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Comment by gwervc | Hacker News Reader

No, in general. It's a tax hell, the state is capturing about 43.5% of GDP for very questionable results on every plan (security, education, health, etc.) The money will be diverted to friends of friends that don't need it in the first place.

Source: myself, looking at starting a company there.

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Better than going to your existing Big Tech management and shareholders. France is supporting "Buy Local" at nation state scale. When the US "grows and innovates," it's mostly extraction at scale for shareholder benefit. Railroads (precision scheduling), healthcare, finance (credit card rails 3% economy rake, financialization of all the things), shareholder investor owned utilities, tax prep, etc.

It's always nice to see a country push back on the tech/intellectual property equivalent of the East India Company concept. Colonialism and empire building isn't dead, it simply expresses itself as multinationals on top of capital markets in the current incarnation. Don't invite the vampire in. When someone says "GDP" or "growth," politely ask them to show whom is benefiting (and to what degree) from numbers championed from a spreadsheet.

(i am sympathetic to the plight of your run of the mill, well intentioned startup founder focused on problem solving, but also not blind to the bulldozers I mention above)

Are you serious? Better going to a government with no added value vs a company providing a service for a monthly fee?

Very serious. It is an opinion that it is no added value. Show me evidence that the French government is providing a lower quality of life than say, the US government. GDP and growth are poor measures of quality of life. Certainly, you are free to not participate in the market if you choose not to as a business owner or service provider. It is very likely nothing of value will be lost.

Spotify's CEO is worth ~$3B while artists make pennies. Why would you incentivize such a structure unless your mental model tilts towards that being acceptable? I'm not saying this should be free or a utility, but it should probably be a business of a couple hundred people with a reasonable valuation target. As a nation state, you can say no. Europe does this, China does this. It can be done. "I would like to submit a bug report." The only people wringing their hands are those who would profit from the VC/tech fuckery ecosystem extending its reach. Don't let them; cut them tentacles seeking a moat/regulatory capture/entrenchment right off.

We can do better, and I feel no shame in stating such a position.

https://www.google.com/search?q=quality+of+life+france+vs+us

https://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/02/11/france.quality.l...

https://www.expat.hsbc.com/expat-explorer/expat-guides/franc...

https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/france/

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/should-we-try-to-live-lik...

really doubt artists are going to do better than pennies in france vs anywhere else. US is a good place to be an artist.

Not so much about artist comp going up as it is about driving down comp and valuations for these "tech" companies who attempt to use leverage to get their way.

It's about power. Always was, always is (once you're passed a certain fiat amount; only so much "line goes up" before it no longer matters). As Theodore Roosevelt said about highest tax bracket taxpayers who might leave the country, "we wish them well!" Call the bluff of these people, they're the ones with something to lose. If they push too hard, make them lose.

The rules are flexible, all of this (economic systems) is a shared delusion. Be mindful of this when negotiating and operating within the system.

US is a good place to be a good artist. France is a good place to be a subsidized artist

Only if you conflate worldwide mass appeal with "good". It's a viewpoint, but far from the only one.

> Spotify's CEO is worth ~$3B while artists make pennies.

That sounds like the market signaling an underproduction of streaming services and an overproduction of musicians. A levy on streaming services earmarked for French artists pushes the market further into disequilibrium, giving people less of what they want and more of what they don’t want.

Almost all the links you provided show USA having a higher quality of life than France in almost every way. For instance the first link of the google search (at least for me) was

> https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/compare_countries_res...

And then this

>https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/france/

shows USA as having in some ways having dramatically higher quality of life metrics, and minimally lacking only in a couple of ways.

I think it's sad because the problems France has could easily be fixed by liberalizing and minimizing the economics. But the french people are extremely against that and so it will practically not happen. And France is rich enough due to historical reasons that it'll probably never be compelled to do so.

Of course, USA should really be compared with EU, not a state like France. Comparing individual US states to France would be more accurate. Unfortunately, such metrics aren't usually available since USA is always considered a single entity in these reports.

France provides working services and a safety net from taxing a GDP per capita that's half of that of the US.

Of course you think that government spending is useless if your reference is the US. It's a country that is useless at serving its citizens.

This is more or less true for whole of Europe. A look at historical GDP growth gives a big hint - around before 2010 the EU and USA were on par, after that while the US grew and innovated Europe has chosen bureaucracy, taxation and fighting with business aside from the state owned ones.

Interestingly, some of those moves by the EU (like the GDPR) are widely popular with citizens around the world, to the point where some US jurisdictions have been working on their own copies.

So perhaps there is worthwhile innovation happening in the EU after all?

“Innovation” is tech-man speak for “figuring out how to privatize/shift profits to our company” in the press. Sort of like how “the economy” can usually just be translated to mean “rich people’s yacht money”

Innovation is also CRISPR, LLMs, reusable rockets and lithium-ion batteries. Potently, many were discovered in Europe but developed in America.

> “the economy” can usually just be translated to mean “rich people’s yacht money”

Mississippi, one of the poorest US states and one widely panned for having "backwards" economic policies (meaning low levels of redistributive taxation), has a higher median household income at nearly $53k[0] than Germany, the country with the best economy in egalitarian Europe, at roughly $46k[1]. So it's definitely not just yacht-owners that are the beneficiaries of economic growth in a laissez-faire capitalistic country.

[0]: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/MS/BZA115221

[1]: https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/salaries-in-germany

SO sorry that it took me so long to respond to this, but your math felt wrong, so I looked into it.

[1]Mississippi PER CAPITA income: 29K [2]Worst German State PER CAPITA income: 34K

I have no idea what All About Berln is, and when I looked into their dataset it was...confusing. So I went to Wikipedia. I think you were comparing Household vs Per capita?

Either way, Mississippi isn't the doing as well you're claiming. They also have a 19% poverty rate [1] compared to Germany's 11% [3].

[1]https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/MS/BZA115221 [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_states_by_GRP_p... [3]https://www.statista.com/topics/10455/poverty-in-germany

And France has the highest government expenditure as a percent of GDP among the developed world, at >58% as of last count[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...

Every time you figure out an obstacle - an obscure regulation that affects you and how to beat it, which bureaucrat can assist you in these matters, which politician you can affiliate with to make red tape get cut - you are also creating a moat. Even better, if you get competitors, you can speak to your government contacts and get your competitor mired in the same red tape.

While you personally may be able to overcome this, the net result across the macro economy is one of stagnation and slow growth. It does not encourage innovation. Such is the situation in France.

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