He would seem to be wrong unless you want to talk about absurd extremes. First in the US the ‘welfare state’ mostly requires you to buy into the social contract. You can’t collect Social Security or Medicare unless you worked at least ten years (and if you’ve done so why stop?). Likewise unemployment only covers you if you worked on the books and paid taxes. Medicaid is, in theory, open to anyone regardless of their work history but then that’s only helpful to you if you’re sick. It doesn’t get you a place to live or a fridge full of food or nice clothes. It helps you if you have a heart attack in the middle of the street…. Take those things off the table and you’ve removed a huge bulk of the US ‘welfare state’.

You’re left with a smattering of programs like food stamps or housing but looking at the standard of living it’s not at all clear it makes sense for the immigrant from anywhere in the world to just pack his bags and head to the US if immigration barriers were dropped. True food stamps can get an able bodied single male $60 worth of food per month. But the prices of food in the US are much higher than in developing countries.

Now on the flip side, immigrants expand GDP…even illegal ones contribute tax dollars both directly and indirectly. Both legal and illegal immigrants, for example, are healthier than the average American. So as our ‘welfare state’ moves more towards a ‘healthcare state’ adding healthy people to our mix lowers costs.

Friedman’s quip is true only for absurdly generous welfare states and absurdly open immigration policies. But it’s not clear you could really ahve an absurdly generous welfare state even with closed borders. The truth is probably a bit upside down, you can’t have a welfare state without free immigration!

” the state owns stakes in firms that comprise perhaps 60% of the GDP through entities such as the sovereign wealth fund Temasek.[6] ”

But yet these are the same types who will claim that Obama has made the US more socialist because the gov’t will own a stake in GM for a few years.

FYI: That’s not the position of the RCC.

“Thus the US invents and moves medical tech forward, and the rest of the world benefits from the technology “fallout.”

Medical technology is a global business, so you can’t portray the U.S. as the singular, or even primary, source of new medical knowledge and invention. In fact, a great many hospitals in the U.S. rely on foreign doctors, educated outside of the country, to staff their facilities. Even U.S. companies that develop medical technology operate outside of the country, for example GE Healthcare.
http://www.gehealthcare.com/eueu/msabout/msabout.html

Alessandra “Please. Do not give us your poor, your tired, or your hungry. Go die somewhere else. We don’t care. Have a nice day.”

As Milton Friedman once said, “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.”

Would you be willing to do away with all social programs in order to allow increased mobility of labor?
=============
I just don’t buy that kind of question.

Did the European Union do away with all social programs as it instituted its regional cross European border mobility framework?

Not ever. The European Union is perhaps the most welfare and social program cluttered region in the world! At least, it’s one of them. And it has enormous social mobility across borders, with a ton of benefits.

This is what I was talking about conjuring up completely unrealistic, extremist catastrophic scenarios to cover up the fact that we could have much, much more international mobility, bringing a lot of benefits to enormous numbers of people without any talk of doing away with all this or all that. All it requires are solutions that are not extremist.

National borders are completely artificially constructed and determined in the first place. So are the systems for moving across them. We can have much better systems that what we have now. What we currently have is not much better than fiefdoms. Countries nowadays just have a bit more technology decorating them, but the structure is fundamentally feudal.

It’s ridiculous, it has to change.

As Milton Friedman once said, “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.”

Would you be willing to do away with all social programs in order to allow increased mobility of labor?

The European Union, in my opinion, is a great example of a recent system put in place allowing for much greater international (in this case regional) mobility which brought countless benefits to many people (professionals and students).

There is no reason why a host of similar systems couldn’t be developed and implemented in various regions or for groups of countries around the world. No need to have one solution fit all. Each case could be examined and a mobility solution envisioned individually.

Human beings can always think of ways to regulate things in order to achieve more balance. There is no need to paint some chaotic, ridiculous apocalyptic scenario of “hordes” of hungry and disheveled migrants coming to invade the nice neighborhoods of other countries. (Same discourse that was used to keep segregation in the South in place for decades, BTW). The more things change, the more they stay the same…

As to the feudal country borders in place today, this something I had blogged some time ago, an updated statue of liberty motto:

It was while writing a comment critiquing libertarianism at VC* that I fetched in my memory the all too well-known motto for the statue of liberty, by Emma Lazarus:

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

And I then mused that it won’t be long, given the illegal immigration problems that Americans are facing and their mostly hostile and virulent sentiments to these millions of immigrants, plus all the other ones who would like to come to America but are deterred or shot dead on the way, that I thought about a new, more current, and up-to-date motto for the statue that would very much please such aforementioned Americans:

“Please. Do not give us your poor, your tired, or your hungry. Go die somewhere else. We don’t care. Have a nice day.”

More at:
http://socimages.blogsome.com/2010/09/08/updated-statue-of-liberty-motto/

How much of the other countries provided to the world’s poor? Wonder how much the Swiss made from the Third Reich?

IN PARTICULAR, when it comes to health care, the comparison totally breaks down. The reason that such countries can get away with a national health care plan is because there is a place in the world with a large, vibrant, free economy which (because it is relatively free) has not eliminated incentives to medical R&D and innovation. Thus the US invents and moves medical tech forward, and the rest of the world benefits from the technology “fallout.” Nationalize the US medical system and you have killed that golden goose whose eggs have benefited us and the rest of the world.

Which is why Obamacare is a pox on us, and on the whole world. It must be eliminated root and branch!

Pope John Paul II in the apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in America:
“With this in mind, the Synod Fathers recalled that ‘the Church in America must be a vigilant advocate, defending against any unjust restriction of the natural right of individual persons to move freely within their own nation and from one nation to another. Attention must be called to the rights of immigrants and their families and to respect for their human dignity, even in cases of non-legal immigration. Migrants should be met with a hospitable and welcoming attitude which can encourage them to become part of the Church’s life, always with due regard for their freedom and their specific cultural identity…’”

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/migrants/pom2003_93/rc_pc_migrants_pom93_mcguire.html

2011 78.8
2010 78.0
2009 80.7
2008 81.0
2007 81.2
2006 81.2
2005 79.9
2004 78.7
2003 78.2
2002 78.4
2001 79.1
2000 76.4
1999 75.5
1998 75.4
1997 75.6
1996 76.7
1995 76.7