Comment by smmn88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smmn88 | Hacker News Reader

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Why don't you all come and join us in Europe? We have what you are looking for:

- Universal high quality health care - Free education including high quality universities - Cheap or even free quality childcare - A social system that has everyone's back if shit hits the fan

No need to introduce socialism as some here seem to advocate. History has shown that this fails 100 out of 100 times, and it's been tried in every thinkable constellation.

Europe IMO has a better approach vs the US - still enough incentives to work hard, but aiming to afford everyone a humane existence. The main threat I see is that the balance is shifted too much to socialism over here, stifling innovation and ultimately destroying the wealth that funds all these goodies.

Part of the problem is that "socialism" is such a vague term, at least in the US. The most prominent self-defined socialist in the US, Bernie Sanders, doesn't want a Bolshevik revolution but basically just move the US to be more like Canada and Western Europe with increased safety nets and universal health care and free/cheap university education. On the other hand, yes, there are various fringe groups who are actually into Marx and collective ownership of everything despite the disasters they led to historically.

Look at comments further below - "forceful redistribution" etc. This is as bad as it gets and I think people don't know what they are talking about.

Eastern Germany started this way - "no one is intending to build a wall" they said, until one day, it was there.

You can't just go there. I don't see many European companies trying to recruit Americans in software. There's the language barrier for Americans but I think in software speaking English is good enough for many countries. We'd have to take a pay cut, but we know we'd be trading off less salary for actually useful lifetime benefits. I get pinged all the time for jobs in Canada, less in Australia. Whereas in my experience at American companies, we're trying to hire people from all over the world and we do it and bring them here.

Because its a slippery slope. A little socialism always leads to too much.

Why call out the fallacy by name when you use it?

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