[Cronos]

The article answers your question, in fact the sentence preceding the one you pasted: In your average social democratic European country, you pay more taxes, but you also get a lot in return: universal health coverage, free child care, generous paid family leave, and free college, for example. If you're Danish or French or German, there are certain things you just don't have to worry about, things that keep us Americans up nights.

I have lived in Poland for the past 8 years and while we have far less of a social welfare system than Germany or Denmark or France, some points hold:

1. Universal health coverage: America spends too much on health for far lower levels of service. And obamacare has exasperated this. I believe the original sin was when insurance companies were allowed to get monopolies so that simple procedures are charged $$$ in the USA that cost $ elsewhere. Right now, thanks to obamacare, you pay skyhigh premiums, your coverage is lower. Poland isn't much better in terms of healthcare - our public healthcare is inundated with queues, but the German one is very good
   
   
2. free child care - Germany has this, we don't. we do have under 3 in state run nurseries, which are always overbooked and have something like 10 kids for every "teacher" - so people prefer private nurseries. France is much much better
   
   
3. generous paid family leave: yes, the leave is good even here
   
   
4. EEducation - now this is key. US college tutions rates are astronomical. Here there are few colleges, all very good and with limited intake, so only the best get in. Others go for trade schools and aren't saddled with huge student debt

Is it worth it? Yes

Would it work in the USA? No - what can work in a compact country like Denmark cannot work in the USA

Even in Germany, it works differently from a smaller country like Denmark.

[WayneS]

Okay. None of the items mentioned "keep me up at night" - except maybe the prospect that socialists are going to successfully force them on us.

1) Health care in the United States is the best in the world, despite what you and/or Michael Moore say.

2) Nothing is free. Somebody is paying for your "free" child care. Furthermore, it has been my experience that goods and services are generally worth what one pays for them. As far as I am concerned "free child care" equates to "turn your child over to the state for indoctrination". Remember how well that worked in Germany in the 1930s?

3) Isn't it wonderful that a government can be so "generous" with other people's money?

4) I can't argue with you there. Our higher-education system is currently a joke. I blame it not just on colleges jacking up tuition prices because of the easy availability of student loans, but also on moronic leftists who persist in claiming the "everyone should go to college". The fact is, not everyone is cut out for college.

With that said, I will disagree with you until the day I die that widespread socialism is "worth it". What is "worth it" is having a government that provides equality of opportunity, without trying to assure equality of outcome.

When people are not required to bear the consequences of their own decisions (good or bad) they become dependent on the government. That is exactly what tyrants want, and tyranny is always the end result when a people are [successfully] encouraged to be dependent upon the "free" things given them by their "benevolent" government.

[ek_hornbeck]

The type of welfare system you have in many European countries can "work" as long as you have an ethnically and culturally homogeneous society with a strong work ethic (i.e. where it's considered shameful to live as a parasite).

This was true in Germany and the Scandinavian countries until recently, as well as in Switzerland (which has an Obamacare-like mandatory private health insurance rather than a single-payer system).

As soon as you have a massive influx of foreigners with no sense of duty to the country or society, the system breaks down. The "social contract" where people agreed to work and pay taxes for state-sponsored social services becomes a system milked by immigrants. Then the native population follows the example, thinking "if they're parasites, I can be a parasite too."

This, fundamentally, is why the European social welfare system will collapse and why it would never work in the United States.