Capitalism by a mile. Its good for everyone from the business owner to the consumer. It also doesn't help people who are lazy, like socialism does.

From what I saw it was 7.9 per 1000 or 0.79%. In addition to this there was a lot of stigma attached to being a pauper.

This is truth. Its better to work at McDonalds for 3 years than to not work at all. Its very hard to go from 3 years of not working into paid employment, the people making the decisions about employing people will if given a choice choose someone whos been in work or is currently working.

 I think you guys are missing the point of welfare. It's meant to guarantee that somebody, even if they can't find work, will be able to live without becoming a criminal.

Yes there are negative consequences such as dole bludgers but you are acting as if its immediately possible for everybody to immediately find work at all times, that's simply not the case in the real world.

I acknowledge that fact. However im saying it becomes more difficult to find work the longer you're out of it.

Question:

Wasn't the industrial revolution a good thing, Rath? Last I checked, it helped slingshot society to have better standards of living than almost any other period in history. Due to new industries, more people had jobs and more goods were being produced at lower costs, ensuring that people had more.

Also, I think you don't understand living conditions in 3rd world countries and the factories that are there. Have you read any studies about sweatshops and other 'bad' industries in southeast Asia or other locations? Here is a little bit of data for you:

What does the chart show? That in most countries, the average sweatshop worker is earning well above median income in the entire country. In Haiti, a country wracked by poverty, the average hatian sweatshop worker is earning more than double the average income at 40hrs a week. Yeah, sweatshops are horrible :-\

Communism, at least in the small scale.

Unemployment insurance is designed to ensure that people who find themselves out of work can survive while they look for work ... Welfare is a misguided effort of the government to get into the charity business

Kind of weird that Rath implies that Welfare reduces crime rates, yet crime only went up since we installed welfare, and when we added new anti-welfare reforms, crime went down.

@mrstickball. Industrial revolution was a good thing, however it was also an excellent example of abuse of workers for profit. It can be both.


Also your graph on sweatshops misses the point. I was pointing out that western countries outsource to countries where they don't have to observe workers rights.

Also that graph is deliberately misleading, for one thing China has far more sweatshops than all the other countries combined and look at it's percentages (for proof check out exports, China has 1.2T per year closest on that graph to it is Indonesia at 115B per year, the rest are far smaller than that even). It also doesn't seem to take into account how extremely low the average wage is in most of those countries and that a lot of people in them live on sustenance or barter in rural communities.