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Comment by arinlen | Hacker News Reader

> California suffers from a Peter Thiel curse.

This. Mr Thiel's highly hypocritical and incoherent rant on "dysfunctional societies" and "corrupt governments" is nothing more admitting that the likes of him are refusing to contribute at all back to society, let alone proportionally to what they personally benefited from it, and are thus single-handedly actively causing its deterioration.

Mr Thiel, pay your taxes, and in the process put your money where your mouth is and start contributing back to fixing problems. You're supposed to be bootstrappy and a problem-solver, aren't you? Why did any of your industrious spirit vanished once it's your time to pay back to society what you owe it? Is it easy to build a huge mansion in a gated community but too hard to work with local and state governments to chip in a fraction of that cost to invest in urban renewal programs, social programs, or even social housing?

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No, the problem is the engineers, not Thiel. European countries also have billionaires. But the billionaires don’t pay for the social housing, etc. Sweden doesn’t have a wealth tax, it has low corporate taxes, and low capital gains taxes too. Sweden has all the robust welfare system because the top tax rate starts at around $75,000/year.

The only reason California doesn’t look like Sweden is because your average California liberal is a hypocrite and won’t put their money where their mouth is.

Isn’t it hard to become a Swedish citizen?

You need around four years living in Sweden, and pass some basic language tests. It’s not very hard.

You’re telling me an adult in any country on earth can move to Sweden (how hard is it to move to Sweden), stay there for 4 years, pass a test and become a citizen?

I’m skeptical.

Yeah and that's why people are losing their shit, just can't can't CAN'T dude super small country.

In any case blonde girl Sweden and human rights Sweden are not the same place.

Well, I understand your skepticism, which is always healthy. I recommend a good Google/Reddit search to find all of the nuances of the subject, but overall, yes, if you are legally working in Sweden for 4 years, you can become a citizen.

How easily can you work in Sweden with no ties at all? I did Google a bit and didn’t see anything supporting what you said.

https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/...

A lot of foreigners work for the big companies, such as Volvo, H&M, Klarna, Spotify, King, iZettle.

The visa process is relatively painless. Much simpler than the the process for USA or UK. All you need is a job offer.

It’s much simpler for 290M+ people in the US to move to California. As well as much more difficult for California to stop the US from redistributing its wealth to other areas of the US.

So not really comparable to an independent nation of Sweden.

Sweden is part of the European Union, and as such, any person of its 447M+ population have the legal right to live and work in Sweden.

In that sense, Sweden’s exposure to potential internal migration is much higher.

That’s a good point!

I recommend visiting Sweden. The welfare system is falling apart, the population is increasingly hostile towards immigration, the average salary is rather low, while prices are high. It is not the best place for the poor, middle class, or the rich.

Meanwhile, it’s important to remind you that engineers are rarely involved with policymaking. They are not the problem. Heck, there isn’t even an union or guild for engineers.

Perhaps the influx of thousands of migrants per year is overwhelming the system? Why can’t their population raise concerns around this?

It most probably is. But OP’s point was that if engineers paid more taxes, all problems would be solved. And it’s not true - migrants also pay high taxes in Sweden.

My point here is that there isn’t a single solution for very complex systemic issues. Pinning the blame on middle classes is wrong and unproductive.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/14/swedish-pm-con...

They voted for a very anti-immigration right wing party.

I’m using engineers as a California-specific example of upper middle class people (given the reference to Peter Thiel below). Sweden, and every other European country, pays for its welfare system by taxing middle class people. That makes sense because middle class people have most of the money. Facebook’s payroll is much bigger than the investment Zuckerberg makes every year. They don’t sit around complaining that we can’t have social services because the billionaires won’t pay for it.

And now those middle class people have the same problems unless they inherited wealth, while expected to fund both the young, the old and the weak.

Take GP's advice and go talk with some locals. Various countries with high taxes are watching their services fall apart. Taxing the middle class alone isn't the silver bullet you portay it as, and is only a small part of the entire system.

Taxing the middle class is a necessary condition of having a welfare state. The most remarkable difference between the American tax structure and those of European social democracies is that we have extremely low taxes on the middle and upper middle class. In the U.S. we have a lot of people complaining why we don't tax Peter Thiel to pay for universal healthcare, but that's not the reason we don't have universal healthcare.

In the face of an aging population and diminishing workforce, taxing the middle class may not be enough. But I am talking about an antecedent question.

> The only reason California doesn’t look like Sweden is because your average California liberal is a hypocrite and won’t put their money where their mouth is.

Or maybe California cannot restrict immigration from other parts of the US, containing 290M+ people. Nor can it stop the federal US government from taking a good portion of its wealth and giving to other parts of the US.

And Sweden can stop immigration anytime it wants.

Seem like pretty big differences in parameters requiring different approaches to government and expectations of outcomes.

Local, state, and federal government at this stage of our national financial collapse is a bottomless grifting machine.

Telling someone to pay their taxes to fix this problem is kind of like telling someone to drink more poison to cure their stomach ache.

> You're supposed to be bootstrappy and a problem-solver, aren't you? Why did any of your industrious spirit vanished once it's your time to pay back to society what you owe it?

It's interesting that Peter Thiel's preferred mythology (bootstrappy problem-solver with an industrious spirit) has become canon even among skeptics.

> It's interesting that Peter Thiel's preferred mythology (bootstrappy problem-solver with an industrious spirit) has become canon even among skeptics.

Peter Thiel's mythology revolves around the idea that all of society's problema are solved by industrious individuals, much like himself, instead of the state.

And now we see the likes of a Peter Thiel not only robbing the state of the means to actually do the job he's whining they should do, but also doing absolutely zero to do anything about the problem.

It's not a mythology. It's entitlement, hypocrisy, cinicism, and rationalized greed.

Mythology, but in the Greek sense, where all the (gods|rich people) are actually terrible people, but you have to play along or your life will get worse, and we spin all failures to do so as personal failings.

My comment's target was the mythology about Thiel's origin story.

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