Isbjørn

Agreed.

Anyway, since someone brought up "the leechers", let's just suppose that "leeches" are, indeed, a signifigant problem that's worth solving. Cutting in welfare all across the board to "incentivize" people to find work is a typical neoliberal solution that negatively impacts everyone, so let's just dismiss it out of irrelevance. Here we're talking about ways to find and deal with the "leeches", specifically. If that even is to be possible, a couple of questions appear that need answering:

Who are to decide who "leeches" and who doesn't? Follow-up question, how do we prevent this from becoming a bureaucratic and costly nightmare?

What do we do if people are incorrectly classified as freeloaders? Taking away someone's benefits when they actually need them borders on violence. We need to prevent situations where people who genuinely need benefits lose them due to bureaucratic mismanagement. There are already many instances of this happening - people being deemed "fit to work" when they actually have chronic diseases that keep them from working, and who need public money to afford medicine/implants/protheses etc.

Considering these things, is targeting "leeches" even worth the effort? I don't think so. Being a welfare recipient is already a very undesirable scenario, and signing up for benefits is a bureaucratic and discouraging process in most places. Furthermore, most places require unemployed welfare recipients to actively look for work (in Norway, you're not even registered as "unemployed" until you sign up at the Labour and Welfare Administration and agree to look for work. You have to agree to accept just about any job offer you get). If anything, we should be looking for solutions that make welfare less bureaucratic and less demotivating. Some people have proposed implementing a universal basic income (subsistence wage) that one receives regardless of their work situation. If you want people to get employed, fund job training and reeducation programs. Publicly invest in infrastructure - this will boost the economy and create jobs for many people who are unemployed but fit to work. And so on. These are totally realistic and feasible solutions, even for people who aren't anti-establishment.

Socialists (here represented by Elphenor and me) would argue that unemployment is a natural occurence under capitalism that serves to keep down wages and create competition between workers for the jobs. To permanently fix unemployment issues, we need a planned economy that takes care of the interests of the collective rather than the interests of corporations. By allowing workers influence over their workplace and democratic input on the economy as a whole, people will see work as more than just a means of subsistence, but work to better themselves and their community. But that's another discussion.

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