I was thinking about the UK benefits system, birth rates, and the Fiat printer recently and wanted to share some thoughts and learn a bit about other welfare systems.

So, I have a cousin, nice person, not the UK equivalent of trailer trash or anything. She left school and never did any form of further education, formal or informal, (I believe a person can self-educate, just as well, if not better than via institutions).

She had a job in an old people's home for a while (they will basically hire anyone) and then had a kid when she was like 20 with, basically, a loser.

Since then, she has been on a life of state benefits, lives in a council house, and has gone on to have another kid. She has said she wants yet another. Apart from the usual benefits, she was put on antidepressants age 18 and gets mental health benefits too. She still struggles financially, but life isn't terrible.

Taking emotion out of the picture, what I find curious is how the use of the money printer and handouts changes and destroys incentives. When I see fellow stackers from Argentina talk about people supporting the old status quo just because they became dependent on pitiful hand-outs, I find it quite scary.

To my mind, any logical person would say, I can't afford another kid, I need to up my skills, up my money etc, but in this world, my cousin would actually be financially worse off if she had a proper job or savings above 15k (that's the cut off in the UK when you lose assistance on bills, utilities etc).

Shit, they have a dog they also can't afford but their vet bills are subsidized too, meanwhile, someone who works normally has to be responsible and ends up worse off.

The feedback loop of consequences has been, to a large extent, removed and the last line of defense is daddy government who you better hope keeps its shit together.

Now, it's all well and good talking about being responsible, but look at most people in life, most problems could be solved if girls simply stopped letting losers impregnate them, but that's not going to happen, life is messy.

But then there is the issue of collapsing birthrates, pretty much everywhere. You always see the dynamic of more affluent people having less kids and, generally, poorer people having more, when to me, on the face of it, that defies logic (it makes sense on a farm when each child is a source of free labour, but not in a modern urban setting).

So then you have birthrates being propped up by those who need the most support. Sometimes I think if they slashed the shit out of all these benefits, it would be a fix that would maybe force people to change, but then I remind myself that even in countries with zero to little welfare, you still see the poorest people having kids, even when they're basically homeless and can't feed them.

Again, maybe I'm just being naive, but since we have a range of stackers from other countries, I would like to hear if you see something similar in your countries, or if you are from a low-zero welfare country, what do you think of high welfare states looking in.

Maybe welfare in general is like medicine and it's all about balance. As Paracelsus's said "All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison."

(note for people in the US, a council house in the UK serves a similar purpose to public housing in the U.S., but with some differences in management, integration, perception etc)