Safety Nets

The indispensable Matt Yglesias, riffing off David Leonhardt's point about how a welfare state's safety net can actually be a spur to entrepreneurship and innovation (a point I've highlighted before), comes up with this clarifying analogy:

Typically when you see a safety net in place, you’re not really looking at someone who’s trying to be safe. You’re looking at someone who’s trying to do something dangerous. Because it’s dangerous, there’s a safety net in place. But the main point of the net is to facilitate risk-taking behavior not to make you safer than the average person.