Yep. Even though they can afford to pay a lower wage and people would still accept it, the sweatshop owners in the most dire countries pay much more than they have to in order to ensure they have a healthy and productive workforce. Its worth more in terms of output that the people working are well fed and healthy than if they are starving.

Oh yeah, closing the child labour shops in Malaysia caused more poverty and hardship than the actual shops themselves were claimed to do. After the child labour stopped, people didn't go further and actually fund schools for the children to go to or suplement the income of the parents who relied on their child working to help feed the whole family.

Actually if everyone had retirement savings they wouldn't need welfare except for people who had never worked. Its a greater incentive to find work if you're spending your own money whilst you haven't got a job. In addition to this, in times of recession it reduces the money supply as people withdraw money from their savings to pay for the cost of living. A pretty good economic reason too, IMO.

While I agree with you in principle, unemployment insurance and social security (while currently very poorly managed) do have value; and enough people see value in these services that they could be privatized. Welfare (on the other hand) is a form of charity.

The idea of insurance is to cover people for financial losses which are well outside of their normal ability to cope. In the case of house or car insurance where your liability may exceed several hundred thousand dollars insurance makes sense. In the case of job losses I believe that the losses in most cases are not larger than what most people ought to be able to cope with. In most cases the liability is limited to less than $5,000 so therefore people ought to cover it themselves. Any insurance ought to be in terms of liability greater than that as it prevents people from taking a poor incentive to milk the system.

Say If savings then first draw up to $5000 of funds, then after that if no job found either insurance or social welfare covers until job found.

A private enterprise has just as many problems as a public entity once the size of the organization gets too large. The best performing companies aren't the behemoth Microsofts, they are the nimble and agile Nintendos and Apples of this world. Theres really no such thing as a smart agile welfare company out there, and one such will simply face the same dillemma that the public enterprises did in terms of how they deliver the service.

Interesting debate on the best way for the government to make sure people are taken care of. Only issue I take with it, is in a government like the US (where it's owned by the people), I don't think it's the governments job to make sure I am provided for.

@Mafoo: Bullseye.

The welfare system is nothing but government-mandated charity. How does that make any sense? Should the government have to FORCE us (via tax dollars towards the welfare system) to be charitable to one another? Absolutely not. Private charity is how these people should be taken care of. It's not the government's job to be a financial babysitter. We're supposed to take care of each other because we WANT to, not because the government is forcibly allocating tax dollars to give away.

Consider this: would people be more likely to

A) waste government aid that they know they will always get
-or-
B) waste charitable aid which comes straight from the pockets of actual people, out of the goodness of their hearts?

This should be a no-brainer, folks. Charity is people willingly improving the welfare. Welfare is forcing people to be charitable.