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Comment by jamesaguilar | Hacker News Reader

Yes, for sure. Some of the benefits should return to the nation that provided the favorable conditions (and do, in the form of that person's taxes and also in the form of opportunity-seekers from around the globe flocking to the places where growth is possible). But I don't like the notion that people owe their successes to their country any more than I believe they are indebted to oxygen or gravity.

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You may not like the idea but that doesn't necessarily have any bearing on its truth. None of us does anything on our own - water, power, roads, schools, the list goes on and on (not all directly attributable to the country itself, but certainly national governments are high on the list of contributors to these projects in almost all cases, and I haven't even mentioned things like tax policy yet). I think the days of the nation-state are numbered but we can't ignore what those entities did for human progress. Maybe not in the form of a literal debt, but it's short-sighted and antisocial to pretend that the elites didn't have a hundred million helping hands on their way up.

Perhaps, but the elites have already paid for all of those helping hands many times over. The top 5% paid about 60% of the nation's taxes, for instance, and they almost certainly have not used 60% of the public services.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html

In spite of this, most of the services they paid for are not the public goods (e.g., roads, power, water, police) you describe. Of the top 5 biggest expenditures in the US, only the 4'th is a public good.

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year2008_US.html

And this completely ignores all the consumer surplus they have created (i.e., the happiness you get from using a macbook rather than having $1000). The elites have paid their debt. Let them leave if they want to.

The US should not become a prison state.

This debt metaphor is really unproductive. Fact is it's easier to make money when you already have money. So the assumption here is a nation would be better off if it subsidized the money making process, same as it subsidizes education.

and they almost certainly have not used 60% of the public services.

They've probably used more than 60%. Almost all of the money is a means to keep poor people "content" in this country. It's a small price that rich people pay. To put it another way, rich people could certainly cut off pretty much all education, pension, health care expenditures if they wanted to. But there's a reason they don't, and its not because they're nice people. But its in their best interest. It's their public good.

I think the point is that the elite benefit from the public services even if we do not use them directly. E.g. if we work in an office building we benefit from the services that allowed the worker vacuuming to be there, though we didn't necessarily take the bus there ourselves. [edit] but this is not to say that anyone should be restricted unduly.

First of all, if the worker is a taxpayer, the employer is already paying for those services in the form of pre-tax wages. I pay for my own police protection, and I raise my wage commensurately [1]. This is all included in the cost of labor.

Secondly, most government spending does not provide those necessary services. Roads, police and water are just not very expensive. Most government spending is just transfers from the wealthy to the less wealthy - see my second link in my previous post.

[1] Actually, my landlord pays for police protection, and has raised my rent commensurately.

Most of the cleaning service people are not really taxpayers[1], which is why including them distorts the equation. They are benefiting w/out contributing, and we do in fact, need them. Also reinforcing my point, How can you claim that Defense is the only public good in the top 5? What percentage of the population must benefit to qualify?

[1]From other IRS data, we can see that in 2008, around 52 million tax returns were filed with either positive or negative AGI that used exemptions, deductions and tax credits to completely wipe out their federal income tax liability. Not only did they get back every dollar that the federal government withheld from their paychecks during 2008, but some even received more back from the IRS.

We ARE indebted to oxygen and gravity. While it's hard for us to destroy gravity we are rapidly destroying oxygen generation capacity on this planet and it's not going to go very well for us if we continue.

> we are rapidly destroying oxygen generation capacity on this planet

Citation needed. (Increasing CO2 actually helps plants produce O2. Even the most dire warmist predictions have increased plant life.)

deforestation

mature forests are carbon neutral.

Chopping down trees, storing the wood, and growing new trees is a carbon sink.

Why not? Oxygen and gravity occur naturally. Nations with conditions favorable to technological innovation do not. They have to be built and maintained.

Loyalty or gratitude to an institution makes little sense to me (I'm probably in the minority on this in the general population), simply because an institution is incapable of loyalty or gratitude towards me.

I'm loyal or grateful to people, but rarely to abstract concepts.

So setting aside questions of what occurs "naturally", who should I be loyal/grateful to? The few enlightened bureaucrats who make a system better than average? The taxpayers who fund it, willingly or not? The bureaucrats who, at best, are ineffective at ruining everything? The rebels who make things happen by bending or ignoring the rules?

If you can't be loyal to the institution, be loyal to the "favourable conditions" of the institution. Support those conditions.

Because those conditions DO give back to you.

I wonder if the parent is objecting to the word "loyalty" - Loyalty implies a certain degree of unconditional support; while I think that when talking about countries, we're better off with conditional support.

That said, if by loyalty you mean conditional support, I agree completely. Governments don't exist in a vacuum, and there is constant pressure from the those who directly benefit from a less-efficient government.

I am - and to be fair I don't think anyone else used the word "loyalty", so I could be swinging at strawmen, but that's what some of the discussion sounded like to me.

There is a very telling story in the great book "Bad samaritans" ( http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitali... ). Among other things -- the author explains how in the 1850s, American travellers in Japan were surprised by the Japanese laziness and inefficiency, so much to make it almost proverbial. Doesn't it sound funny? In the 1850s, Japan was terribly underdeveloped, and in an underdeveloped environment you simply cannot do much to innovate, undertake new projects. So people everywhere in underdeveloped countries just seems lazy to people from the industrialized world, that was true of Japan in the 1850s, Korea in the 1950s, and many African countries nowadays.

The impetus later came from the central government, and in 1905 Japan was not a negligible country anymore. The moral of the story is that free-market bullshit and Ayn Rand books are just make-believe stories without any solid backing.

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