Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ed312 6 days ago
... and "Chat Control" and Digital ID and forcing digital currency and persistent digital surveillance and conceding your national sovereignty to a council that can pass binding laws without your consent and ....

Let's not pretend either system is perfect, or that the _underlying principles_ that both systems hold are the absolute correct way to organize a society.

Americans have be primed with _decades_ of rugged individualism and the idea that collective action is inherently weaker/flawed (just don't think about Social Security). It might have been reasonably true 100 years ago that everyone could pay for their own health care, but we're now in a world where the average person is perpetually on medications that are expensive to produce, and will demand increasingly expensive medical interventions throughout their life (heart health, cancer care, etc.). Combine that with AI probably wiping out a ton of industries/jobs - something has to change. I'm not going to pretend to have a solution, but I think it is disingenuous to suggest any EU nation has it figured out either and is obviously correct.

1 comments

While Americans have been primed, it's still relatively new. If any of the new deal proposals were proposed today, everyone would lose their mind.

The dirty secret: half of what makes living in America tolerable comes from new deal policies. Everyone knows it, nobody will say it.

A similar thing goes for the ACA. Republicans hate it, but at the end of the day Americans don't want to be dropped from their insurance plans for having cancer or some genetic defect. Literally nobody wants that, only out-of-touch political talking heads want that.

That's not to say any of these policies are perfect, they all have flaws. But if you ask the American people what they want but carefully never name policy names, it becomes obvious everyone is on the same page.