A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work

>the law enforces a social scoring system to determine who is affected, prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable employees

This is the reason OP got laid off, if all he says about his high performance is true. The good old positive discrimination making unintended victims. Germany just lost a 10x dev's productivity for this.

While I agree with the spirit of the law and don't have the details of this case, it is quite the sad situation for everyone involved.

a) uncompetitive - taxes too high, too much protection for people who might not merit it;

b) less likely to start new businesses - in theory, you can have a great welfare system and a great atmosphere for enterpreneurship, but in practice, the former will usually stifle the latter, as the "eat the rich" types will dominate the discourse;

c) extremely vulnerable to the aging problem. Too many pensioners, not enough kids, not enough highly qualified migrants who have zero reason to subject themselves to lower compensation, higher taxation and, on the top of all, interaction with bureacracy that insists on the local language. OTOH hardly literate people from Afghanistan or Niger don't mind any of that; the German / Dutch / Swedish welfare system will take care of them even if they do nothing and/or immerse themselves in the black market.

IDK how to get out of this pickle, the local population is addicted to high welfare spending and other onerous protections like to crack and won't vote against it, even though it is becoming clear that as we fall more and more behind the US, we won't be able to afford a system like that.

Robust welfare states can be only carried by robust economies and a lot of young workers. Those conditions existed in the 1960s or 1970s, and our current systems are downstream from that, but the foundation is eroding with every passing year.

The final collapse will be pretty ugly, something like Argentina, but full of 70 y.o. paupers. Weaker spots in the EU already have a huge problem providing healthcare to the elderly, or even anyone. On paper, it is an universal right, but in reality, there simply aren't enough doctors to carry this obligation out.

The Czech Republic is somewhere in the middle, nowhere near as bad as rural Bulgaria, but try finding a dentist who accepts insurance patients outside the major cities like Brno and Prague. That will be an exercise in the impossible.

Staff is overworked and underpayed, waiy lines for crucial procedures can count to decades.

The workforce is aging because young people have stoped reproducing and fear of losing welfare money and the sight of brown faces prevents authoritiesfrom importing competent foreign non eutopean workforce.

This will collapse. There is no doubt this is not sustainable.

This is not an uneven distribution of wealth. Its a monster system that costs more than the national GDP can reasonably sustain in the long term.

Now I am no proponent of privatized healthcare, the current system does not work though.

Everyone suffers like this.

Note: My employer provides private healthcare insueance for us. I live in the richest part if the world. The Nordics. My private insurances gets me same day medical appointments.

The poor sods that cannot afford it have to wait weeks.

Tell me how this is fair and how wonderful the nordic welfare is??

Its americanized and terrible for almost twice the price

People need to dream, I guess.

The US is a terrible place to live in if you are poor. But for a typical Hacker News denizen, moving anywhere to the high-taxation domiciles of Europe would mean a major loss of income and worsening of many services.