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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

> The productive middleclass is effectively squeezed.

That's why I left Belgium. Getting squeezed to the bone to pay for endless leeches producing absolutely nothing that I enjoy or respect: it's not just the arts. Administrations are pathetically inefficient and arbitrary in how they treat people too.

So I already left and now I'm selling everything I have there: a little apartment, one garage, a few items worth a little something.

I'm fully planning on acquiring another nationality and then I'll just abandon my belgian one.

> Not surprisingly, mediocrity, irrelevance and low-output are the norm.

Totally.

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Like many I am looking for an exit too, at least fiscally. Right now I am -like many here- territorially bound by family and real-estate.

But the negative economic death spiral has set in here. More people work for the public sector directly and indirectly than the private sector, and the tax burden is ever increasing while services received are dwindling.

I've often wondered if a colony in some of the unclaimed lands of Antarctica could soak up everyone who is fed up with the death spiral of productivity in the west.

You'd meet some interesting people if nothing else.

For an unhealthy length of time (definitely since c. 2009 and arguably since the 90s) anyone with economically interesting skills was better of emigrating to the US, and many of these "best and brightest" did. I think the ceiling where you're better off in the US (or a few other Western states) is getting lower and lower, especially since the last few years have starkly shown just how unwilling and resistant to change the central european populace truly is. Right now you can still leave without huge exit taxes (unless you happen to own a company, most don't). I'm guessing as the brain drain keeps picking up pace, we'll see hefty exit taxes targeting basically everyone starting in 5-10 years.... after all, when people leave, they won't be able to pay 70% (~50% taxes and mandatory insurance, 30-40% rent or a mortgage, whose principal directly went to some old dude) of their income into your young-to-old wealth transfer system where they don't get anything out. So when they wanna leave you, you gotta make them pay dearly!

Abusive relationship? Not at all!

In Europe you have two options: Become a parasite or become a host. If neither of those options suit you, you have to get the hell out or live outside of the law and long fingers of the tax collectors.

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