Comment by throwaway3627 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway3627 | Hacker News Reader

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In other countries, they have:

- higher standards of living

- longer life expectancies

- better healthcare

- higher taxes, but the money is used more efficiently and for better results than on mass incarceration or the largest military-industrial complex

- very easy tax payment processes

Taxes aren't universally "bad": fire departments, police departments, roads, schools. And guess what? That's "socialism." So is Social Security and USPS. The myth of anarchistic hyperindividualism (libertarianism) is a self-delusion because there are benefits to common infrastructure no individual could build themselves alone.

PS: Why don't most Americans know how bad they have it? Is it their lack of passports or lack of honesty in paying attention outside of their filter bubble?

> PS: Why don't most Americans know how bad they have it? Is it their lack of passports or lack of honesty in paying attention outside of their filter bubble?

I think it's both, now, but I think that the 'no passports' thing has been a factor for a while.

When I was in middle school I wondered why many (white, middle-class, etc) Americans only speak English when so many people from Europe, etc speak several (or at least can get by).

It dawned on me one day that you could start on one coast and drive clear across the continent without ever needing a second language - it's all USA the whole way.

So yeah - much like the language thing there's no real exposure to anything other than our country.

Still, Spanish is a very real second language in the US

That fact that just knowing English you'll get by in most of the world doesn't help either. As a native English speaker there is less motivation to learn another language, this affects the UK and Canada as well, I suspect it impacts Aus, NZ, etc...

It does come down to living in a bubble, but the bubble is absolutely huge; as the other replier said, it stretches from coast to coast. We're also heavily propagandized everywhere we turn -- whenever I turn on big media news sources, it blows my mind how this stuff is presented as "news," yet there you go. We're also under-educated, which makes appeals to things like "make it a fair tax" feasible, where we'll go along with whoever says that (where fair almost always means regressive).

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