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Comment by rndmize | Hacker News Reader

Man am I tired of hearing "the US is too big, too different, too whatever" when it comes to social policies. Social policies don't have to be implemented at a federal level.

SF is doing it wrong? Fine. No one has to do things like SF. But there's no reason not to try a Finnish policy at a city, county or state level if it'd been demonstrated to work.

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The fact that you can just move to SF from Alaska does make difference. Here in Europe we have sort same problem and the poor Romanians and also the people taking advantage of anothers countries social system was definitely one factor for Brexit. A lot of countries that are in the EU are slowly being even allowed to work in different countries, the integration didn't happen overnight. So I'm sure similar problems apply.

People here say a lot of homeless like to move to SF because of climate too?

There's nothing that California can legally do to stop someone from Alaska coming over and staying. But there's plenty that EU countries can do to stop exactly what you described - free movement does come with a range of limitations, like the fact that after 3 months you either have to be employed or have private health insurance to continue "exercising your EU free movement rights". If you don't then you can be kicked out. It's just that no EU country is actually enforcing this law - but it could have done if it wanted to.

> Man am I tired of hearing "the US is too big, too different, too whatever" when it comes to social policies. Social policies don't have to be implemented at a federal level.

Why is it only bought up for social policies? Why is the size and ethnic makeup never a barrier to starting a war or lowering taxes? It seems to mostly just be a lazy excuse to avoid $thingIDontWant.

It's also implicitly a white supremacist argument, "we can't have nice things because we have ethnic minorities".

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