One thing that's come up often in talking with conversation partners is the contrast between German and American social services. If you're unemployed here, and a citizen, you will have health care and enough money to live on. Some of the Germans (not the unemployed ones) seem to have a slightly negative view of this, for the same reason that traditional US conservatives would: roughly, that it allows people to be lazy.
The main response I've found coming out of my mouth about this is something like this (translated from insultingly bad German to English): pretty much any government/social services system we opt for is either going to err on the side of allowing people to be lazy, or on the side of letting disadvantaged people suffer (including people who want to be productive but who are stuck is bad situations). Both of these aren't things we want, but if we look at it like a choice, then we should decide on the basis of which is worse. And that looks like a pretty easy call - obviously, it's worse to have disadvantaged people suffering.
The point of this is that the arguments I've heard (mainly in the US) against a social-services-rich governmental approach is that it leads to something bad (allowing people to be lazy). But the fact that something has a bad result only entails that we shouldn't do it if the alternative wouldn't be worse.
In other news: I'm worried that I'm going to have to stop running for a few weeks. My hip just isn't feeling quite right.
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Maybe the solution is to make it very difficult to claim welfare benefits - so difficult that it would be easier to find a job. That way, the lazy option would be to work.
ReplyDeleteNo, I'm not really serious.
I think that's actually how things are in the US - it's very hard to claim welfare benefits that aren't really enough to live on anyway. Seems to be working perfectly.
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