> You really should stop and think what you get from the state before you criticise what the state takes from you.

And when you're done doing so, and decide that it's not a good deal for the money, then you're told to do it again, and again, until you get the "right" answer the person patronizingly telling you to do so expects.

It's reasonable to have a discussion about the most reasonable, efficient, and appropriate way to fund certain things, as well as whether they should be funded at all, and whether funding them should be mandatory. Such discussions should not be derailed by people simply saying "think about what you get" as though the people participating in them haven't already thought about that just because they come to different conclusions.

History shows us that privatization always ends up being more expensive for the average person, while still providing lower-quality service than the old public system.

Example please? By that line of thinking the Soviet Union must have had the best and cheapest service and products. Also Venezuela should be a total Dream right now without empty stores, starving children, no murder rampage.

I did not in any way imply that a strict top-controlled planned economy system like in the USSR was better. I also did not imply that the current state of chaos in Venezuela is preferable (and that happened due to a bone-headed reliance on a single big export product, which completely collapsed when global oil prices crashed).

I'll amend my statement to "privatization of a functional public system, ostensibly to provide better/cheaper service".

Examples from my own backyard include the Danish State Railways, Ørsted (previously DONG), TDC (previously TeleDanmark, which was previously KTAS, JTAS and Fynsk Telefon) and others.

Were they perfect? No, there was a lot of waste and mismanagement of resources. But as investors came in and demanded rationalization and austerity measures in the name of Holy Profit, customer service and general quality plummeted.

The current state of ISPs/telcos in the US is another good example of privatization gone bad.

The railroad sucks because its an old outdated businessmodel when it comes to personal transport. Only railroadbusiness that make sense is Heave industries and inner city subways. Everything else ist just romantazied waste full bs. So of course these kind if business can only be sustained by wasteful public spending.

What are you even on about? Rail transport is one of the absolute cheapest forms of transport per passenger mile and capacity per hour.

God your socialist are aweful, everytime that fails you guys point it to the random single event that made that whole thing fail and act as if that were some unqie exception. “... single bone headed reliance...”

Please stop posting uncivil, unsubstantive comments. We ban accounts that do that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: since we warned you before and you didn't stop, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

Please enlighten us on how the chaos in Venezuela wasn't caused by over-reliance on oil and widespread corruption.

Taxes is traditionally a heated subject.

I think it's unreasonable to express a simple (one-sided) argument within this subject and not expect a one-sided answer from someone.

It is truly a complex subject.

Now, I expect someone to disagree with that statement. :)

One interesting property of the US tax structure is that most of the tangible benefits are mostly funded locally (education for 13 years, police, fire, most roads) which is generally a lower tax rate than the federal taxes (which don't as clearly connect to the services that we all need): especially if you don't consider the >50% of federal money spent on the military to be a good use the federal/state/local divide makes it very visible that the taxes you pay are mostly not going to the services that we need.

That's a little misleading, as a ton of federal dollars come back to the state governments. It seems inefficient (and it is), but it's a way of applying political pressure, and of redistributing money from states with stronger economies to those with weaker economies.

I don't think it is that misleading, the bulk of federal tax dollars are spent at the federal level. More of my net tax dollars go to tanks than schools or roads right?

Healthcare isn’t free in Germany. It’s extortionately expensive.

It is (close to) free if you already pay the contributions we are discussing about here. Note how the post said you get free healthcare if you paid your contributions.

The contributions are not extortionately expensive. It may seem that way if you are healthy, high-earner, and young. But looking at the actual cost of providing healthcare it's pretty competitively priced. Over the lifetime of a person private health insurance is not that much cheaper. You can view the difference as a tax supporting the poor and chronically ill if you like.

> It may seem that way if you are healthy, high-earner, and young.

Interesting tidbit that many people tend to forget about: Health care payments are capped. The maximum monthly income that gets counted is 4425 EUR/month of which about 14% get paid in total. So if you earn 10k a month you effectively pay a lower rate. The effective health care rate drops for high-earners.

It costs about half what the US pays per capita.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...