Comment by hermitShell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hermitShell | Hacker News Reader

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There are deeper structural problems when you look at the incentives inherent to government driven society.

While I do appreciate and even support the idea that the immense wealth available on planet earth should be more evenly distributed, and people should mostly be focused on raising families, deepening their philosophy, and perfecting their craft... (some societies in Europe are pretty laid back in terms of hyper-productivity culture)

Regulation is possible without paralyzing industry. Laws about the internet are possible without stifling freedom. Central planning is possible without crashing the economy so bad you end up with a regime change. It all comes down to execution and for the most part, it's been a series of failed experiments.

As much as I want a happy future for Canadians and Europeans, I just don't see the odds being super favourable.

Dunno. My impression is that with the EU, we pick its suboptimal parts and compare them to what they could be with optimal execution.

We don’t look either at the successful parts, not at the world where it is wholesale gone. My gut feeling is that EU members are, on the whole, much better off for being in than out. One natural experiment is the UK - opinions differ, but the drastic accumulation of problems coincides with Brexit timings.

I’m all for improving the EU! And for sure there are bad bits. But when your car AC is doing badly, you don’t write off the car. You try to fix the AC…

People sometimes call EU the sleeping giant. Big potential compared to the actual results.

I'm more aware of what Canadian government does with its tax dollars. And I'm just assuming that the EU is similarly quite expensive for what it achieves, and the budgets only change in one direction.

EU budget is actually quite small - about 1% of GDP.

That’s very small compared to EU members states national budgets, which sit at around 35% of GDP, apparently. Canadian federal government apparently spends 18-20% of Canadas GDP, topped up by local governments.

This is all very apples-to-oranges but doesn’t support the thesis that EU budget is particularly bloated.

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