Via Stephen Hicks, I discovered this 1999 essay by Theodore Dalrymple, on poverty and squalor. A discussion point, perhaps.

Notoriously, the infant mortality rate is twice as high in the lowest social class as in the highest. But the infant mortality rate of illegitimate births is twice that of legitimate ones, and the illegitimacy rate rises steeply as you descend the social scale: so the decline of marriage almost to the vanishing point in the lowest social class might well be responsible for most of its excess infant mortality. It is a way of life, not poverty per se, that kills. The commonest cause of death between the ages of 15 and 44 is now suicide, which has increased most precipitously precisely among those who live in the underclass world of temporary step-parenthood and of conduct unrestrained either by law or convention.

Just as it is easier to recognise ill health in someone you haven’t seen for some time rather than in someone you meet daily, so a visitor coming into a society from elsewhere often can see its character more clearly than those who live in it. Every few months, doctors from countries like the Philippines and India arrive fresh from the airport to work for a year’s stint at my hospital. It is fascinating to observe their evolving response to British squalor. At the start, they are uniformly enthusiastic about the care that we unsparingly and unhesitatingly give to everyone, regardless of economic status… There seems to be a public agency to deal with every conceivable problem. For a couple of weeks, they think this all represents the acme of civilisation, especially when they recall the horrors at home. Poverty – as they know it – has been abolished…

Case after case causes them to revise their initial favorable opinion. Before long, they have had experience of hundreds, and their view has changed entirely… In the welfare state, mere survival is not the achievement that it is, say, in the cities of Africa, and therefore it cannot confer the self-respect that is the precondition of self-improvement… By the end of three months my doctors have, without exception, reversed their original opinion that the welfare state, as exemplified by England, represents the acme of civilization. On the contrary, they see it now as creating a miasma of subsidised apathy that blights the lives of its supposed beneficiaries. They come to realise that a system of welfare that makes no moral judgments in allocating economic rewards promotes antisocial egotism.

The whole thing.

It seems to me that whatever behaviour gets rewarded will tend to be repeated, and if a demoralised, parasitic and antisocial outlook is spared its natural fate, it will persist and, most likely, become more objectionable and entrenched. This is one of the fundamental difficulties of Socialism and material egalitarianism. How does one offer a hand-up to those in need and with a desire to become (gasp) bourgeois, while not rewarding self-inflicted woe and reinforcing the social ills that follow? 

Madsen Pirie outlines the problems of proportional representation.   

Proportional representation… brings in the politics of what used to be called the smoke-filled room, of the deals struck in private between the political bosses. The first-past-the-post system may often bring to power parties with less than 50 percent of the popular vote. What it does not do is to give excessive power to very small parties. One has only to look at the disproportionate influence of the extreme orthodox parties in Israel. With only 2 or 3 seats they have exercised a major influence because their votes were needed to build coalitions. It’s possible to have a 10 percent shift in opinion in Scandinavia, and see only some junior agriculture minister swapped for someone from another party.

A democracy should enable people to change their government. It is more about throwing out who they don’t want than about electing the most popular. Proportional representation makes change difficult. Elections tend to bring small adjustments in the balance between the parties, and to result in coalitions of slightly different composition. There are times when a break from the status quo is needed. It happened in Britain in 1945 and in 1979, but it is doubtful that either would have happened under proportional representation.