In the United States, calls for better social services, public programs, and other state-led interventions are reliably met with cries of impracticality. Ideas from the left are regularly derided in hyperbolic terms; some classics include the charge that the left wishes to give away the equivalent of “free ponies” (that one comes via Hillary Clinton ), or are otherwise pie-in-the-sky utopians living in a “magical fantasy land ,” promising “ unicorns ” and the like. But those who shout down even the barest suggestion of mobilizing public assistance to confront the U.S.’s many sprawling social crises betray their ignorance of, or their dogmatic ideological opposition to, the wealth of flourishing social programs that are in place worldwide.

Vienna has long been among the many interna

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