At the end of the day, we should all focus on decentralizing government as much as possible to the local level. Otherwise everything gets lost in a permanent bureaucracy. Switzerland is the best example of this. Some of the highest social services in the world and lowest aggregate tax take.  And btw Switz has the highest per capita military spending  in the world. At the end of the day i think all of us agree on objectives in politics, the issue is all about delivery, and unfortunately state bureaucracies just don't deliver. I get back to my father in Australia being a private doctor. Australia has a universal healthcare system called Medicare and then a private system on top of it. What was fascinating is the private hospitals had a lower cost of service than the state ones. Why? Because the state ones had two admin staff for every front line worker and the private hospotals were the reverse. Again I have  no objection that a first world country should have medical care for all, the question is all about optimizing delivery. Sorry for the politics guys. If you optimize delivery of services thru decentralization, then you can achieve much more across the board, irrespective of political affiliation (unless of course you want the large state bureaucracy for whatever reason). We are getting to a time in the west when we have to consider how to optimize government services. Another thing, contingent liabilities. I have  no plans nor desire nor ability to retire at 55 or even at 20 years of service and receive a pension for the rest of my life. I am not sure how we can reasonably continue that, even for our heroes in police and fire, etc. btw, Merkel decreasing the retirement age in Germany a few years ago was non-sensical. Sorry, a bit of a ramble.