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[wierd]

You can look at the effects of higher taxes and infrastructure in a place like Sweden.

Crunch the numbers, and Sweden produces more billionaires per capita than the USA does. Sure, the rich complain about the taxes, but all that infrastructure spending in fact creates a better support structure for businesses so that entrepreneurs can afford to take bigger risks. On the opposite end you can end up like those "liberty cities" in Texas that don't have public sewage works then wonder why businesses aren't flocking to town to take advantage of the tax breaks.

This is just furthering the point;  There are real trade-offs to sacrificing infrastructure for short-term profit, and real trade-offs to enabling a massive welfare state.

The ideal conditions for real prosperity, and real wealth, is when there is reasonable and practical applications of cost reduction along with real and practical applications of assuring social welfare-- TOGETHER.



The US is just so HyperCapitalist, that nations that HAVE such a healthy mixture are seen as being comparatively "Teh COMMUNISMS!".  Countries that have historically actually TRIED real communism/socialism, are the ones that have experienced the other end of the spectrum, and proven to be untenable.  The US is just working itself as hard and fast as it can into ultimate planetary exhaustion before it will finally be proven to be likewise untenable.

[Reelya]

Also, to put the "falling behind in technological innovation" thing to rest. I pointed out that this is apples and oranges. Most European nations are the size of states in the USA, not the whole USA.

A better indication is when you google some random science-related thing per capita. For example "nobel prizes per capita" seems like the obvious one to try:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Nobel_laureates_per_capita

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]

1 Saint Lucia 2 179,667 111.317
2 Luxembourg 2 590,321 33.880
3   Switzerland 26 8,544,034 30.431
4 Sweden 30 9,982,709 30.052
5 Iceland 1 337,780 29.605
6 Denmark 14 5,754,356 24.329
7 Norway 13 5,353,363 24.284
8 Austria 21 8,751,820 23.995
9 United Kingdom 133 66,573,504 19.978
10 East Timor 2 1,324,094 15.105
11 Ireland 7 4,803,748 14.572
12 Israel 12 8,452,841 14.196
13 Germany 108 82,293,457 13.124
14 Netherlands 20 17,084,459 11.707
15 United States 375 326,766,748 11.476
16 France 63 65,233,271 9.658

USA has the most, at 375. But that doesn't mean other social-democratic nations in Europe are "falling behind", because the USA is a very large nation in terms of population. 14 nations produce more nobel prizes per capita than the USA does, and almost all of them fall on the social democracy end of the scale (other than a few tiny outlier nations with 1-2 nobel laureates). In other words they're more efficient at producing Nobels than the USA is.

[wierd]

Makes perfect sense when social mobility, and access to quality education is better in reach of the majority statistic of the population, as then per capita, the number of people that could ultimately become Nobel Laureates is better expressed. (EG, you can be brilliant, and also be poor, and thus never live up to your potential. The US excels at increasing the divide between rich and poor, with the number of poor increasing far faster than the number of rich. As such, it makes PERFECT sense that the US would be the one with the faltering Laureate production RATE. )

The converse would also be true in pure communism-- While everyone has equal access to the state education, the state education is not as good as in other nations, because of inefficiently spent capital resources. Brilliant people get sub-par education, and fail to live up to their real potential.

[Tack]

Well, I'm vaguely convinced. However, the issue has now transferred into how well that works in a fluid system. Humans will naturally want to move the place where it's best for them. By this nature, wouldn't more wealthy idea-makers move to hypercapitalist places like the US whilst the poor flock to places with a more robust welfare system like Scandanavia and Europe?

[Kagus]

Also worth mentioning that the Nobel institute itself happens to be in one of them thar Scommunavian countries. Checkmate, anarcho-capitalists.

[Reelya]

Like i said, there are more billionaires per capita in Sweden than in the USA. Billionaires would have to be the most mobile people possible, but that doesn't mean any of them will be particularly drawn to the USA. People with that much money don't need to move, and demSoc Sweden has a large pool of highly educated workers to draw on, so there's little reason to relocate.

Also, there's good data suggesting that the "hyper-capitalist" stuff actually stunts growth. And it hasn't really worked for the economy all that well. For example, Sweden has 40% government debt to GDP compared to USA's 115% government debt to GDP. And the USA government passes a lot of education and healthcare costs onto the citizens. Yet somehow are going broke faster than nations with comprehensive publicly funded health and education systems. Under the USA system you end up paying twice - taxes for those things but they make you pay again to the private sector before you get any services.

[McTraveller]

Youtubers being president - yea or nay?

"Free" healthcare, education, etc:  It's not free, is't just cost-shared.  And possibly* inefficiently, because it's easy to not care how much things cost when you're not the one paying the full bill.

Mass immigration/refugees: I can try to sympathize, but it's unreasonable. I mean 8-15 thousand people just showing up in a small geographic area. That's an entire town. I don't know of many locales that can absorb that much new population instantaneously and support it with groceries, water, etc.  That's a lot of logistics.  I mean, I don't know about you all, but generally I only move when I know there is somewhere to move to... but I guess I've never been in a situation to feel like leaving what I have for nothing is a best option.**


*I say possibly, because in the US costs are high because no individual cares about anything more than premiums and out-of-pocket, not actual cost.  But in the UK, for instance, total spending is much smaller per-GDP for not terrible results.

**And yes I know part of this is the political statement of just trying to overwhelm the system.

[Reelya]

"Free" healthcare, education, etc:  It's not free, is't just cost-shared.  And possibly* inefficiently, because it's easy to not care how much things cost when you're not the one paying the full bill.

It's still better than the alternative of full-for-profit versions.

Let me explain. Think of the question "who pays for an individuals education?" You could say "the individual should pay the full cost" however, there's a problem there. If the individual needs to pay the full cost of the education, then they must directly receive enough pay from employment to pay for their entire education, which would push up the market price of educated workers. However, in reality, your boss makes some of the profit by exploiting your education. In fact, if you have an education and work, then most of the *actual profit* from the added value of your education is in fact made by people who are *not you*. And, if the full cost of education is pushed onto the individual, then less individuals would see enough financial return on that investment to bother getting an education, thus the supply of educated individuals would shrink, further pushing up the price of educated workers. The tax money you "saved" by forcing people to pay for the full cost of their own education is outweighed by the financial losses to the system as a whole, because it loses all the marginal value-adding from the educated person's labor which is no longer cost-effective for the educated person to provide.

A similar point could be made about transport subsidies. Say that we decide it's unfair to subsidize public transport and completely leave that up to the free market as to whether there are buses or not and what routes they travel. Suddenly, many businesses that rely on minimum wage workers will discover that their workers can't afford to travel to work. The system in many places would likely collapse entirely with nobody being able to find enough workers to fill demand.

[Tack]

If a reality TV host can be president, why not a youtuber.
However thank god that fourteen year-olds can't vote.

[pisskop]

What do you mean you dont want president Game Grump?

[ChairmanPoo]

*I say possibly, because in the US costs are high because no individual cares about anything more than premiums and out-of-pocket, not actual cost.  But in the UK, for instance, total spending is much smaller per-GDP for not terrible results.

In the UK and everywhere else. In general socialized medical systems achieve better outcomes for the buck than private ones... and in fact even within the single payer bunch, more socialized systems are more efficient thsn private run ones. This was in one of my textbooks in uni, alongside refs to the studies, alas I dont have that onnhand anymore.


By the way, I wouldn't regard the NHS as being the best nowadays, at the very least in my field. Years of funding cuts have made penny pinching part of the official policy, NICE guidelines are lagging behind the rest of the continent, and the outcomes are likewise lagging behind.

[Rowanas]

*I say possibly, because in the US costs are high because no individual cares about anything more than premiums and out-of-pocket, not actual cost.  But in the UK, for instance, total spending is much smaller per-GDP for not terrible results.

In the UK and everywhere else. In general socialized medical systems achieve better outcomes for the buck than private ones... and in fact even within the single payer bunch, more socialized systems are more efficient thsn private run ones. This was in one of my textbooks in uni, alongside refs to the studies, alas I dont have that onnhand anymore.


By the way, I wouldn't regard the NHS as being the best nowadays, at the very least in my field. Years of funding cuts have made penny pinching part of the official policy, NICE guidelines are lagging behind the rest of the continent, and the outcomes are likewise lagging behind.

I think stress on the system as a result of an increasingly elderly population (who use up far more than their share of NHS resources) is the primary factor in our lagging behind.  Sadly, if this socialist dream is to continue, and however unpleasant it might seem, we need to get some Malthusian/Logan's Run shit all up in this.

[wierd]

Or, you could encourage people to take out DNRs when they are healthy--- and then fucking honor them, no matter what the family members bleat and squeal.


(Works in a nursing home. Many old people want to die, but are prevented from it by their families. It is NOT uncommon for a person who was totally with it, and took out a DNR on themselves, develops rapid onset dementia and WANTS that DNR to remain in force, but now they are "mentally infirm", and "cannot decide for themselves", and so they get a DPOA-- who "does not want grandpa to die!", and so prolongs to poor bastard in a limbo of non-living hell for decades at a time, and rushes the poor bastard to the emergency room every time he falls, or has respiratory distress, or whatever.)

[Yoink]

Jontron 4 president

[Tack]

Or we could just crack that cure for senescence, and suddenly our aging population aren't a 4000% higher risk factor for basically every chronic disease.