I agree that a big flaw in the welfare state idea is that even if at first it’s really “universal”, eventually governments and people look at it like they are “giving you something” and start to attach conditions.
It’s easy to find talk, for example from people who think universal healthcare should be applied differently to people who live an unhealthy lifestyle.
There’s also all other consequences like vetting immigration that will crop up as well.
Immigrants are nearly always not eligible for public funds, and are excluded from almost all kinds of welfare until their citizenship process is complete, at which point they become citizens and not immgrants.
This is a very America-centric idea. Most of Europe works on a 'human dignity is inalienable' principle that gives everyone, even immigrants, access to public welfare if the circumstances necessitate it.
This isn't correct though; in the Netherlands, you cannot get a residence permit unless you have a sponsor, income, family, or whatever. If you have a residence permit, you can lose it if you apply for welfare [0]. I do believe you're entitled to child benefits, but that's about it.
If you're an asylum seeker / refugee, you're entitled to housing in an aslyum seeker center and a weekly budget of E60 a week (for which you need to pay food, clothes, etc yourself - and which gets cut if you misbehave) while your application is being processed.
Human dignity is inalienable on paper, but in practice you get the bare minimum until you nationalize.
My experience as an immigrant to Europe (Ireland, specifically) was that I had no recourse to public funds, and when I first arrived, needed to pay for my own private health insurance. In addition, while you _can_ avail of public welfare (if you're on stamp 4, which you can get after 2 years of employment on a critical skills employment permit), doing so will negatively impact any application for naturalisation or permanent residency.
You have also made a comment in this thread that the Irish policy of building in the countryside is xenophobic, which considering the major changes to the demography of Ireland in recent times feels quite ungracious.
Can you elaborate? The current system says that you can build a house in the countryside, but _only_ if you have strong ties to an area and meet "local needs", which in effect means if your parents live there. This is a de-facto ban on immigrants, since they (by definition) will not have parents from there. It's also a de-facto ban on city people, but everyone I knew in the country hated Dubs for some reason, so they probably wouldn't differentiate much between them and foreigners.
Funny enough, I _did_ build a house in the countryside, and as an immigrant, but only by buying a very old house and refurbishing/extending it. I hardly view this as a claim on the public purse; I imported my job (by working remote for a US company), dumped hundreds of thousands of Euro in to Ireland (half a million just in taxes), then built a house after working with asinine planners and finally sold it at a huge loss. So Ireland got a bunch of money and another house. They're welcome.
As far as Ireland's demography, I don't see how people immigrating (mainly to the cities) changes what I said? Ireland is noteworthy in that it _also_ has a huge problem with emigration; it treats nurses terribly and more or less pushes them out the country, for instance.
Yes, it was the use of the word xenophobic which I do not feel was justified, and considering the huge changes to Ireland's demographics brought about by immigration, it felt particularly harsh. I do appreciate you meant by extension of the fact you need to be from the area.
Personally, I have some sympathy with these types of laws. As someone whose home town in the UK became greatly gentrified before I was able to get on the housing ladder, I find myself living a little way out from where I want to be. Some people are "Anywheres" whilst others are "Somewheres". I am very much a "Somewhere" and need to be based around where I grew up and where my early memories reside. My sister is an "Anywhere" and lives in sunnier climes, apparently with no sentiment for where she grew up.
What "Anywheres" tend to take for granted is they usually have a somewhere they can go back to, but the displaced "Somewhere" does not.
BTW, I certainly did not mean to imply anything about your use of a public purse.
> It’s easy to find talk, for example from people who think universal healthcare should be applied differently to people who live an unhealthy lifestyle.
Brought to you by the same people who oppose healthy free school lunches.
If the lunch were actually free no one would probably oppose it. It's that they oppose throwing grandma to the street when she can't come up with the property tax to pay some lunch-co megacorp to give the kids lunches. If you literally go to the grocery store on your own dime, bag lunches, and donate them for poor kids to eat I don't see how anyone could rationally oppose that.
Economies of scale are huge here, so no government is going to win in any reasonably functioning government.
Government would also reduce overhead from not collecting money for school lunches, thus making such a program more than 100% efficient here if scaled to every child.
Your assertion is underpinned by a false equivalence between scale and efficiency that does not hold in reality.
A few old ladies working in a church kitchen (the typical form these sorts of volunteer endeavors take) to slap PB and J (or deli meat and cheese) on wonder-bread and pairing these with apples and single serving bags of potato chips are going to run circles around the government when it comes to lunches provided per dollar. The government is incurring similar input and labor costs (let's assume the volunteers are paid for the sake of comparison) to do comparable work (i.e. what happens in every school kitchen) but there are entire categories of overhead that the latter has to pay for, and furthermore, these categories of overhead apply constraints that increase costs. The government provides meals that meet more specific criteria. It does not provide them more efficiently on an resources in vs "output of thing we want" produced basis.
You’re describing an inferior product (cold PB and J, apples, unhealthy chips ? drink) that also has higher costs due to packaging to get to those lunch ladies and more packaging to families as you can’t use lunch trays.
That product also needs to then be distributed to individual families vs being prepared inside a school.
So in terms of "output of thing we want" per dollar it’s a massive failure here.
PS: Deli meats and jelly are also terrible health wise, but I get that’s not really your point.
Why must we presuppose all these health and safety regulations that make it too difficult for a charity to just deliver a big batch of healthy meals at the school can't be eliminated, but somehow we can suppose we can increase taxes enough (apparently, in areas impoverished enough that free school lunches have this massive economy of scale you reference) to cover government or corporation supplied school lunches? This is just a rigged game.
In terms of economies of scale Schools can prepare any food using public logistical networks (grocery store etc) a hypothetical donator can do, but they just get more options and easier distribution. A friend ran a nursery school with ~25 kids and even at that scale she could provide snacks cheaper than individual parents. This was a for profit school and parents were themselves paying for the food in both cases, school wins even without considering the cost of ‘free’ labor.
As to health and safety, biology and human nature can’t be hand waved away. Food banks get specific legal protections for cases of food poisoning, but the underlying issues result in people getting sick. Similarly all that wasteful tamperproof packaging comes from real events like the Chicago Tylenol murders, at scale people suck.
There’s also inherent disadvantages when you want food to be preserved without freezing or refrigeration. Jelly is mostly sugar to inhibit microbial growth. Deli meats need to use preservatives you eat while minimally impacting taste when added to meat and we don’t have good options here. That’s why people have refrigerators in their homes, it’s solving a real issue.
> It's that they oppose throwing grandma to the street when she can't come up with the property tax to pay some lunch-co megacorp to give the kids lunches.
>If you literally go to the grocery store on your own dime, bag lunches, and donate them for poor kids to eat I don't see how anyone could rationally oppose that.
The health department will accuse you of running an unlicensed food pantry and threaten you with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. The useful idiots will endorse this action becase "it's not ideal, but we can't have unlicensed restaurants can we".
Restaurant licensing and "health inspections" always seemed so absurd to me. If somebody makes shitty food or their place is gross people just won't go there. We don't need daddy government saying which places are safe.
It’s easy to find talk, for example from people who think universal healthcare should be applied differently to people who live an unhealthy lifestyle.
There’s also all other consequences like vetting immigration that will crop up as well.