Living in an European welfare state, which is founded on a full-on welfare capitalist system of government and economy, I really believe that it's one of the best if not the best system of government and economy in the world.
Taxes may be high, but in return there is no homelessness (save for a minuscule group of individuals who deliberately choose to live homeless for some reason, even though they wouldn't have to), there's 100% literacy and a high level of education among the wider population, and nobody has to endure lack of high-quality medical practice because of not being able to afford it.
Despite the scaremongering of American conservatives, there are way more positives to universal healthcare than negatives and, most importantly, it does not exist in exclusion to private medical practice. If you so choose, and you can afford it (or, more commonly, have it as an employment benefit), you can go to any of the hundreds of private clinics in the country, to see one of the thousands and thousands of private doctors.
Most importantly, nobody has to live in extreme poverty. While there are restrictions and requirements to it, if you simply have no income for whatever reason, you can get welfare benefits that help you survive and get you the necessities for life. Nobody needs to live on the streets, nobody needs to go hungry or sick, nobody needs to die because of extreme poverty. (If anybody does experience extreme poverty, prolonged hunger due to lack of food etc, it's pretty much guaranteed to have been because of their own everyday life choices, which they wouldn't have had to make.)
It's not all a completely perfect system and Utopia, of course. There are many problems with such a full-on welfare system, major and minor.
One of the slightly more minor problems, which I would still like to write about today, are the welfare leeches.
I call "welfare leeches" the sort of people who do not use the welfare system because they need to. Instead, they abuse the system to not do a single day of work in their lives, if they can help it. In other words, they deliberately live at the expense of the government (ie. at the expense of the taxpayers) without contributing anything to it by working and paying taxes.
I have met such people myself, in real life. These are people whose entire life revolves around all the myriads of ways to game the system, to get money from the various governmental welfare programs, so that they don't have to work a single day for their income. They know all the tricks and tips, they know where to live, they know what to say and do, they know how to manipulate the system to bypass the restrictions and checks put into place to stop this kind of abuse. They have spent their entire lives trying to find out how to do that, how to collect as much free money from the system as they can.
It's quite literally like they are rich people who don't need to work at all in order to live a decent life, except that they aren't rich and instead they are just leeching the welfare programs and taking advantage of them. And some of them are so successful that they don't even need to live in some cheap-ass rundown apartment, barely surviving to the end of the month each month, but instead they can even afford some luxuries and hobbies that most other people who have to genuinely survive on welfare can't afford.
And the thing is, what they are doing is not technically illegal. They have found all the ways to legally game the system in order to get free money from the government, at the expense of their fellow taxpayers. Or even if some of them sometimes are technically breaking the law (such as getting false medical statements by lying to doctors), it can be extremely hard to prove that they have done so (doctor-patient confidentiality and stuff.)
It's just one of those negative side-effects of a welfare system that really can't be helped. (The welfare programs do have restrictions and requirements, sometimes even really tough requirements, but these people always find ways around them.)
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