Hmm, I think the foregoing left the connections a bit too implicit. My point was to compare those places I’ve seen where people survive, and some even make economic headway in life, with the way public assistance and “poverty” interact here in the US, where the number living in poverty nearly disappears once you add food stamps, subsidized housing, medical coupons, and the like.

People write about the moral-hazard aspects of this all the time–how the marginal value of entry-level employment can be tiny, or sometimes even negative, in these circumstances–and this was a large part of the impetus for welfare reform (which admittedly has improved the situation to some degree.)

So the point is: given that so many survive, and even progress, with so much less, maybe every once in a while the defenders of our statist systems should have to actually come up with a positive justification for the status quo, rather than getting everyone to buy in to their assumed mantle of superior morality.