> 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!