I would contest that honest citizens would want to work to help support their community
Honest does not necessarily mean magnanimous.
dishonest citizens will find ways around working well anyway by their very nature.
Yeah, you'll have corruption/laziness in any economic system, that's how people are. Communism just counterbalances it very poorly. In a non-welfare state, they would try abusing charity organizations instead, and those are much closer to the corruption than government can be - they'd be better at sniffing out laziness. Lazy or not, if they can't abuse handouts, they will either find work or go hungry.
For those needing added incentive, throw in a carrot and stick scheme
Do you have a metaphorical carrot on a stick to suggest? I can't think of a good enough one, myself.
add a healthy splash of nationalism and hey presto youve got a very healthy country.
Nationalism didn't work too well for pre-WWII Germany or Stalin's Russia.
Hmm, I struggle with the idea that you can stash hoards of money away while a fellow American citizen is starving on the streets due to unemployment. It doesnt sound fair to me.
Fairness does not mean equal circumstances, it means equal opportunity. If the person hoarding money was clever, innovative, lucky, or born into a wealthy family, then it's not a problem, and charities are MUCH more able to help out the homeless and hungry in a small-government, non-welfare state. The rich who do not hoard will also have more to donate to causes.
First off our unemployed aren't really starving on the streets. Very many of them are collecting unemployment have roofs over there heads, cellphones, and flat screen tv's. Only in america lol, can the poor be soo well off. Don't forget food stamps (not really a stamp anymore, they give you a credit card that the government refills every month.)
Exactly. How many people collecting enough unemployment and food stamps to buy a flat screen TV can you imagine will be motivated enough to go out and find a 9-to-5 job? It's the same phenomenon we're seeing in county jails - the lazy sometimes commit crimes so they can be sent to jail and watch TV and sit around all day. (Prison is another story, usually being much more dangerous and long-term.)
Second our rich are encouraged to give to charity's for tax breaks. No matter where you go in the US you will see hospitals with peoples names on them, that's because some rich guy forked out the money out of the kindness of his heart to give back to the community, even if he got a tax break for it. You see you can't help anyone if your broke but if your rich you can help a lot of people. Just one example of many of how our super wealthy actually do good.
The tax breaks don't need to be there, because it balances out - the
marginally charitable wealthy who do it for the tax breaks may lose their incentive, but the
genuinely charitable (example: Peyton Manning) would have more resources and would give more.
Since the
income tax system is one of the biggest factors getting in the way, and that's where the tax breaks end up, eliminating it entirely would actually have a positive effect, not a negative one.
Privatization is the answer almost every time. State colleges level the bar in the short-term for poor families, but private schools have to jack up their tuition to turn a profit. If state colleges and government grants didn't exist, entrepreneurs would enter the education field far more often, with big incentives to compete with more expensive schools while still providing a quality education. Poor families would also have more money thanks to less taxes, and be able to save up to send their kids to college. The existence of Pell grants and the like, which are based on income, gives low-income parents much less incentive to save for their children's education - placing even more of a burden on wealth redistribution.
Was it Bush who proposed an alternative to health insurance? I remember hearing about someone lobbying to provide people with the option to open a special kind of savings account at banks, a "rainy day fund" that would take the place of insurance. People can still do this on their own, but the need to have insurance makes saving way more difficult and slow. Insurance companies make a profit because the law of averages is on their side - they pull in enough in premiums to cover claims, labor, overhead, and taxes, and still be in the black. That means, on average, people pay more into insurance than they get out - which wouldn't be the case with a savings account. In fact, you might be making interest as the bank invests your money.
Yay for laissez-faire. If only we could roll things back to FDR's stupid "New Deal" band-aid job.
