[ecshafer]

The welfare state can not exist in world where the government is against population growth. You cant have a robust welfare state and make through policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare. We need an exponential curve of population to maintain it, especialy when its at european levels. Mass immigration of uneducated people from low income countries doesnt cover the gap, especially when the government extends welfare to them.

This is all a fact.

[braiamp]

With how many statements of fact you make, you are pretty wrong. There's not one of them being right. We have enough productivity that a minuscule part of the population can produce and distribute the basic needs for every human on earth. There's literally humans that can't find jobs to do because we don't educate them well enough to go and offer services that other humans need. Not only that, we try to say that they don't deserve enough pay to supply their basic needs.

And yes, I'm talking about teachers and medics. We don't have enough of either, because we don't pay them enough compared to their workload. Those things we will always need, in great quantities to support our population. Greater quantities than engineers, architects, researchers, etc. but guess where everyone flocks because it pays more?

- https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/250330/978924151...

- https://ipsnoticias.net/2022/10/el-mundo-necesita-69-millone...

[zozbot234]

A welfare state that was genuinely targeted to serving basic needs of the population would look vastly different from present-day France and other comparable countries. Take a look at Singapore; last I checked, it was not known as a place where people might be at risk of starving. The underlying problem is that people expect the welfare state to solve issues of social marginalization, which are actually the result of fraying social capital as opposed to a mere lack of resources. Welfare states make these issues actively worse, not better.

For instance, when every employer (including those that may be only marginally successful to begin with) is expected as a matter of law to extend onerous labor protections against firing and laying off to each and every worker,[0] this results in marginal workers (who may have been socially marginalized originally for reasons of ethnic heritage and the like) being completely excluded from the market, which makes their plight even worse. (Except for forms of "gig work" or informal employment, of course - which in practice function to sidestep the most onerous regulations to some extent.) A very relevant issue in present-day France.

[0] And to fund those costly welfare programs through payroll contributions that are levied on employees and employers alike - which is its own issue and often amounts to exploitive, confiscatory taxation for the most marginal workers.

[lII1lIlI11ll]

> You cant have a robust welfare state and make through policy and propaganda 4+ child families rare.

I'm curios what do you mean by this. Could you provide some examples of such policies or propaganda campaigns?

[ecshafer]

Legalizing abortion, unneeded regulations that require car seats at later ages which disincentivize more children for lack of car space, zoning that removes green space and side walks in favor of car infrastructure, expensive education and health insurance (family premiums are insane compared to individual), incentivizing two worker house holds through tax policy.

[victorbjorklund]

Health insurance? Are you sure you are talking about welfare states and not America? Which welfare state has expensive education and health insurances?

[kuerbel]

cracks fingers

The last sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting for a post that collapses if poked gently with a stick.

"The welfare state cannot exist without exponential population growth."

Sounds mathy, but is wrong. Welfare states do not require exponential population growth. They require a sufficient ratio of contributors to dependents, plus productivity. Those are not the same thing.

Exponential curves + limited resources = ecological faceplant. No serious economist argues that infinite demographic growth is a prerequisite for social insurance. What they talk about instead are levers: labor participation, productivity, retirement age, automation, taxation structure, and yes, migration.

"Government policy makes 4+ child families rare."

Prosperity itself lowers fertility. Governments can nudge at the margins, but they are not mind-controlling people out of large families. Most people stop at one or two kids because time, money, energy, housing, and sanity are finite.

"Mass immigration of uneducated people doesn’t cover the gap."

Ah, bundling multiple claims into a single blur. Efficient, but sloppy. Refugees are not permanently "uneducated"; education and skills are state-dependent, not genetic properties. (Except if you are one of those right-wing grifters that think only white people are capable of intelligence, and maybe east asians. Those people get a hearty fuck you from me, that is not worth discussing at all). Early years cost money; later years often don’t. But you know what, the same is true for children.

Fourth argument: "Extending welfare to immigrants makes it worse."

This assumes welfare is a static pot rather than a system designed to convert non-participants into participants. Welfare states don’t exist just to reward contributors; they exist to stabilize societies over time. Cutting people off doesn’t magically turn them into productive workers. Quite often it does the opposite.

Now, let's zoom out a bit for the real category error here. Modern welfare system are intergenerational risk-sharing mechanisms, not growth cults.

"This is all a fact."

Sure thing buddy

[zozbot234]

> Refugees are not permanently "uneducated"

But why import uneducated immigrants when you could import educated ones instead? The Canadian model has been a resounding success on that front and European countries should copy it. (And no, the "brain drain" argument doesn't really hold water. The successful migrants/expats tend to go back to their homelands after a while and become a much needed force for progress there, if there's even the slightest scope for actual improvement.)

[kuerbel]

You're mixing up refugees and economic migrants, which makes the argument collapse immediately.

Refugees are not "imported." They are people fleeing war, persecution, or state collapse under international law obligations that Europe helped write. You don't get to say "we'll take the engineers, but not the bombed-out schoolteachers." Treating asylum like a points-based talent visa is a category error, not a policy preference.

The brain drain argument absolutely does hold water. Systematically pulling scarce doctors, engineers, and academics out of low-income or fragile states weakens those societies. Some people return and contribute, yes, but many don't, and many return to systems too damaged to absorb their skills. That's not controversial. It's well documented in development economics.

What's being presented as "common sense" here is really a value judgement: that human worth should be ranked by immediate economic utility to the receiving country. That's not a fact, and it's not how real migration systems actually work.

If the goal is serious policy discussion, collapsing refugees, migrants, education, and prosperity into a single slogan doesn't get you there. It just makes the world simpler than it is.

One more point about the word "import," because language matters in how we think about policy.

Describing people as being "imported" frames migration as a centrally planned, top-down process, rather than as a response to war, persecution, economic collapse, or climate pressure. It shifts attention away from those underlying causes and toward the idea that governments are deliberately "bringing people in" as if they were interchangeable inputs.

That framing makes it easier to talk about migrants in abstract, instrumental terms, sorted by usefulness rather than understood as people reacting to circumstances, and it tends to oversimplify how migration actually works in practice, which is far more reactive and constrained than intentional or engineered.

Being precise about language helps keep the discussion grounded in reality rather than drifting into metaphors that flatten complex human movement into something it isn't.

[zozbot234]

Statistics differ, but refugees granted protection range from a single-digit percentage of recent immigration into France to about ~15% or so (other countries have a somewhat larger share, including other European countries). It's true that many people tend to conflate proper refugees and economic migrants to whom a points-system might apply, but this is a general problem with how migration policy is discussed on all sides of the political spectrum, not something that's original to my comment.

Want to admit more refugees without endangering social cohesion? Then you should make sure that you're also carefully selecting your economic migrants as best you can. It's not a matter of assigning different human worth to each, but of simultaneously abiding by legal obligations towards actual refugees that are binding for the country, and also trying to do the absolute best you can for the highest amount of people who might be wanting to expatriate to it for different but nonetheless valid reasons - without unduly burdening that country and society in the process.

[ipaddr]

"Prosperity itself lowers fertility"

This is not true. Women entering the workforce instead of having babies earlier in life lowers prosperity. In our society women working during those early years creates more prosperity (two incomes) but those who are very rich like Musk has no issue producing a big stable of kids.

[gramie]

I don't believe that there is a single case in world history where increased family income did NOT reduce the number of children per family. Likewise with improvements in child mortality.

[seec]

Well, those people are resistant to facts and logic.

But when you think about it, their survival depends on it, so it makes perfect sense. Most of those making those arguments have cushy bullshit jobs, completely dependent on stealing the work of others to live. Funnily enough, you would pay them to do nothing; it would be preferable for society because it would cost less money, and they wouldn't be able to create insane bureaucracy to satisfy their power trip.

But it doesn't matter; reality has a way to always catch up and expose the liars. The system is clearly unsustainable, and enemies have been probing for weakness for a while now. It's unclear how long we have left until a full-strength attack happens but it seems hard to avoid now.

[victorbjorklund]

Hungary is a welfare state.