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Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

It's different from country to country, but in general lot's of them live with their parents and most of them receive some welfare.

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.

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There is no free health care in Greece at the moment. Everyone pays to receive treatment from the public health care system even if you pay your health care insurance monthly fees.

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.

Yes, it's hard to maintain free healthcare and free education like in Northern or Western Europo when Greeks pay little or no tax.

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.

Excuse me, but the welfare systems are public, not free. We pay for them with our taxes. At least in Spain, education and health system are public, not free.

Welfare, free health care, free education... Free to him but it has to be paid for by someone. As more people rely on those benefits, the cost goes up for those who contribute to the system. The frightening question is what happens when the well runs dry?

Considering how, in the US at least, wealth and asset holdings has extremely concentrated itself in the top fraction of the population in the last 30 years, probably not soon.

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).

Just because the well runs deep, doesn't mean it's right to steal water from it, unearned.

In the end capital ownership and property rights are just concepts we've collectively agreed are legitimate. Once living conditions become dystopian and wealth inequality skyrockets even more than it already has, I suspect society will legitimize "stealing" from the well.

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.

I agree that ownership and property rights are an invention - though one of a free society. And you are correct that society can just as easily decide that these rights are no longer valid, though that is not a society I would ever consider free. To a certain extent that is happening already. The day the individual is forced to give up his last right and his last dollar to the ugly greed of the 'collective good' will be a sad day indeed.

Imagine a future where self-driving cars (=home delivery taking over retail), 3D printers, fully automated factories, and the death of copyright/intellectual property has put 75% of the population out of work. It's hard to imagine anything BUT some kind of socialist/communist system required.

Well, I think you've certainly got an interesting notion of freedom. I don't consider a life subjected to the will of a state free in any meaningful sense of the word. You're only 'free' insofar as your rulers choose to protect your interests.

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.

Basic welfare is an unavoidable cost. The only way to avoid paying for food, housing, and healthcare is, to be blunt, to starve or bleed to death in the gutter. And basic welfare doesn't really cost much. The cost drivers for the European welfare systems are healthcare and pensions. With respect to healthcare, the EU countries actually have the enormously inefficient American system beat (often for better quality at lower cost), with respect to pensions, they generally lag behind due to lower fertility rates.

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.

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