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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Government policies that prevent economic growth and ensure high unemployment rates do nothing to benefit the middle class. It's better to limit worker rights because that makes employers more likely to hire workers in the first place. This improves growth rates and economic mobility.

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Then you gotta explain places like Sweden and Germany, or why the richest, most productive US states are the ones with the strictest workers rights.

Chances are it's something else.

I mean the US has some of the highest wages and least workers rights if you come pare countries.

Absolutely.

It also has functionally infinite land, weak neighbours, incredible energy resources, isolation from any other world power, a (relatively) egalitarian culture, and the single biggest patch of good, arable land on the planet.

No shit workers get paid lots in such a productive piece of territory.

Those factors are likely irrelevant to industries like tech.

And I mean Canada has all those same things and wages are much lower.

No, Canada doesn't have those things, namely arable land. Much of Canadian land is wasteland, too cold for much agricultural use. Its economy isn't that large either (much less population), and its currency isn't a major currency worldwide.

Canada has fertile farmland below about the 53 parallel. It’s massive.

Its does - still colder, less fertile, and less sunny than the US Midwest, and hardly comparable to the California Central Valley.

The Central Valley is not naturally fertile

The big effect of all these things is to make stuff cheaper and easier in the US. Cheaper land, cheaper energy, cheaper food. It means America can generate more capital with less inputs than anywhere else. That capital is then available to other industries, like tech.

Canada has lots of land, although it's generally much colder, less fertile, and just worse. They have oil, only it's thousands of miles away from the economic centres. They have arable land, also thousands of miles away from population centres (also far inland). And they border a hyperpower who could destroy them in a glance.

I'm not a US resident, not born there, but they are more ambitious

> prevent economic growth and ensure high unemployment rates

odd to hear reliable Chicago-School-of-Economics "facts" spoken with such confidence, while ignoring the change of local roads to superhiways, and 100 local retail stores closing at the same time. The very nature of the consumer transaction is changing. Economic analysis at the Nation level says that daily spending by consumers is the large majority of economic growth, especially when subtracting pure-government spending programs in the analysis.

Where are consumer transactions taking place? Involving what number of ordinary jobs? Consider that in the last five years, basically all retail clothing in New York City has closed. Are Milano or Rome different?

There are seismic, continental changes in economy that are not addressed by simple supply-side one liners.

We have too much retail space as it is. Closing a lot of stores will be better for all of society in the long run. Of course, government should help impacted workers with a safety net through the transition.

I was watching a documentary on the penal system in brazil and how companies use it to exploit them and treats inmates as a cheap right-less, tax-evasion slave workforce

Brazil was also the last country in North or South America to ban Slavery.

you ban slavery and it rebrands itself to another name

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