Why we should get rid of welfare state.

Picture the scene: You got a very comfortable life, you can have your kids on the best schools, drive your dream car and live in an amazing neighborhood.
And then you lose your job.
If you don't have another income source you'd to agree that it's time to tighten your belt and spend far less than you're used to.

Few people would disagree about that.

Except when it's about the State, not you.

The king of Netherlands said a couple years ago:

the welfare state of the 20th century is gone.

The reason is very simple, there's not enough money to pay all the benefits that people demand on a welfare state, specially in a crisis situation.
That's the reason why mostly of the countries with big welfare states are restricting their benefits.

Austerity sounds like a dirty word nowadays, but you should blame the spending in the first place, not the attempt to balance the budget.

The inconvenient truth is that all the benefits and "rights" the contemporary welfare state guarantee are very pricey and can't handle crisis situation or even a natural population growth, without raising taxes until a point it suffocates the economy.
I'm talking about very wealth countries that are still struggling to keep the welfare running, not to mention poor countries that tried to copy the "nordic model" and failed miserably (I'm looking at you Latin America).

Could it be more flexible? Yes, but this sort of thing usually are set on stone, wrote on the constitution with very little room for adjustment, and we can't forget how people become crazy when you want to change their privilegies, demonstrations and riots are the expected reaction.

So you mean there's no way to have a scalable welfare state? Probably there is, but the government is not agile enough to find a solution and not brave enough to put populism aside.

If we look for the "Nation as a service" paradigm there's much to be explored, the Resilience project is one the most promising ideas for a basic income I've ever seen and I'm looking forward to see it working.
All the P2P models and blockchain applications also give us a bright light of hope.

It's the end of welfare state of the 20th, but it might be an amazing thing, the end of the known welfare state can open space for a new range of alternatives, things to explore and experiment, and then we might finally find a model that works not only for now, but also for the next generations.