Thought Experiment

[bu villain]

I am talking about basic necessities. They simply were not always available unless you were among the party leadership.

Ok so now you are saying the USSR is not a good parallel to my initial scenario (which I agree with by the way)?

You make a great case for cutting back on the current handouts. If you are getting so many handouts that you lose out by working, you are getting too many.

That's one way of seeing it. Another way is that the handouts in many cases are too binary and should phase out in such a way that there is no "gap" where a small increase in income is not profitable. For example, in the scenario I gave in the initial post, no one loses their handouts no matter what their income is so work will always be profitable.