[nightcracker]

America (as a whole) needs to shed its sense of superiority and its traditionalism.

For the record: I'm Dutch. I have free healthcare, good infrastructure, fast and cheap internet, sensible employment law, no police abuse, etc. All for ~40% tax (http://www.expatax.nl/tax-rates-2016.php).

Why? Because our government actually works. Why? I don't really know. It's a compound of hundreds of little effects.

The solution isn't 'less government', it's 'a working government'. Every time I learn something new about how the U.S. government is structured I shake my head a little. First-past-the-post voting of a single president that holds way too much power. A congress with life time based assignment that interpret a 200 year old document to their wishes to structure law. Case based law with uninformed juries, where the selection of the jury is optimized for maximum disinformation. It goes on.

On top of that there are financial taboos with origins that as a 199x er I do not understand: 'socialism', 'communism', 'higher taxes'. These ideologies (just like a free market) do not work on their own. Both ideologies have good ideas, and you need to take the best of both to make it work. But the American public is brainwashed.

I'm rambling a bit. There is no easy solution from what I can see. The U.S. government is structurally flawed and only massive changes can fix that. On top of that the public is misinformed and does not have its own best interests in mind.

[dmarusic16]

One reason Europeans tend to misunderstand America is that they come from comparatively more homogeneous and therefore higher trust societies. America is overall better at integrating immigrants, but a solidarity deficit remains. Result: we don't get the nice socialized benefits. It's not the government as much as the polity.

[josho]

Europe is anything but homogeneous. There are places in Germany, France, etc that have been under rule by numerous nations. My grandparents considered themselves German and spoke German despite living in Russia.

Regardless I've been screwed over by plenty of folks that look just like me, so what you say comes across as an excuse for the state of affairs rather than owning the issues and seeking to improve it.

[vacri]

The agony of WWII and its collaborators is still within living memory, as is life under the Soviet bloc with its secret police and disappearing people, likewise wars of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. There are also several large secessionist movements where people actually want to secede, unlike in the US, where that kind of talk is rhetorical[1]. I don't think that kind of blanket statement of 'higher trust societies' can be made; the situation is a lot more nuanced.

For that matter, I think that Americans had a lot more trust in their government before the last couple of decades.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_separatist_move...

[beat]

Speaking as an American, I'm terrified of the "massive changes" that would be required to "fix" (replace, really) the Constitution. It could mean civil war or the disintegration of the nation into a bunch of probably-warring nation-states.

Moreover, I'm not convinced our current problems are purely local. Trump followed on the heels of Brexit, and right-wing nationalist/populist movements are on the rise across Europe. The world is going through some weird changes right now, an angry reaction to future shock, and recent US politics are just a symptom.

[usrusr]

I call it "the state rewrite problem", which consists of two assumptions: one, that the quality of any constitutional framework degrades over time as political actors adapt to it over generations (except maybe if the constitutional framework was particularly bad from the start) and two, that any rewrite/reboot intended to counteract that degradation would be even worse than that if the established set of political actors is involved. This traditionally is only ever avoided in the aftermath of some particularly violent crisis. Now the art would be to avoid that crisis.

Drafting random collaborators for a rewrite could be one approach, but they would still be prone to getting influenced by the establishment. Maybe dozens of randomized committees working in parallel, with all but one draft discarded at random, to make sure that writing happens out of the spotlight, and with little incentive for self-serving elements?

[seanmcdirmid]

The Dutch don't tax overseas income or profits, though, do they? Only America and Etriea do that as far as I can tell.

[nightcracker]

If you mean for citizens living abroad, then you are correct (although I do not know about Etriea).

If you mean for companies... I don't exactly know. But I do know that we aren't exactly clean in the global playing field for tax havens, and I wish we would change that.

[charlesdm]

Small economies often tend to be leechers off of the global system. This applies to the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, various tropical islands, etc.

The Netherlands is one of the countries significantly facilitating tax avoidance, and this is (obviously) by design. Hundreds of billions in royalty payments flow through the country every year to tax havens.

[wcummings]

>Every time I learn something new about how the U.S. government is structured I shake my head a little. First-past-the-post voting of a single president that holds way too much power. A congress with life time based assignment that interpret a 200 year old document to their wishes to structure law. Case based law with uninformed juries, where the selection of the jury is optimized for maximum disinformation. It goes on.

There are problems with American government, but these are really not them. The only thing here that might hold water is the President having too much authority, and that's been a relatively recent trend.

[andrewflnr]

I dunno. As an American, the case-based law thing really pisses me off because it means you can't know what law applies to you in a given situation without knowing the entire history of legal cases that touch that area. And I'd prefer something more like preference voting for the president. I'm obviously not holding my breath on any of these points.

[blahi]

You live in a country with population about the size of LA metro and more homogenous than it.

[pbz]

That's just an excuse. Germany and UK have much higher populations and manage to achieve similar results. The "more homogeneous" argument is weird to me. Most immigrants that I've dealt with are more inline with the European mentality (regardless of their country of origin) than US natives. Are you saying the problem is with the locals?

[josho]

I'm surprised to hear that argument here. As technologists we typically see scale as a positive.

So spreading a social safety net across a large and diverse population strikes me as utterly obvious.

How do you see diversity and scale as being a negative?

[usrusr]

A valid question and one that is getting much less attention than it deserves (probably because some of the answers are rather uncomfortable).

Locally, welfare can be egoistically motivated. Just about everybody would be willing to pay serious taxes to raise that one beggar off his doorstep - if only to keep him out of sight. We like to think of that as altruism, but it hardly is. Now ask those same people to pay serious taxes for the benefit of poor people thousands of miles away and you get a completely different picture.

Enter mobility: If you raise "your" beggar, someone else might just hope that theirs will go to a place where they will be raised (your doorstep). Clearly, egoism won't work as a motivator anymore because you don't want to be the new charity central. Therefore, welfare has to happen on the same organizational level as freedom of movement and that's where the relative unwillingness to help those thousands of miles away comes in again. Even basic income suggestions quickly lose their pie in the sky utopia feel when it comes to the question of access/citizenship/migration.

The US was literally built on mobility as a substitute of welfare, but once the original anti-welfare "stay poor or go west" was exhausted, the inherent antagonism between mobility and welfare continued to stay obscured behind other ideological concepts, "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" and all that. The EU is learning the hard way, but it is impossible to separate valid concerns and solution-finding from all the noise of and about stupid racism.

[andrewflnr]

As technologists, we also know that getting popular is one of the worst things that can happen to a community. Scaling community and relationships is super hard.

[blahi]

Different people don't get along very well. Something "technologists" prefer to pretend isn't so.