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Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

The problem with most welfare schemes is they have big welfare cliffs. You make one dollar more than a certain amount and you lose thousands in benefits. It's the virtual equivalent of a greater than 100% marginal income tax.

Also, countries with greater welfare programs don't have greater entrepreneurship. The opposite is somewhat true. Probably due to higher taxes and it's very hard to go out of business once you're in business and to fire employees in other countries.

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I know that France is the butt of many jokes about work, "no French word for entrepreneurship," but in my experience almost every business I interacted with around socialist Paris was a small, independent business. This was the unintentional consequence of labor laws. <50 employees fall under one set of labor laws, >50 employees you're in a tight spot until you're >1000 employees. Then the additional overhead of benefits for those employees is subsidized by economies of scale.

Having UBI could loosen job protection rules and labor laws too.

I thought the point of universal basic income was that it is universal. Everyone gets it so you don't have welfare cliffs.

I don't think those reasons are true for the "lack of entrepreneurship". I'd love to know some numbers actually, I know EU doesn't have as many unicorns like Uber, Google, Amazon, etc. But that is a tiny amount of people who started those (and now employ a staggering number of people).

I think there are two reasons why that may be: - Generally larger regulatory barriers. GDPR is an obvious recent one, but also market complexity with EU countries regulations/laws differing more than US states. I think (without knowing). That coupled with "first to market" advantage of US companies. - Money isn't as big as a driver for Europeans. "Rags to riches" is a pretty American thing. "Get educated and live well" is closer to our lookout I think.

Until recently, I don't think you could start a company and reach the entire EU area. Can you now?

In the US, any person has access to consumers all across the US. I think this is a big part of the success of US companies.

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