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Comment by svantana | Hacker News Reader

You do realize that taxes don't just disappear, right? Tax revenue pays for things like child care, health care, universities etc. That means the average consumer can spend more on frivolous things even if they are more expensive. So yeah us Scandinavians are living a pretty sweet life :)

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You pay for child care, health care and universities, whether through taxes or your pocketbook. Paying through your pocket book just means you have freedom of choice.

In America we have low taxes but not choice. You can choose to drive in America but you cannot choose to ride the high speed rail instead. Our choices are limited by our regime.

I would say that you have "choice", but not "freedom". Choice, in that dichotomy, refers to being able to draw from a set of pre-determined options (e.g. the choice of cereal brands in the supermarket), whereas freedom refers to the ability to follow one's desires, ambitions and morals.

Just the other day, I watched a documentary about the protests that led to the opening of the Inner German border and the demise of the GDR. It was kind of sad to see people protesting for various kinds of freedom, knowing that most of them will only get choice (e.g. the choice of which country they cannot afford to travel to because their jobs were not competitive anymore).

By the way, I don't think that Europe has systematically more freedom (by the above definition) than the US. There are some life plans that you can only carry out in the US, and some that can only be realized in Europe.

Unless you don't have enough money to pay for those things, of course. And that is the whole point of the system.

Choice of what? I don't really care what brand my antibiotics are. Whether the government pays for it via taxes or me out of pocket, I only care if they work.

Same with universities, vacation, labour laws etc...

Consider if one is unable to afford health insurance premiums and has a pre-existing condition which is expensive to treat. This person is not likely to have credit to be able to afford more than a few months of treatment. What choice do they have left other than to die (which is also not typically legal to accelerate)?

I don't get your point. I also think choice is overrated when it comes to treatment. Having a treatment is more important.

I don't think many people in Europe envy the US healthcare system.

True, but e.g. the tax difference between an average salary in Norway and the US is far too small to even make up the private healthcare costs and other additional costs, and Norway has a far flatter salary structure - far more more peope are close to the average salary.

The effect is that very large proportions of the population end up with a better standard of living.

As for sweet life, speak for yourself, please.

You don't seem to agree. From your side do you believe taxes are too high for what you're getting back? Is it hurting the country?

Let's presume that 40% taxes are optimal for Sweden / Norway, and that the U.S. tax rate is 30% [A]. That does not mean that increasing the U.S. tax rate to 40% is optimal for the U.S. - do you think the current U.S. government, Donald Trump, military industrial complex, etc. should get more money to work with?

A. These numbers are made up

I think his point is that instead of giving the government less money you should work on making sure that the government actually does the right thing with the money it gets.

I have a suspicion the US is way too far gone to try that - the adversarial model (the societal idea of "people vs the Government", rather than the Government being a representative of the people) is not going away any time soon.

It's easy to see government as representative of the people when you live in a small country, or if you're thinking about your local government.

When a government has 300 million+ people to represent, it needs to have very limited responsibilities and powers, because the common interests of so many people are very limited.

That is (cargo culting political attitudes aside) largely why the American relationship with the federal government is "adversarial"- the larger it grows, the easier it is for special, non-representative interests to take advantage of.

There's a similar story played out among union participation here; the larger the union, the less individuals feel that it is working exclusively in their best interests. Likewise: approval for individual congressional representatives is typically high, but Congress itself invariably has very low approval ratings.

When a government has 300 million+ people to represent, it needs to have very limited responsibilities and powers, because the common interests of so many people are very limited.

I'm not sure I agree with that. The common interests of people are basically the same - education, health, housing ...

There are over 80 million people in Germany. Not in the same league as the US, but still a huge country. And I don't think (obviously this is not data) that people here feel the government don't work for their interests. In a very small country like Ireland (where I'm actually from) the government seem to me to be much less 'representative' of the people, due to cronyism and corruption (see current Irish gov scandal expected to bring down the government within weeks - http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-the-maurice...)

I’m not sure that the total size of the population is what matters here. It’s the lack of representation. Back when the USA started, we had 33,000 person-units per Representative. Now we have over 700,000 people per Representative in all but the tiniest states, and those Representatives are only going to listen to the biggest and most obnoxious voices out of those 700,000.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/09/opinion/flynn-expand-congress/

Alternatively, shift the center of power that has become entirely too federal (IMO) back to the states, whereby it's easier to actually listen to your constituents on matters that could be done just as well (in some cases better) at a more local level.

Yes I totally agree that there can be problems with high taxes (the Laffer curve, corruption, tax avoidance, etc). I was mainly refuting the idea that high tax rates must lead to "poorer" citizens. In many cases the money is just passed around, and if so it's a zero sum game.

It’s not just a zero-sum game. Extra costs include the salaries of civil servants who administer the funds, including the many people whose job is to print out a report and put it in a drawer where nobody will see it, and the blatant cronyism in public contract awards.

Extra benefits include the infrastructure, technologies, and knowledge that we develop, that would not have existed because no businessman would have considered them to be profitable.

The government of the USA is filled with lots of pointless but well-paid jobs, and there is a noticeable small-government-conservative faction that is constantly harassing the government with their counterproductive regulations.

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/02/17/feds-delay-caltrain-el...

https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2012/09/07/the-fallac...

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2016/09/22/california_s_...

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