 So, it hurts the people, it purports the help. Among other things, it does that by, and this is my economic critique of the welfare state. Welfare states suppress wealth creation, they suppress economic growth, and sadly, I don't have the counterfactual parallel universe to prove this, but to prove it empirically, but poor people would be far, far better off without them. So, it hurts them by basically giving them the false illusion and letting them live in a fantasy land that is everything is fine, everything's okay, when they could be living in a far better world, that requires a lot more of them, but actually provides them with far greater economic well-being. Good intro. Yeah, we can kind of start on those lines. So, I guess to talk about some of that stuff, what I would say is that welfare to me has been proven to be fairly effective at alleviating a great deal of extreme poverty in the world. You mentioned that the thing that alleviates a lot of poverty isn't welfare, it's markets, it's economic growth. And to a large degree, I would agree. I'm not a socialist, a capitalist, I think the profit motive in market economics makes a lot of sense. But I think that within reason though, we can imagine a world that is made better by distributing some of those games to lower income people who need it to the extent that you're incentivizing innovation, and to some extent also bolstering innovation. You mentioned that poor people would be much better off without welfare because it entraps them to some extent. It allows them to fall into the mindset of welfare, to where they don't need to innovate, they don't need to strive. But I would tell you that to me, it's the exact opposite. I think that in a lot of countries with pretty robust welfare systems, we see the opposite. Because after all, it's pretty difficult to work on the next big technological innovation in your garage when you've got hunger and poverty looming over you the entire time, especially when you have to work another job or two in order to meet your needs. Rather, I think that at least in my view, welfare can provide a bolstering effect on innovation for that reason. You also mentioned that we don't have a counterfactual. Obviously, we don't have a world where there's no welfare, but we did have that world for a long time. For a long time, the government didn't provide very much social welfare. That was a world with a lot more, let's say economic precariousness, a lot more poverty than we have today. Now, obviously, you could always ultimately say that the gains in poverty at those times were because of innovation, because of industrialization, because of economic growth. Again, we don't have any disagreements that economic growth can bring people out of poverty. But when we started to see social security and welfare programs come online in response to the Great Depression, for instance, we saw real increases in people's standard of living. Social security has been one of the most successful anti-poverty programs of all time that the US has implemented themselves. I would say that in sort of the broader context of the world, anti-poverty and welfare programs have been shown to give real increases in lower-income people's standards of living. I don't think it's a coincidence that the countries with the most welfare or countries that we would perceive as having the most welfare, countries like Norway, Sweden, Iceland, the Nordic countries broadly, that those countries also have some of the highest rates of social mobility, entrepreneurship, and income mobility in the entire world. I don't think that that is a coincidence. Wow, okay, so where do I start? It's a lot to unpack. You're working off of a lot of mainstream conventional wisdom, so I'm going to have to spend time unpacking the conventional wisdom. Let me just start by saying, so far we haven't talked about the moral aspects that I let off with. I hope we go back to that because economics is interesting, but I don't think ultimately economics moves to the world. I think it is morality, and I think that's why we have a welfare state for moral reasons, has nothing to do with economics. But let me address the economic issues that you've raised so far. Let me start with the end. Let me start with Scandinavian countries. Scandinavian countries have high mobility only because the gap between relative poor and relative wealth is small. So if you have a distribution that is very narrow, yes, it's easy to move across that distribution very quickly. So it's meaningless to talk about mobility in Scandinavian countries and compare it to mobility in the US. What's much more interesting is to look at mobility in a country like the US pre-welfare state and post-welfare state, and mobility was far higher in the United States before the establishment of any welfare programs, including Social Security in the 1930s, than it was post a free market, a true free market, not relative welfare states. Not one welfare state is compared to another. A true free market is the most mobile because it is based on ability. It is not based on the fact that it is based on what you're able to do. You talked about the pre-welfare state world. Well, let's take the pre-welfare state world. In the 18th century, 17th century, however far back we want to go, basically, if you look at Western Europe and the United States, almost everybody was extremely poor, as defined by the United Nations, two dollars a day or less. The entire population was extremely poor except for some aristocrats and maybe some city dwellers, some merchants in the city. During a period where there was no welfare state for about 150 years, extreme poverty was basically, basically as extreme poverty as the UN defined it eradicated in the West, in Western Europe and the United States. Just take a country like Sweden, which is one of everybody's favorite countries because it has a robust or used to have a robust welfare state, less so today. Sweden was the poorest country in Europe in the 1860s, 1870s. 1870 liberated its economy, basically created the freest economy in Europe, one of the freest in the world, if not the freest at the time. From 1870 through World War II, Sweden basically grew its own the fastest economic rates in all of history. Basically, it eradicated extreme poverty in Sweden without any welfare or with very, very little welfare in the 20s and 30s, but almost none. It then adopted socialist policies of massive redistribution of wealth in the 60s and 70s and through the 80s. By 1984, Sweden was basically bankrupt. Since then, it has been reforming its welfare state, shrinking the size of the welfare state. It's still big by US standards, but it's significantly less than what Denmark has and it's significantly less than what it had in its past. But most of that wealth that was being redistributed during those 60s, 70s, 80s was wealth that had been created during its period of free markets. Sweden went through a period when in the 19th century, early 20th century, it had a significant number of the largest businesses in Europe were based in Sweden. It was entrepreneurial. It was massively innovative. It was, as I said, economic growth was robust. It then got to a point when the late 1970s, the two biggest industries in Sweden were ABBA, the POP Group, and Johan Borg, the tennis player. So it had lost its leadership industrial-wise. It had lost its leadership entrepreneur-wise. Today, entrepreneurship is back in Sweden, not in Denmark, not so much in Norway, not so much in Finland, but certainly in Sweden. And if you look at that, it has very little, if anything, to do with welfare, because the welfare state has actually been shrinking from 1994 to today. But it has everything to do with the fact that Sweden has very, very loose regulations. It's reduced the regulatory burden on businesses significantly and as a result, made it much, much easier to start businesses and be an entrepreneur in Sweden than it had been in the past. But again, the real contrast, and again, we can use social mobility. I forget the other two parameters that you use for the Scandinavian countries. But generally, if you look at Scandinavians, for example, Denmark, Sweden, if they were US states, in terms of GDP per capita adjusted for cost of living, would be well below the average of a US state. They would be closer to some of the poorest states in the South. The United States is significantly richer than on a GDP per capita basis than Scandinavia is. Americans live in bigger homes, they drive bigger cars, they have more money to spend and to save. And if you look at life expectancy, people always bring this up. Life expectancy of Swedes in the United States is about the same as life expectancy of Swedes in Sweden as are measures of happiness. So there's nothing special about Scandinavia. It's a nice place to live relative to what we have today in the world. But it's also a pretty dull place to live in a sense that there's little ambition, particularly in a place like Denmark or even more so in Norway. Productivity is not increased as much as it has in other places, certainly not as much as it could in a free market. Entrepreneurship is nowhere near the potential. Israel is more entrepreneurial than most Scandinavian countries. There's just nothing to write home about. And then France, of course, which spends on welfare about as much as Scandinavia does. You don't get any of the so-called pluses that the Scandinavian countries seem to have. Maybe because France is bigger, less homogeneous, and is more similar in that sense to the United States. So maybe if you take away some of the factors that make Scandinavia unique, you don't get some of the supposed benefits that everybody sees in Scandinavia. So no, I think extreme poverty was eradicated in the West by capitalism, by free markets. The welfare state has basically taken all the wealth that was created during that time and spends much of that wealth. And in the process, it has dramatically slowed economic growth. Poverty in the United States, relative poverty, and not absolute poverty, of course, but relative poverty in the United States has not decreased since the 1970s. It was decreasing fast before the war on poverty started. It continued to decrease in the beginning of the war on poverty and since then has been flat. Poor people in the United States, social mobility in the United States has been hurt in my view by the welfare state. Social mobility has shrunk because of the welfare state. And economic growth is pathetic and has been pathetic since the 1970s, since we started this large experiment in massive redistribution of wealth. And we can talk about social security. I've spoken for a long time, so let me put aside social security. I disagree with you completely about social security. I think social security has been an unmitigated disaster and is going to be even worse in the future. But it's basically harmed Americans both because it reduces economic growth and because irresponsible people retire on less money. And what social security does, I'm talking about it anyway, what social security does is reward irresponsibility and penalized responsibility. Yeah, yeah. 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