[autodafe]

Welfare, free health care, free education... Free to him but it has to be paid for by someone. As more people rely on those benefits, the cost goes up for those who contribute to the system. The frightening question is what happens when the well runs dry?

[rbehrends]

Basic welfare is an unavoidable cost. The only way to avoid paying for food, housing, and healthcare is, to be blunt, to starve or bleed to death in the gutter. And basic welfare doesn't really cost much. The cost drivers for the European welfare systems are healthcare and pensions. With respect to healthcare, the EU countries actually have the enormously inefficient American system beat (often for better quality at lower cost), with respect to pensions, they generally lag behind due to lower fertility rates.

Education pays for itself because it is an investment. The average person will be more productive and earn more (thus increasing GDP and also their personal tax payments) if they have an education rather than being illiterate. ROI for education is extremely good. Countries like Switzerland and Germany do not subsidize education just because it's a nice thing to do, but because it's a positive sum game.

[zanny]

Considering how, in the US at least, wealth and asset holdings has extremely concentrated itself in the top fraction of the population in the last 30 years, probably not soon.

I mean, most of these states aren't raising taxes, but are playing with monetary gears to keep money injection from spurring inflation (albeit they have had huge taxes for decades).

[autodafe]

Just because the well runs deep, doesn't mean it's right to steal water from it, unearned.

[obstacle1]

In the end capital ownership and property rights are just concepts we've collectively agreed are legitimate. Once living conditions become dystopian and wealth inequality skyrockets even more than it already has, I suspect society will legitimize "stealing" from the well.

Notably, the well doesn't care whether or not you steal water from it. The water was never 'owned' by it in the first place.

[autodafe]

I agree that ownership and property rights are an invention - though one of a free society. And you are correct that society can just as easily decide that these rights are no longer valid, though that is not a society I would ever consider free. To a certain extent that is happening already. The day the individual is forced to give up his last right and his last dollar to the ugly greed of the 'collective good' will be a sad day indeed.

[kalleboo]

Imagine a future where self-driving cars (=home delivery taking over retail), 3D printers, fully automated factories, and the death of copyright/intellectual property has put 75% of the population out of work. It's hard to imagine anything BUT some kind of socialist/communist system required.

[obstacle1]

Well, I think you've certainly got an interesting notion of freedom. I don't consider a life subjected to the will of a state free in any meaningful sense of the word. You're only 'free' insofar as your rulers choose to protect your interests.

This isn't to say that an ownership-oriented society is bad because it is unfree; just that it is inherently unfree, like any other formal system for living in cooperative groups.

So in my view, the argument for private ownership-oriented societies from freedom falls apart. And we're back wondering why we shouldn't 'steal' from the well.