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Comment by senior_james | Hacker News Reader

Most of the time, people that have more freedom are less happy. I remember stories I heard about people moving from Soviet Russia to the United States back in the early 80s. They were unhappy and stressed out because in the soviet union, they were assigned a job and the government took care of them. Here in the United States, you had to fend for yourself.

Freedom isn't always pleasant and happy, but it's better for the future of humanity. I've been all over the world and don't know anywhere that has as much freedom as the US.

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It's not a very good example. The USSR was a totalitarian paternalistic state that deprived people of many basic freedoms and opportunities. The state guaranteed job and housing only because it took everything else. To an extent, the Soviet people had modified behavioral patterns and mentality. When migrated to the States, they brought all the thinking patterns they were taught in the USSR without having proper survival skills. They did have hard times adjusting to the West civilization, but I wouldn't rely on their opinion when it comes to freedom and happiness. In their case freedom and happiness were not correlated.

> They were unhappy and stressed out because in the soviet union, they were assigned a job and the government took care of them. Here in the United States, you had to fend for yourself.

What does this have to do with freedom? It's about having basic safety nets for your citizens. "Freedom to fail", which is what you're describing, exists wherever you want it to exist so the country and even society is irrelevant.

> I've been all over the world and don't know anywhere that has as much freedom as the US.

Yes, it's nice to be affluent in the United States.

It's called the Paradox of Choice. More choice/freedom, means people are less happy, because they are constantly trying to maximize purchases/life. Ends up just making you miserable.

"Freedom" is completely orthogonal to having to worry about basic needs. You can guarantee every citizen's basic comfortable survival, and still have a great deal of personal freedom and even a market economy. It just means moderately high taxes and the government owning a lot of capital.

The world's post-industrial history is extremely short, and everything we've seen thus far is some kind of historical accident. Other futures are always possible.

Any particular state in mind?

In general most states in the US are very similar to each other in terms of laws. There are some newsworthy exceptions, but in most people's day-to-day lives, basically every state is going to be the same with regards to laws and freedoms.

The biggest difference you'll see is different cultures, but a culture doesn't tend to define itself by the state. Most cultures in the US are centered around geographical region (West Cost, Deep South, Midwest, etc) and even then vary wildly based on the city you're in (Buffalo is very different from NYC, Sacramento is very different from San Fransisco, Portland is very different from Eugene, etc).

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