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Comment by rafiki6 | Hacker News Reader

You obviously have an agenda in your comment. Do you have any evidence that suggests the expansion of government correlates strongly to income inequality? Scandinavian countries are a great example of countries with large government and low inequality.

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People always pretend the US government size is small and tiny countries in Scandinavia have giant ones. Yet few countries have the massive number of agencies and law the US does. The size of population certainly plays a role in this but ultimately it affects the average person operating in such a society.

I'm not talking about taxation. I'm talking about the size of the administrative state, ie. the amount of intervention the government engages in in the economy and socially.

The size of the administrative state may not be a relevant metric in evaluating the extent of actions taken to equalize voice in decision making/policy based on economic power, or to limit economic inequality more generally. (In fact, one view of the large administrative state is that it's a moat designed precisely to the advantage of established actors.)

The US is 30 times larger than the largest Scandinavian country. It stands to reason that the US would have a government proportionally as large unless they somehow found a way to be more efficient. I can guarantee you they have not.

Does it still have a "massive number of agencies" compared to the EU and all its member states? I don't think so.

I think it has much more to do with population. Sweden, Norway, Denmark all have populations less than 10M. Size of government, including tax rates, I would argue, factor more into a country's overall cultural profile which taken as a whole likely correlates with inequality.

Compared with Sweden's left to right political spectrum the US has two firmly right-wing parties to choose from. I think that matters a lot more than a population number.

How are you measuring the size of governments?

relative to their tax base and populations

If you measure their tax base as percentage of their total GDP, you'll be surprised at how small government in those countries are. For instance, by that measure, France has the biggest government of the OECD: https://data.oecd.org/tax/tax-revenue.htm

Your link indicates that in 2016 (most recent year with full data, although seems fairly constant since 2000) the tax revenue of Denmark (45.51% of GDP), Sweden (42.57%), Finland (42.68%) and Norway (41.46%) were almost double that of the US (24.07%).

(Although I don't like including Norway in such comparisons, as it's tiny population and huge oil wealth makes it a big outlier.)

> I bet most people's token solution...

That wasn't an assertion tied to an agenda. It was an assumption about the typical US citizen, as a preamble.

I read the comment in whole, and it sets this up as a clear strawman. I bet on lots of things that end up being wrong. Why is the commenter so against big government when not a single soul proposed making the American government any bigger either in the comments or the article?

It's called a thought exercise, as HN is considered a good faith exchange. If you ask an American how to control a situation, the most common solution is an appeal to a government authority. That's not really a strawman, when it's demonstrably true. Relying on the economy, is typically the choice when there's propaganda money to convince them so (see most of the US West Coast states). I really don't understand why you would take this in bad faith, when there's a commercialization of mocking it (via youtube, merchandising) and the documented history of the USA litigiousness. shrug

I argue it's not demonstrably true, and as a matter of a fact, given how right leaning the entirety of the US is (even within the left leaning circles), and the prevalence of two dominant political parties that would be consider center of right and far right in any other country, it's clear Americans seem to favor less government. I'd be happy to find evidence presenting another view. The issue with the comment is it doesn't actually setup a thought exercise as it does a poor job of establishing the reality of that exercise and then negatively attacks a view point no one presented.

You could easily filter the media of your choice and find multiple stories similar to this:

>Americans Want To Regulate AI

>AT&T says it’ll stop selling your location data, amid calls for a federal investigation

Both right and left, in the USA, want regulation. Each one challenge that the other's regulation is unnecessary. That doesn't change the agenda over time.

> it's clear Americans seem to favor less government

And the sky is plaid? Some Americans pay lip service (it's easy to trust when you've never been a victim), but the media entertains with court room drama and mockery precisely because citizens, when harmed, expect regulation to prevail.

The history shows the exact opposite and the legal field is orchestrated to be layered (compare the housing code in any city from the 1800s to now, not to mention how land rights are judged). The federal government has dwarfed the local governments. It legally (and in practice) overrides it every day.

> It was an assumption about the typical US citizen, as a preamble.

Is it an assumption based in any way in reality, or based on the author's constructed strawman perception?

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