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Comment by godzillabrennus | Hacker News Reader

It’ll take some high dollar lawsuits getting paid out before any regulation around these will happen.

Ah, one of the remaining only ways "doing the right thing" ever gets done in the States these days.

Why can countries like South Korea, Taiwan or Japan provide public services like roads, internet infrastructure, police and healthcare at an incredibly small fraction of the cost that is lightyeaes ahead in quality and competency (for the 99%)?

Path dependence? US went a bit too far in the "individual liberty" direction, and it now can't get out of the mess. In principle, things could be fixed, but good luck getting enough lawyer mass on this.

Surely allowing police to use excessive force to control protestors is the exact opposite of "individual liberty".

>individual liberty causes high prices and low quality. this could be fixed with more lawyers

please elaborate

Free market causes low quality.

What I meant in my comment was something else though - that strong individual liberty/independence causes difficulties in coordinating people on large-scale infrastructural projects. I.e. by the time you get through all the lawsuits and payouts, your new rail line takes 10x time to build and costs 20x the money a less liberal country would need to spend.

These countries all have at least 10x the population density of the US. I'm not sure about healthcare, but the rest of your list gets cheaper as population density increases.

Fine, we are talking about the trhee main urban centers of the US here - not the whole country. Now that this strawman is out of the way- are we allowed to continue?

No. You don’t get to wire up NYC at the expense of all taxpayers.

NYC pays far more in both state and federal taxes than it receives in services. NY State pays far more in federal taxes than it receives in services. Rural parts of the US receive far more in services than they pay in taxes.

The rest of the country isn't paying for a thing in NYC - it's the other way around. Just leave us more of our own tax money and we could do all sorts of things that aren't currently considered possible.

> Just leave us more of our own tax money and we could do all sorts of things that aren't currently considered possible.

At (roughly) what number of people does that argument stop working? 5M? 500K? 50K? 5?

I'm not clear on what it is you're asking.

I don't think that's a strawman. Roads and internet have to reach everyone in the country, not just major urban areas. The money for these projects comes from people in major urban areas too.

You make a good point about policing. Density wouldn't explain why policing in Tokyo is better and cheaper than in New York.

And the US has 10x the population density of Canada. Yet we manage it somehow (except for internet). I love how the US is simultaneously the most powerful economy in the world and completely hapless at putting any of that to use for the good of its citizens.

To be fair, the vast majority of Canadians live near Canada's southern border.

To be fair, it's cold up north...

For sure. It's not a mystery why people would rather live in Toronto than Yellowknife. But it does mean that low population density is in some sense mostly on paper.

My main point is not that providing quality public services is easy but that excuses like "we don't have enough population density" are a red herring. The real hurdles are entirely political.

Some back of the envelope calculations:

Length of US/Canada border: 8,890km [1] Population of Canada: 36,708,083 [2]

Assuming ALL of Canada's population lives within 100km of this border a rough estimate of this area might be 889,000km^2 giving a population density of 41 people per square kilometre. This conservative estimate is in the same ballpark as the US population density of 33 people per square kilometre [3] with the caveat that this population is spread across a long, thin 9000 km ribbon increasing the cost of roads and any other infrastructure versus the US's more favourable shape. And let's not forget that Canada's GDP per capita is $46,437 while America's is $57,467 [4]. This is a factor of 1.24 in favour of the United States.

Given all this, why is the US incapable of providing the kind of single-payer healthcare that Canada does to its population?

[1] https://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-402-x/2012000/chap/geo/geo-...

[2] http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/f...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

It isn't but I thought we were talking about infrastructure (there are clearly political factors at work there too of course).

In the case of healthcare it's because the US is alone in the degree to which its system is privatized.

I agree that this is a major factor for the US, but as a point of clarification, empirically (based on other countries) there seems to be a degree of privatization that increases efficiency.

The US government is like old legacy software. It's not as good as modern software but it's too difficult and expensive to replace.

Even that won't cause any real regulation. If anything the legal battles will just drag on for years before they're eventually settled out of court for almost nothing.

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