Reddit reviews The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism

This WAS true.

Sadly our current Parliament is heading in that "us versus them" direction.

Also we're "market liberals" not "socialists."

Welfare states come in all shapes and sizes. Canada is modestly "socialist" compared to the modestly socialist nordic states.

A good read is Gosta Esping Andersen's "Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism" which puts Canada (and the US) in the "market liberalism" area of welfare provision.

Seriously, seminal work

>Because since they receive all these amazing perks by paying such a high tax rate, then wouldn’t it be logical to say that they could achieve perfection if they paid 100% in taxes.

That doesn't follow logic? The logic is that higher input (at a manageable % of income) + higher output (at a manageable % of GDP) = more productive society; not that 100% input = more productive society. I understand where it's possible to get confused, but it does take a bit of a leap to take it to the absolute extreme there.

It could be good for you to read Esping-Anderson's Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Clasen's Comparative Social Policy and Pierson's The Welfare State Reader, if you're confused about some of the logic behind Social Democratic states.

China is not a [welfare capitalist state] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_capitalism#Welfare_capitalism_in_the_United_States) it would be more accurately described as authoritarian capitalism. Welfare capitalism refers to states that intervene in the economy, to varying degrees, to provide social welfare for citizens. While outdated, [The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism] (http://www.amazon.com/Three-Worlds-Welfare-Capitalism/dp/0691028575) breaks them down to three forms; social democratic, corporatist and liberal.

Apart from being a citizen in what is called a social democracy, I do have some knowledge on the term, however in effect limited mostly to theories regarding the Nordic model and how welfare capitalism is done in the Nordic countries. So not as much theory on social democracy in itself as a concept, but rather more empirically perhaps, on how social democracies incorporates these notions into welfare and work policies.

With that said, I believe looking into the Nordic model will give you some good insights into what exactly it is that social democracy entails, and it will surely give you some additional "meat to the bone" after reading the wiki article.

A good start, I believe, is Gøsta Esping-Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (there are abridged versions available in various scholarly databases). I can also produce some key concepts from the book worth mentioning, if you like.

Perhaps if you could formulate more precicely what it is you're most interested in regarding social democracy, I could provide you with some more litterature or insights?

> Your first point is woefully absurd to the point of idiocy. All of those people have been ruthlessly scrutinized and strawmanned. There are too many respectable people who talk highly of those men to believe that they actually hung out with Nazis.

This isn't an actual argument; I'm not sure if it's a logical fallacy or just a statement of nothing, but in any case, the Ron Paul letters thing is very well documented.

>The Mises institute is an economics think tank not a political one. But what I’m talking about is what would a good state look like rather than a bad state. That’s a metric we are using not some mental gymnastics to justify a state. A good state acts more like the free market than a bad state does. To just say “Public libraries are illegitimate.” That’s fine, but they still exist as they do and I am still interested in how they conduct themselves.

The problem here is that you approach it in a way which fundamentally legitimizes the claim of the State. "I don't really think you own this property legitimately, but I certainly support your right to act like you do so" is extraordinarily weak sauce. Additionally, it ignores the extent to which the State is responsible for generating the problems you seek state governance to resolve. Criminality, for example, is largely the result of State policies, both insofar as most crimes are not property crimes and therefore not crimes but rather justifications for the expansive use of state violence on marginalized populations, and also in that state policy creates economic winners and losers which, in turn, increase the propensity of those losers to turn to criminality to sustain themselves. As long as the State exists, the things that justify the State's power will exist, because the State is largely responsible for generating them. Not entirely, but largely.

>Moving on, you are forced to interact with people when your wealth is violently appropriated to pay for the subsidization of people through the programs I presented before.

Okay, but far, far, far more of my wealth is violently appropriated to pay for programs which benefit white American citizens; and far, far, far more of my wealth is appropriated to pay for the salaries of the violent thugs who enforce those laws. And again, the easier solution is that we simply stop violently appropriating people's wealth, not that we reduce immigrant communities because they might increase the absolute amount of wealth violently appropriated. And furthermore, increased immigration, while possibly increasing absolute welfare costs, almost certainly reduces relative welfare costs, both in that immigrants disproportionately do not benefit from the welfare state (particularly illegals who very typically aren't able to benefit from it at all but are still subject to taxation) and in that, by paying taxes, they increase the size of the pie from which the government violently appropriates its funds.

>The one third of second wave immigrants went home because they didn’t like it in America and went back home for whatever reason. That doesn’t happen anymore due to subsidies and artificially granted due to the policies of the USCIS.

So the success of an immigration system is judged by the amount of people who don't stay here? That doesn't seem like a relevant metric at all; furthermore, the gap between the United States and the rest of the world in quality of life is much larger now than it was during earlier waves of immigration. Even if you're from a relatively developed country, like the U.K. or France, the standard of living for someone falling at the same point of the income distribution is typically going to be significantly higher in the United States. When there aren't exogenous political factors which compel immigration, like an ongoing civil war or something like that, economic factors tend to be the most important factor driving immigration. If you're better off in America than anywhere else, there's no reason to leave. That speaks to the relative success of the American model, compared to other countries, in generating wealth and standard of living. It doesn't speak to failures within our immigration system.

>We already have an agreement on the welfare state, so please tell me how someone sponsoring their elderly grandparent to live in the United States and receive American social security without having paid into it reduces my tax burden?

>But you will just say “but that’s rare.” But that doesn’t matter, it’s a principle not a statistical matter.

Well, it's not rare. It doesn't happen. You only qualify for social security if you accumulate a certain number of 'social security credits' through payroll taxation. Generally, unless you've worked for about a decade in the U.S., you can't qualify, though there are some exceptions in cases where the U.S. has an agreement with a foreign country to allow it (this is almost entirely limited to developed countries like France, Italy, and Japan, and doesn't really benefit immigrants from developing countries). Ditto Medicare.

Our welfare state isn't designed with any form of universality in mind; it's one of the key axes of distinction which separate us from the Nordic and continental models (e.g. Germany and France). The book is going to be somewhat dated now in terms of the policies described since it was written a while ago, but consider reading Gosta Esping-Andersen's Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (link).

>You entirely ignored my whole story about my friend who can’t be a good capitalist, but I guess that makes it easier to smear myself and The Mises people as racists.

I'm trying to keep this relatively contained in terms of length since I don't want to start hitting the upper bounds of Reddit's character limits in posts.

>But my main point being here is that I agree 100% that modern American immigration is a horrible government program. My proof being that my friend is being denied despite the fact he could produce horrendous wealth for the country, whereas people who are reliant on the state for a whole ton of stuff are being subsidized and let in. If there was a free market immigration system, this would be totally backwards.

Except, that isn't true. Depending on how we define high vs. low-skilled immigrants in terms of labor market position, we get different stats, but in no circumstances do low-skilled immigrants outnumber skilled immigrants. If we compare by type of visa, the US issued 197,129 H-1B visas to "skilled" immigrants vs. 83,600 H-2B visas for "unskilled" laborers source 1 source 2. It evens out a bit when you consider the 134,368 H-2A visas for seasonal migrant farm labor, but these are typically temporary seasonal jobs granted to nonresident aliens who typically can only stay for about ten months. In terms of new prospective Americans, we let in nearly two times the number of skilled immigrants compared to unskilled immigrants.

It's closer when we consider by education, though; 55% of immigrants have high school education or better.

>Like I said the fact that school budgets are higher, have worse results, and that my taxes are raised is not insignificantly based on the fact that there needs to be so much superfluous stuff related to public education that there wouldn’t be in a free market system.

But immigrants aren't a burden on the American education system, in net. Or at least, I've yet to see any actual evidence they are. I mean, insofar as I'm sure property ownership is less common in immigrant communities compared to native communities, they may be relatively less likely to be directly responsible for property tax payments which fund American schools; the thing is, that's built into their rent (unless their landlord is an idiot) so I don't even buy that argument.

>Oh by the way, you have to be naturalized to vote, and pray tell do naturalized people tend to vote for more freedom, less spending, and less regulation?? I think we both know the answer to that.

This is a terrible argument, though, since we can draw all sorts of arbitrary demographic lines to point out that lots of people tend to vote for less freedom, more government, and more regulation. And in fact, I'd argue that there isn't a single demographic that doesn't, on average, do precisely that. When fewer than 2% of Americans routinely vote for the Libertarian Party (the only political movement in the United States that can claim to be in favor of more freedom, less government, and less regulation), literally everyone's a villain.

Though, for what it's worth, the only evidence I've seen suggests that immigrants tend to be very similar to natives, increasingly so over time (i.e. second-generation Americans from immigrant families are more like natives in terms of political opinion than first-generation Americans). See here and here.

Plus, if ideology is really a concern, why not just screen for ideology? We don't let anyone in if you don't express a belief in individual property rights. I'd be willing to accept that, as long as we start kicking people out on that basis, too, including citizens, and particularly citizens, since they can and do vote for more government and less freedom.

>But just out of curiosity, if every single dollar of social spending were shut down tomorrow and whoever was allowed to leave or come to the US was just totally free after that, would you be happy with the outcome?

In re: this specific discussion, yes. More generally, as long as the government exists, I won't be.