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Comment by mooreds | Hacker News Reader

> What the hell is going on there?

Please tell me if you figure it out. As near as I can tell, there's a profound distrust in any mandatory collective action (aka government) especially the closer to the federal level you get. Voluntary collective action is praiseworthy.

Maybe this is due to unique characteristics of Americans, as documented by de Tocqueville? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville

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Yeah, Americans generally prefer doing things voluntarily as opposed to being forced to do them. It’s part of the whole “freedom” thing.

"Freedom" is overblown in American discourse. Americans can't even agree on stuff like "freedom to require people coming into my store to wear a mask during a pandemic" versus "freedom to go about my business without restrictions," so it's often just spin, even without getting into the real fun ones like abortion, birth control, guns...

This is because the word has been redefined in the US. As outsiders we struggle to understand american brand freedom because its a weird concept centred on "my rights" where in most of the rest of the world includes responsibilities.

The US is screwed until they fix their discourse.

Believe me, a decent chunk of Americans don’t even understand the concept of freedom.

We have an expression, “it’s a free country”. But if you go to Mexico, the pharmacy will just sell you anything short of controlled substances—antibiotics, heart medication, whatever. In the US you need a prescription from a doctor. We’re not a free country by a long shot.

One can believe in freedom and also believe that the federal government has grown too big and often infringes on those freedoms.

> Believe me, a decent chunk of Americans don’t even understand the concept of freedom.

The government overreaching doesn't mean people don't understand the concept of freedom, just that the establishment has grown too influential.

I don’t know how you could believe in freedom and not have that opinion about the US federal government. But I’m not sure why you brought that up in this context.

The us has over ten times the population of Australia. The concentration of power is much greater and the distrust of that power isn’t completely irrational.

What I can’t figure out is why one state out of the fifty can’t do healthcare. That’s how it stayed in Canada, in one province.

Many already do to some extent, they're just incremental, narrow changes designed to solve the most pressing issues rather than full "free, universal healthcare". For example, Massachusetts's mandatory health insurance, or Washington State's public option.

I've lived in both countries. While Americans are very strong believers in democracy, Americans trust their government much less than than people in smaller countries. It may be directly related to the problem of empathy at a distance. There are things that I would trust the Australian Government to do that I would not trust the US Government to do, not because I think the Australian politicians are more competent or trustworthy, but because the United States population is 13 times greater, making a human connection between politicians and and constituents, keeping trust and accountability is an order of magnitude easier with a population that's an order of magnitude smaller.

We don't trust the government because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and history repeats itself.

That's what a constitution is for, it's an agreement between the people and government on how they wish to be governed. Ours sets out our God given rights that no government should be able to take away.

The Australian government hasn't been too kind to its people recently during covid, carrying people off for facebook posts, not a great example.

Someone in our prime ministers own government just described him as a man with no moral compass who uses 'his so-called faith as a marketing advantage' But the Australian population is much smaller, which means the public have a much smaller task keeping the government in line. You can't keep brazen narcissist kleptomaniacs entirely in line of course, but you can keep it to the level where they're not buying superyachts. I think this different context leads Australians to have some very different ideas about Government to Americans. We know power corrupts, but we don't see the Australian government as an arena where it is possible to attain absolute power, we don't see it as a vehicle someone can ride to outright despotism. There are people in the government in Australia would love to be despots, would love to rule the nation with an iron fist. The clown who renamed the 'Customs and Border Protection Service' to 'Border Force' and made all the uniforms black (ok really really dark blue) would love to be proclaimed eternal wise father of the nation, but we don't believe he's got a hope of getting that past us. We are more trusting of government not because we are naive, but because a nation of 330 million is a very different beast to a nation of 25 million

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