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Comment by kwanbix | Hacker News Reader

I now what you probably mean when you say "free", that you don't have to pay for it, but in reality, the universities are paid by everyone. Same for health care. I pay 400 euros per month. Of course, then I don't pay much else. But the cost is distributed, they are not "free". Maybe I am sensitive to the word, because in my home country, Argentina, populism has made people believe that everything has to be "free".

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I mean, the money has to come from somewhere. Yes, in terms of government-provided services "free" tends to mean "socialized", but if I compare it to a market-driven healthcare system in the US where the majority of effort goes into creative billing to milk people's insurances, the overall lifetime cost of healthcare appears to be much lower. Especially that with German insurance, there's no copay for treatments, only for prescription drugs (and even then, it's between 5-10€ per item, which can be further refunded if you are eligible).

With universities, my argument for public funding is that it theoretically makes higher education accessible to people actually interested in the subjects, instead of people who can afford it and go for the prestige of it. I feel that elsewhere, big name universities serve more as a platform for networking rather than actual educational institutions; here, I do not even know which universities are more or less prestigious. A degree is a degree.

I understand your perspective, but it is still mostly free for the people who need it (there are always fees and things so it is never completely free, but it is still very cheap compared to the actual cost).

In case of education, young student typically don’t earn enough to pay income tax, if they have any salary or wages at all. To them, it’s free. I now pay for them through my taxes and I am happy to because I was in their position and if uni wouldn’t have been so cheap, I could not have attended. It’s not free for the overall society, but it is free for those who use it.

Same for healthcare. We all pay but when you need heavy surgery or long-term care that would cost tens hundreds of thousands of euros, it’s close enough to free as to not make you bankrupt. Again, free-ish for those who need it.

Yes, that's what "free" usually means. When people talk about free healthcare they usually don't mean that the only doctors should be hobbyists.

When I'm in Berlin (mainly talking to Americans) I get the impression that Berlin is especially great if you don't have need to have a job / pay tax

That's a good point and we should differentiate. The taxes in Europe are very high for a reason.

This is an accounting trick. Taxes do not cover the same services everywhere. Of course, taxes are higher in Sweden than in the US, but then you don’t pay as much for your children’s education or your parents’ health care. So sure, the young and healthy people without children are better off in the US. Or the very wealthy who would nominally pay more taxes, though they have other tricks to use.

On average it’s much more nuanced, though. Comparing at one given level of service, public services are actually good value for money.

It's about mentality. Americans strive to attain the ideal of a "self-made man"; prizing work ethic and self-sufficiency. Germans (Europeans is too broad of a label) are okay with learning a trade and then doing their job consistently for the rest of their lives - that's why the employment conditions in Germany are tuned towards long-term, stable employment.

In the UK we have the term "free at the point of service."

That's what the word "free" always means. Goods and services don't spontaneously materialize into existence.

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