Write 250 words on this topic: “Which promotes greater personal responsibility, the free market or the welfare state?”
I believe that the free market does. With the welfare state, people become lazy and have no consequences of their choices. The free market allows people’s choices to have consequences. This causes more people to have better responsibility.
When you are in a free market, people must face their choices. A free market creates a strong incentive to be responsible and succeed because if not they might fail. For example imagine a reliable, responsible salesman gets more customers by doing high quality work and showing up on time. But meanwhile a lazy careless one loses his customers to the responsible one. This shows that good choices lead to a higher income, while bad choices lead to failure.
In a welfare system it only weakens this by providing support to whoever no matter your behavior. This often causes a reduction to make safe decisions. Which means they will keep wasting money even if they know you’ll just make bad decisions with it. I imagine it this way, if two people were receiving financial help. One person uses his money for paying bills and saving. But the other wasted his on food, drinks, video games. The foolish one does not plan ahead. But because they’re in a welfare system, they both still receive support, so the foolish person is not affected by his dumb choices. This system reduces the motivation to make good choices, and because of that the consequences are limited.
One more big reason the free market is better is because it’s not funded by taxation. In a welfare state it is all funded by your taxes. This means you are forced into paying for people’s poor choices. The welfare state causes people to support results they didn’t want. This faulty system weakens personal ownership.
Overall, the free market supports a much greater sense of responsibility, than the welfare state. With the free market we all can be more responsible, smarter, better financially, have less taxation, and much more. With all of this said the free market is the smarter choice than welfare.
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