You completely misrepresent me in your comments and you have really bad attitude.
> The fraction of people in EU countries who just want to exist on social welfare and have no aspirations is miniscule.
You insinuate that I was talking about people living of welfare which is absolutely not within the "subsistence" definition. That would be more akin to a rent-seeker.
Also, I did not make any political statement. I merely setup a taxonomy: That of subsistence people vs. aspirational people and proposed that EU is better suited for subsistence people while the US is better suited for aspiration people.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Please especially don't cross into name-calling or personal attacks.
Either you are naive or disingenious. "Great for subsistence seekers" is a dog whistle for a neoliberal political agenda.
Aspiration seeking and the desire for a strong social system are not mutually exclusive. Whether somebody cares about there being a social safety net for themselves and everybody around them does not indicate how aspirational they themselves are but correlates positively with empathy and negatively with egocentrism.
> That is not at all controversial.
It's a false dichotomy and as a way to cast the comparison it is quite obviously controversial.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Please especially don't cross into name-calling or personal attacks.