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Comment by darth_avocado | Hacker News Reader

> I don't know what comes after

You start looking like South Africa, Brazil, India or other large economies with high concentration of wealth at the top.

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All of them famous for top heavy bureaucracies meddling in industry and highly political byzantine rules for business, which is the current drumbeat the west is following.

Lumping "the West" as one thing in this argument is just wrong. The West is composed of so many different countries with their own legal systems, cultural baggage, bureaucratic and political processes which evolved differently over time that it makes your sentence meaningless.

From my own experience moving from Brazil, having ran businesses there, and later in life moving to "the West" (Sweden) there's simply no comparison between the hurdles you have in Brazil vs Sweden. No, not even the drumbeat is pointing in that direction, it's almost a literal different world.

You need to be more specific to make this kind of criticism, it is absurdly vague, and by that also quite unhelpful to any discussion.

That are exceptions but there is a noticeable trendline. The freedom of business index ranks Scandinavian countries pretty high. Norway, Sweden, and Finland tend to rank highest among Singapore and South Korea. Ireland tops it because it's a giant tax shelter but there's not much notable innovation there. Meanwhile UK, France, Italy, Spain are ranking poorly. The US has been declining there slowly, which is much more obvious when you factor in local/state/housing etc, federally it's long been more permissive but fiscally irresponsible.

My personal indicator is how many young (<50) entrepreneurs are building real stuff vs announcements of ex-bigco executives partnering with the government to jump on a new bandwagon.

Start?

It can get so much worse than what we have in the West.

Lack of density in the US means we at least get the mexican version of this not the indian/bladerunner flavor.

Neither South Africa nor Brazil are that dense, which is why I included them as examples.

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