Problems with relying on billionaires to save us

So its funny you left out the countless proposed, failed and later repealed attempts at wealth taxes in Europe.

If you want a very simple example, just look at how Sweden killed their markets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_financial_transaction_...

Countless business lost, lives damaged and millions lost, just because someone wanted to introduce a "tax" with "good intentions" without thinking.

It's one thing to be a Scandinavian country that has a homogenous culture and smaller population (and land mass)...and another to mix large amounts of different cultures across a giant nation of states and have everyone agree upon the same thing or be able to institute the same infrastructure.

Any national-scale policy will be poorly adapted for some major region of the US because it is simply too diverse geographically, culturally, historically, and economically.

Is it? Are they actually paying less...or is the cost being dumped on to someone else? This is like saying people who get SNAP benefits are paying less and everyone wins...except someone has to pick up the cost. Many Medicare costs aren't negotiated and the hospitals are told what they will pay for certain procedures (and again hospitals change the price for others to make up the difference).

I think what they are talking about is prescription drug prices...which even Trump said needed to be done.

Governments in other countries are more involved in colleges...and they also restrict who gets in. We let pretty much everyone in that wants to go and will give them money to do so...that is a terrible way to run the system.

With college in the US, the specific mechanism seems to be a combination of (a) colleges that have an incentive to raise tuition as high as people will pay, (b) people who consider a college degree important enough that they'll pay as much as they can afford, and (c) government action that greatly increases people's ability to pay, either via subsidies or by expanding the availability of student loan debt.

Compare this to the public K-12 school system, which doesn't have the same split between a seller and a cost-insensitive, subsidized buyer in its funding structure. (This is similar, I believe, to the way college is funded in a lot of other countries.) The cost per pupil in public K-12 school is also rising faster than inflation, but at a much slower rate than higher education. Same country, different funding structures, different results.

How?

>This is not irony

We're on a developer news site, talking about the US not having this or that, while also ignoring the fact that the US is very sought after by developers.

Even if you consider defense RnD spending "useless" (its not), look at pharmaceutical spending.

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/health_glance-2015-7...

Why don't we nail down one of these countries you're describing, so we can directly compare the spending?

>but regardless of this fact are you implying that since the US subsidizes so much for the other countries that Americans deserve to live in this second rate system where everyone is on their own?

Where did I say that?

You asked why other countries can do X. One of the reasons is because they don't have to pay for Y. If other countries could not longer rely on the US or China, we would see a much different picture.

>First point that is always made is we should be happy that US employees makes so much more salary. What you fail to understand is that Europeans are coming from an environment where they had good schooling, probably no debt from University and made it to adulthood without any health issues thanks to good healthcare and good healthy food policies.

So why abandon that environment?

>Furthermore Europeans ALWAYS have an exit strategy to go back to a system that has all these fundamentals. The US employee may be paid better but they grew up and live in an environment where everybody else is sinking due to the lack of these fundamental systems.

Do you have evidence for this?

>Secondly on a tangental point, Europeans love to talk about how Americans have access to a billion options for snacks and food. What they fail understand is that if you have grown up in this environment of corn laden garbage it is a prison that is difficult to escape. It is easy for Europeans to be in awe coming from an upbringing of whole nutritious foods. Its another thing to realize how much more expensive it is to eat healthy in the US vs Europe thanks to policies that were in place before even I was born (88).

That's the first time I've heard of this.

Normally I hear "wow, you're going to pay 3x as more for the same job I was doing in Spain?"

Look, you asked why countries are different and I gave an answer. You're now debating whether or not that is "good". You're also leaving out countless negatives about these countries you're alluding to.

The US was part of the industrial revolution, but suffered few domestic casualties (infrastructure) from either World War. The dollar becoming the world reserve currency for oil/capitalism cemented it.

(Where Russia, Continental Europe, and China were ravaged by WW2)

There's a common (almost cliche) line of "bad times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make bad times", which appears superficially true. Consider the Weimar Republic, or Imperial Russia from about 2 centuries ago. Both appeared to follow that pattern. The fall of Rome kinda fits that, too, if you squint.

The hallmarks of "bad times" appear to be increased law and regulation, increase in law/regulation complexity, non-dependable money supply (inflation was an issue in all three of the above scenarios), dilution of national identity, and so on. I'd argue that what underpins those changes is eroding morality. A perfectly moral people need no law, and their money supply is uncorrupted. As morality decreases, the necessity of law becomes apparent, and so the increase in law and regulation. As graft increases (which drove the need for law and regulation) the money supply becomes corrupted, fiat.

The collapse of empires (make no mistake, the United States is a cultural economic empire) is typically sudden, violent, and bloody. All three scenarios all featured a lot of death in a very short amount of time.

The end for the United States will likely be the same. Inflation will destroy what's left of the propped up economy. People will start to go hungry, their housing and livelihoods will be threatened. As soon as the bottom of Maslow's Hierarchy is in question, people start to rebel. You see some of that already with anti-vaccine riots. People believe their bodily autonomy is threatened. Definitely their livelihoods are threatened (this game of coercion -- get a vaccine, or you can't even work -- that Australia is playing and that the US seeks to implement -- is pushing people out of their comfort zones).

Are we in the end game? Dunno. We won't know until it is the end. Sudden, violent, bloody.

[edit] misplaced asterisks [/edit]

Honestly, I don’t know.

But I don’t think reform and collapse are the only two outcomes.

A lot of countries hobble along and simply live with their corruption for long periods of time.

I tell you what my answer isn’t. It’s not some cliched breathy end-times prediction where I make vague comparisons to the fall of Rome while parroting the same reasons every other ding dong has been parroting long before I was born (decline in morality, government spending, rising inflation)

I don’t know what’s going to happen and the people who have consistently predicted the wrong outcome for the last 5 decades are just as clueless.

Let’s start from a place of humility and tell ourselves we don’t know.

Most of us are so profoundly ignorant on the subject we’d do a lot better asking BASIC questions that reveal our ignorance rather than bloviating inane predictions.

I have so many basic questions that I’d love to ask much smarter people. Questions like:

* Are there inflection points in history we should study where people brought about meaning reform without huge social volatility? * How can societies depolarize themselves? How has it happened throughout history? * What questions should I be asking? (This one should be asked every day)

I would argue that a significant % of people are arguing for this though, or at least open to the idea.

I mean, would you say a significant % of people believe that Q nonsense?