Government paid healthcare is still a big expense that's covered.

His point is that if people grow up in a country with a strong safety net (and enjoy the benefits of that upbringing), then move away to start businesses or earn money away from that country to avoid paying into the cost of that safety net, there might not be so strong a safety net when they plan to return.

Which makes perfect sense; if it happens at scale, how would that safety net survive?

Right now, the few who do this are free riders on a system everyone staying behind is supporting. It's not a problem if a thousand people leave Germany to go make money outside the German tax regime and then return in their old age, their system can absorb it.

What would happen if a fifth of the population did that? It might be harder to sustain that level of social services with that loss of tax revenue, i.e. payment for those social services.

What do you mean by safety net? If you haven't paid into pension funds (as required for employees but not eg freelancers), then you aren't receiving anything out of it. The situation for pensioners is actually very different: many can't live on regular pension so they're going to southern EU countries, or eg Thailand for much lower cost of living compared to central EU. Also, Germany's SPD party wants to buy pensioner votes by giving long-time employees additional tax money ("Grundrente"), but not eg freelancers who actually paid these taxes - a corrupt and unconstitutional plan. Their pension story is completely bankrupt anyway; in Berlin they're putting limits on housing rents and all other kinds of unhelpful restrictions on landlords, when renting property is one of the few ways to make a living when retired due to the ECB's zero interest rate policies.

If you did not contribute to the pension funds, you get money as social care, at least in my Eastern European country (part of EU). You never have to work a day in your life, this is what a number of people are actually doing.

Are they uniquely free riders or just joining the rest in their free riding? The majority of people are not net tax contributors. There's a fascinating gender difference as well, with only men as a group being net tax contributors.

Being shackled to the mediocre majority is never fun, some feel the shackles more than others.

There are entire political philosophies that acknowledge this.

They don't like the safety nets.

Or they don't want one. I like safety nets, they are needed for some people that cannot make a living on their own, but I don't want one for me. It's a huge difference between "like", "need" or "want".

> Come back to what exactly? If you haven't contributed to the social safety net, you're not going to get much out of it

I guess they'll have contributed to their personal wealth instead and will just come for the public services / safety offered.

>I guess they'll have contributed to their personal wealth instead and will just come for the public services / safety offered.

Safety? I'm quite sure Singapore is a much safer country than Germany. The US, not so much...

But if you've already moved to Singapore and you want to live in a safe country when you're older, it would make no sense to leave Singapore, unless maybe you're moving to Japan. Western Europe is of course generally safer than America (very little gun violence, after all), but Singapore is one of the safest places on the planet. Just don't walk on the grass.

Yes, this is how it works, by design. You get free health care and some pension even if you stick your fingers in your ears for most of your life.

In the Netherlands at least that pension is proportional to the number of years you worked in the Netherlands, so it would be very small indeed. And health care isn't free, just insurance is mandatory and standardized.

nhs is free no matter how much you contributed. you can also get money even if you didn't contributed