receive free health care for up to one year. After that period, patients must pay for their own treatment. That's still more than many places in the US.
The fact that public education is (often?) so bad that private tutor schools are needed to enter university doesn't change the fact that education is mostly free in Greece.