by phil21 | 2026-02-14 21:28:34+00:00
> I read about the fear and complaints of high taxes to pay for the lazy, but the actual tax load on countries with strong socialist policies is not really all that much higher than in the U.S.

Many of these countries are going through the start of a lot of social upheaval in part due to these tax loads paying for social benefits that are simply not sustainable from a demographic perspective. There is an undercurrent of resentment for those who work non-enjoyable jobs and look at others who have it easier than them. This is from the blue collar/menial labor camp vs. the white collar/laptop classes who imo are totally and entirely out of touch with reality at this point.

> Those super-rich have somehow convinced everyone that the current balance is best.

While there is a little bit of truth to this, I don't really believe this is truly the case. Folks compare themselves to those around them, and socially speaking those you are in contact with are what generally matters from a societal standpoint. It's sort of like shoplifting. Sure, it's not "worth it" for any single retail clerk to take the personal risk to tackle a shoplifter vs. just watch it happen. But it's corrosive to society as a whole when that retail working a job they likely do not get much enjoyment out of is forced to simply stand by and watch someone just ignore the social contract and get ahead the easy/illegal way. So there is definitely truth to the trope of "don't defend a billion dollar corporation while being paid retail wages" - at scale it's incredibly damaging to society as a whole.

Same goes for living with folks on my block growing up who decided to take the easy route and loaf off the backs of others. In the end it's labor. You could redistribute the top 10% of wealth but you'd still have the same (or even more!) labor that would need to be done. Someone has to do it. Many kids growing up in that environment saw that and decided to not even put the effort in. Those who somehow rose above it almost universally escaped the poverty cycle.

I am not against taxing the rich more - but I'd argue that the systemic reasons why the top 10% or whatever control over 50% of the wealth of the nation need to be corrected before anything else matters. You can't really fix that with post-redstribution in my opinion. It needs to be fixed at the point of value creation so workers can somehow capture more of their labor surplus. Everything I've seen in life does not point towards "redistribute the rewards evenly regardless of personal effort or sacrifice put in" being a sustainable answer. This doesn't even work on a small scale in small companies - if management allows "lazy" workers to exist for very long, it becomes corrosive to the entire culture of the company and you eventually fall apart as those putting the effort in either stop or move on to greener pastures where they are not dragging others along via their efforts. Same goes with society.

> but what I've seen instead is the gains from all of this tech we've created in the past 200 years primarily going to a small class of people, and that just makes me sad.

This we can certainly agree on. Although I'll point out that the average HN poster is in this class of people.