| I appreciate you articulating your views wholly. I also live in a high trust society (Finland). I would categorize your position as the textbook left-leaning bias (Government good, corporation bad), and fundamentally incorrect. But NOT because I'm on the opposite side. I believe the only rational position to take is the center (ie. "things are complicated" and "incentives rule all"). There are huge holes in your logic: 1) The default state of humanity is not utopian prosperity. The default state is starving naked in the dirt. So where does the tax money the collective uses to "take care of each other" come from? Why are only the rich countries providing good benefits...and how did they get rich in the first place? 2) If one is being honest in their analysis, enterprises competing to create surplus value is the only reason your government is able to get the tax revenue to provide you with anything. Otherwise you're just redistributing dirt among naked people. 3) You've ignored the existence of incentives. Your view rests on the fallacy humans in government are a different species than the humans in private companies and will act more selflessly. This is provably false. 99.99% of government workers have zero exposure to the accountability of elections, have no competitive pressures, no fear of losing their job, and thus do not make things better or innovate. People in private companies on the other hand have all those incentives. 4) Historically, whenever we give a society over wholly to government, it has resulted in disaster and human tragedy on a mass scale every single time. If government is fundamentally good, why aren't wholly government-driven societies better? How come when China privatized and reduced its percentage of government driven economy from 90% to 30% (where they sit today), it made everyone more prosperous by a factor of 100x? 5) Current trendlines all indicate the "High trust European socialism" model is in slow collapse across Europe. Like the USSR (you could call it USSR-light given EU average has now reached 55% government driven economy), they stopped innovating and are losing the private industry surplus to tax and redistribute. Germany, UK, France, Finland (my country) etc. are all in deep shit right now. 6) Cooperatives are legal in basically all developed countries. If the collectivist model drove more value for people, how come cooperatives don't dominate all sectors of the economy? |