Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericmay | Hacker News Reader

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> It was not misleading

I disagree but I'm not going to debate it because it's just differences of opinion. It also seems blatantly unconstitutional in Washington. I also think income taxes are bad policy - if you want to tax rich people, people making an income with a job isn’t the route to go.

> Do universal health care, free education, or breaking up monopolies / cartels count as moving towards socialism for you?

Depends on the implementation, generally no.

I'm not opposed to government-run healthcare, nor am I opposed to completely private healthcare. Both are good options with trade-offs. What I am opposed to is the current state which enriches a bunch of lazy, do-nothing government workers and redundant agencies, and a bunch of insurance companies who are focused on ripping off Americans and do nothing to enhance things for Americans.

Education is a little tougher but the more decentralized the better. I don't want governments paying for charter schools, nor do I want overweight education systems not improving the lives of children sticking around just because they're public. Open to ideas there.

Breaking up monopolies and cartels, sure but the devil is in the details.

> Part of the problem is that people feel like our representatives are not representing and the currents system seems to bring more idealogical options.

> 100% it was a rebuke. Corruption being a top issue for many voters was surprising, and relieving. Centrist Dem talking heads seem to understand this, DSA candidates seem to be making too much of their wins.

Completely agree - I'm an independent and both parties have to earn my vote with the best mix of policies. I'm anti-MAGA, and anti-DSA. I think you would agree as you allude to, similar to how MAGA overestimated their mandate, DSA candidates shouldn't either or they're going to wind up with the Democrats being obliterated in 2028. My point was that citizens aren't voting against capitalism and free markets, or even too fed up with wealth inequality, but they were rejecting higher prices and war. I'm in favor of both policies actually, but corruption and failure to execute those policies (Iran, tariffs) in an effective way lost the Republicans my vote.

> Completely agree - I'm an independent and both parties have to earn my vote with the best mix of policies.

I picked up this old book the other day called "Markets, State, and Community: theoretical foundations for market socialism" which critiques both libertarian and DSA, then seeks to argue for something in the middle. I'm not far into it yet, but it has been intriguing so far.

America will not vote communist, but they may opt for more social public welfare ideas. Norway is not commie, but it is a social democracy. I would disagree with the only prices and war being the reasons. If that's what Republicans take away, they are missing as much as DSA. Oligarchy and nepotism are being used more and more every day for reasons.

I volunteer within Indivisible, and my biggest personal goal is to moderate them and snuff out the bad ideas with rationale arguments. Hope there are people working on the other side in a similar way.

When I moved to WA, I was excited about the no income tax thing, but didn't comsider how regressive what is inplace is. WA needs serious reform on this front.

> Norway is not commie, but it is a social democracy.

Norway is a very nice country but often times we find that policies in places like this don't scale nicely to other countries, especially gigantic ones like the United States. Norway is a wealthy and very small (by population), homogenous country with very high social trust and a very advanced capitalist market economy. With that, comes things like very high (maybe not Norway but other Nordic countries) taxes on alcohol, for example.

America has a lot of poor and uneducated people and that can't change by policy. In order to institute and educate everyone to the same degree that Norway has you'd probably simultaneously be able to solve world peace and end hunger and all sorts of things. We fund our schools incredibly well, but we don't necessarily get the outcomes we expect. But if you compare certain pockets of the US we do as well or better than many other highly regarded countries.

We can learn from Norway and others (as they can learn from us) but we can't really lift-and-shift their style of government to the US. It's a bit like economics where the joke is there's economics and then there are Argentina and Japan.

> Oligarchy and nepotism are being used more and more every day for reasons.

Maybe or maybe they're just used as proxies for failures to understand the dynamics at play. It's tough to say. But I don't think that most Americans are focused on this because they also believe Democrats are corrupt, though perhaps not as corrupt. It just manifests differently. That's my take though.

> When I moved to WA, I was excited about the no income tax thing, but didn't comsider how regressive what is inplace is. WA needs serious reform on this front.

Regressive taxes are fine. We shouldn't dogmatically oppose them (nor the inverse). You can't make good policy based on rational arguments if you are dogmatic one way or the other. In addition to some economic reasons, I personally have philosophical reasons to oppose income tax - so I'm not really taking my own advice here, and acknowledge that haha.

Thanks for the good discussion so far!

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