Ian Duncan Smith can live on £53 a week...

Including rent I couldn't but not including rent I already do.

It is not supposed to be "reasonable". It is taxed money you are getting from the government that you did not earn. If you can live easily on benefits there is no incentive to work. I think £53 is about right.

The question of whether or not he can live on £53 a week is irrelevant; he earns a salary and pays his own way in the world.

The people that rely on money taken by force from others do not have the right to set their own budget or to live in houses larger than necessary. In my eyes, they do not deserve anything at all; nobody has a moral obligation to be charitable. If they wish to, they are to be commended for their philanthropy, but nobody is morally obliged to be charitable.

They should be grateful to get anything.

And you seem to forget that benefits are not supposed to provide a reasonable standard of living. They are supposed to be a safety net, not a hammock.

In a post-industrial economy benefits have to be more than a safety net, because not everyone can even get on the tightrope in the first place. Because it is now a knowledge economy jobs fluctuate wildly. Even your law career is essentially made up, because it doesn't make use of physical labour.

There is simply not enough work that needs doing. In that situation introduction of a full citizen's income should be considered. Why is it any different to employing labourers?

And we have no right to set a budget for poor people. Why should it be the government's job to dictate how they live their lives? That is what happens under brutal theocracies like the Taliban or the Saudis. It is ideological.

Nobody has a moral obligation to be charitable, as you always say, but even if you take this extreme viewpoint you must concede it is cheaper and more expedient to pay the poor money otherwise they will start rioting and stealing your stuff.

And what about the people who genuinely are trying to get jobs and have lost jobs? Should they see themselves drowning in debt after paying more than that every month in taxes and ni every week for years working honestly? It's even harder to find a job when you're stressed about money and feeding your family and paying bills that keep adding up to more and more. Imagine making the choice on whether to try your hardest to pay your mortgage or have food on the table. £53 a week is barely enough to live on after rent. A lot of money is paid by UK workers and has been paid by a lot of people who find themselves unemployed now. We have to look after our own- already there are too many on the poverty line and below it.

If you do not have 3-6 months savings then why on earth do you have a mortgage. It is totally irresponsible. I hate the culture we have in the UK of constantly living to the very edge of your income and relying on the state if things go wrong. Other cultures which do not really have a welfare state (such as Asian countries) do not have this problem because people take personal responsibility for their lives and save some of their mone when in work. I do not believe the state should be subisdising people to acquire property through a mortgage.

The other problem is that, if benefits are enough to pay your rent/mortgage and live reasonably well, then there is no incentive for people to take low paid jobs such as working at Tesco.

The other big problem with your argument is that people get housing benefit on top of JSA. Low-paid people get HB while they are working; others will get it when unemployed. The benefits bill is pretty out of control, as a proportion of our economy and more than a third of government spending (which is more than half our economy), it is greater than the entire taxation of a country like Singapore.

I stopped reading when you said that a law career was 'made-up' because it didn't involve manual toiling.

Why? It is a profession. Salaries are kept high by raising barriers to entry and profiting off knowledge of a complex system. If that system collapses your job is worthless. See currency, especially fiat currency, for another example.

The brain's capacity for knowledge means the knowledge economy can employ just as many people as it wants, more or less. The industrial economy, certainly as it was until Thatcher's reforms, always needed manpower. That is why there is no longer full employment.

And a similar thing occurred thanks to mechanisation of industry in the early 1800s. The following period saw trade unionism as workers fought to protect their interests; essentially to create the sort of closed shop that professions have done so well at.

The result of each economic rebalancing has been an uptick in living standards and less work hours at the cost of an increasing structural unemployment rate.

3-6 months of savings don't last when you're in your mid 50s and your job was in the construction industry which collapsed in 2008 and you were self-employed. Every situation is different but don't think it's irresponsible because others don't have the means to have a perfect financial situation when their mortgage was taken out originally 20-30 years ago and since then they've done everything to give their kids the best future instead of indulge on themselves. Maybe investing in children's future instead of saving every penny was a stupid thing but that's the situation. Not everyone fits into your perfect little bubble but nobody has a right to judge others for not being prepared to be unemployed for an extended period of time.

I noticed that you still failed to justify why it becomes someone else problem to fund their exuberant life style when the become unemployed. You totally failed to address the very fail points made in the post you quoted.

Don't you think this is a good thing? Labour is unpleasant; lower work hours are a good thing.

The natural response to less requirement for human capital should be a decrease in population growth; but bizarrely people keep on having an unnecessarily high number of children.