> It fascinates me that so many countries on the planet do things like liberal welfare and 'free' healthcare, yet the richest country in the world by a very wide margin calls it shenanigans.
Have you ever considered that it would contribute to why it is the richest country in the world?
Not really. GDP is large, but that's only because the population is large. Per capita GDP is around US$ 9k, which makes us poorer than Mexico or Argentina. For comparison, per capita GDP in Sweden is something like US$ 54k.
I remember being taught in school that Brazil is the n-th richest country in the world, and if only that wealth were evenly distributed we could all enjoy a welfare state like in Europe. That is simply not possible. But I guess many people here still believe it because the country has a few highly visible pockets of wealth.
Is it though? I know USA borrows heavily and spends a lot of its money on luxury items like a fearsome army and the most expensive health care (per capita) in the world.
Also the way USA is making that money is by heavily taxing its value creating people who are highly motivated to do their best work by a lack of safety net and other niceties. Now I wonder if you provide them all shelter, food, healthcare, entertainment and transport, who would be motivated to work anymore?!
> There are already many countries with generous welfare states where one does not have to work and could theoretically live off the government, yet they manage just fine.
I didn’t know there were any countries like this? Would you please link to a few?
> Our economic system ensures that those things will not help the great mass of people in our society.
If that were actually true, why do the most productive economies nearly universally have the highest median incomes? That includes the US, which has nearly the world's highest median & disposable income levels. If it worked as you're implying, the US would have a terrible median income.
In fact, our economic system - and variations of free market economics broadly - is precisely the reason so many do so well. That's true in all developed nations on the planet, from the US to Canada to Scandinavian countries to Japan to Australia to Germany to Switzerland. To the extent a nation lacks such, is the extent to which they suffer poverty at the median vs developed nations.
Most of those same high median income nations that have taken aggressive advantage of free'ish market economics, are able to provide robust healthcare systems and social safety nets, precisely because of the glorious abundance the system makes possible.
> I find it furious how american citizens are force to subsidize the entire world.
Come on: the US is already the wealthiest country, and if you look at the underlying reasons why its citizens get more of the world pie, you can find plenty of reasons the rest of the world is “subsidising” the US. Let’s start with IP rights and the abuse of that system to the detriment of any non-US country. There are plenty of systematic biases in favour of the US, often “negotiated” by the US. The US is happy to destabilise whole countries to get what it wants cheaply e.g. oil.
And we are talking about healthcare here, where plenty of other countries seem to have found systems that work better than the US for cheaper.
> Probably because liberty does not mean prosperity.
In the post WW2 era, it has overwhelmingly meant that. Not subtly, not kinda sorta, overwhelmingly. And the lack of liberty has overwhelmingly meant poverty.
The scales are so radically tilted toward those things, that the outliers are few on each side, counted on one hand typically.
Prosperous + high degrees of liberty: Switzerland, Norway, Ireland, Iceland, US, Canada, UK, Denmark, Australia, Sweden, Finland, Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Belgium, France, Japan, Israel, New Zealand, Italy, South Korea, Spain
You know, just nearly all the most affluent nations on the planet. Nearly all the most prosperous nations are also high liberty nations.
The list continues even further on down the line: Taiwan, Portugal, Estonia, Slovenia, Czech, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Greece, Poland
Even Romania for example now has a GDP per capita well exceeding that of China and Russia. How is that possible, that Romania is embarrassing Russia economically? One has far more liberty than the other; one is democratic, the other is autocratic to an extreme. In the not so distant future, Romania will double Russia's GDP per capita. Russia's liberty deprivation is beginning to show itself - again - in their economic regression (eg falling incomes for 5-6 years) and general stagnation.
What are examples of very impoverished high liberty nations? There are exceptionally few. So few I would challenge anybody to name more than three or four out of ~196 nations.
Outliers in the prosperous group when it comes to low liberty? Also exceptionally few: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE
The low liberty group of nations is dramatically dominated by poverty by comparison.
> It makes absolutely no sense to claim that a country has a well-functioning society if it happens to have a hand full of ultra-rich billionaires while the whole population suffers to barely make ends meet, let alone have a shot at a decent life.
The US is much, much richer than any remotely comparable entity. Americans do not live the lives of grinding poverty you imagine. The only country or region that consumes more per household is Hong Kong[1]. A comfortable life in the US is available to much, much more of the population than STEM graduates as well.
> Honestly, from my point of view, the US is a 3rd world country, but I expect that viewpoint to be very controversial.
As someone who lives in a real third-world country...I'm of the opinion that this is a silly thing to say. Yeah, the world's biggest economy ($23T GDP) that constantly sends payloads to outer space and back is third-world...maybe you could come live in a place with 80% of people below the poverty line and see what third-world is.
> I'm just puzzled that this wishful thinking that economic prosperity is necessarily connected to political freedoms still persists.
That's because it's true in ~188 out of 190 on-going instances where oil isn't involved. It's fair to say it's true 99% of the time.
US, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Ireland, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Israel (this list keeps going)
Versus what?
China... and? Maybe Singapore, a tiny island nation.
Denmark has nearly three times the GDP per capita of Saudi Arabia. Czech has four times the GDP per capita of Iran. That isn't going to change, if anything the disparity will increase between the liberal order and the authoritarian order. China is more of a historical one-off than anything.
The US has at least 10x the GDP per capita of Cuba, and six times that of Russia. South Korea has ~15 times the GDP per capita of North Korea. Australia has 40 times the GDP per capita of Myanmar.
The economic prosperity rankings are overwhelmingly dominated by nations that are more politically free than not. The least politically free nations tend to be hyper impoverished (again, with only a few exceptions for petro states). As such it's not wishful thinking, it's reality.
>> supposedly the richest country the world has ever known.
Which numbers are you looking at? Countries like Norway, Ireland, Qatar or Switzerland normally top the lists of richest countries today let alone ever known. The USA doesn't break the top 10 on the list published by the CIA. Only after removing alleged tax havens might it hit #9.
> It's much, much easier to live and work in a foreign country today. And it's only getting easier as technology improves.
So let the current oligarchs exile themselves and we'll do what we can to make sure no more Bezos are created again.
I wonder if your school situation has to do how schools are funded in the United States in particular. It sounds like your school needs more tax money from richer parts of the country then where you grew up.
>> Governments invest a lot in their country, their citizens, education, a healthy market, etc.
> Do they?
They absolutely do. What I've seen of other countries's welfare states is grand.
> I find that most people are successful despite governments, not because of them.
Universal Healthcare. Universal shelter. Public transportation. Environmental protection. Welfare. Universal Education. Massive wealth redistribution. Markets. Most rich countries do these things with the government and are better for it. Huge numbers of Americans are not successful because this country lacks these things, and is actively prevented from having them.
> The plain fact is that if you look at the richest countries in the world, with the best standards of living, they have huge governments that provide their citizens with a host of services without profit, such as healthcare.
You seem to be trying to imply a cause and effect relationship here, without actually saying that. I'm sure we can find examples of rich countries with small governments, and poor countries with large governments.
Also, for rich countries with large governments, which came first? Did they become rich, then grow large governments, or did they get a large government, and then become rich? I would guess that the former is more typical than the latter.
>>People taking in $200k are not in any sense "very, very wealthy", except from a third-world viewpoint.
Mate, I don't know what to say. You live in a bubble made out of solid stone granite. Literally anywhere else outside of US that kind of salary makes you "very very wealthy". Within top 1% definitely. So I don't know if you think anything outside of US is third world? Or what?
>>(In countries with regular health care and education, life costs less, so this about the US.)
>those dozen or so countries even further down the list than the US do sorta seem like nice places to live
Precisely. I'm not sure topping the economic freedom charts is such a desirable goal for the average citizen.
Here in Hong Kong (#1 on the list) for example, I have the freedom to legally discriminate against employees based on age, appearance, religious beliefs and sexual orientation. I have the freedom to engage in anti-competitive mergers and monopolize the market. I have the freedom to pay peanuts, demand unpaid overtime, require a 6-day workweek, give one-week leave per year and not pay you for breaks. Freedom to run a toxic bus fleet and burn bunker fuel in my ship while anchored 24/7 1-mile from the center of town.
One can argue cause and effect, but I don't think it's coincidence that Hong Kong has the highest income inequality in the developed world[1] and one of the unhappiest populations[2].
> The US for example is a highly regulated welfare state with upper-mid tier taxation among nations.
IIRC the US is a freewheeling capitalist state among developed, non-tiny countries. I mean, there's still substantial social welfare, but it's significantly smaller than most of our compatriots.
Have you ever considered that it would contribute to why it is the richest country in the world?
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