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by sofixa
1809 days ago
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> Most extant forms of welfare exist because at the time of their creation they allowed some group of politicans to buy the votes of some subset of the population. In order to reliably capture those votes, the welfare system has to represent a substantive transfer of wealth from whoever is getting screwed to whoever is selling their vote. Do you have any source on that? One of the original welfare systems, in Imperial Germany, was introduced by conservative politician Otto von Bismarck to preempt the popularity of the Social Democratic party which was gaining popularity with its proposals. Eastern bloc ( Soviets, Warsaw pact, Yugoslavia) were dictatorships that supressed any dissent, but had very decent welfare states. There were wealth transfers, of course, but they were to the state, not citizens, and welfare wasn't linked to it. |
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Mindlessly asking for a source on every claim or observation is one of the silliest and most annoying things people on HN tend to do. It’s an original observation, not some shit I regurgitated from a book. You’d swear 90% of the people here thought you weren’t allowed to have a thought unless you published it in an academic journal. If you read the thread under my comment, you’ll find plenty of people pointing out researchers and historians who came to the same conclusion, e.g. (apparently) Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, whose book I have ordered.
> Eastern bloc ( Soviets, Warsaw pact, Yugoslavia) were dictatorships that supressed any dissent, but had very decent welfare states
This is entirely compatible with my observation. They aren’t democracies.