It differs depending on where in Europe you live of course, my perspective is from the Nordics. I see it, instead of "they take x % of my pay", as that we collectively decided to fund these healthcare, paid vacation, maternity and paternity leave, education, child care, social security so that everyone has a fair chance and are taken care of.

I suspect this kind of mentality only works in a fairly homogeneous society, where everyone enjoys the collective benefits fairly uniformly.

Yeah, I'm from western EU and share that same idea. I don't mind paying the taxes because they are put to good (imo) use.

Which is interesting - my wife has a quite different background (North America) and sees the socialism as a waste of money, as it mostly helps the poor and disadvantages the 'less poor'.

Personally, my view is that right now my family has it well, but it might not be like that forever and _maybe_ the system will repay itself and maybe it won't, but I'm happy knowing that it's there just in case.

(On a related note, she also thinks it's silly that over here we have a lot of insurances)

I'm a software engineer working in Sweden, a country I chose because of its strong welfare society among other things. With a good salary, I'm paying more tax than the majority of Swedes, my marginal tax rate is over 50%, and in the election last weekend I voted to increase one of the taxes in favour of healthcare spending. My point is that paying a lot in tax doesn't necessarily make you less happy, let alone depressed. The way I view it, I'm contributing to a system that ensures affordable education/healthcare for everyone, and extra social assistance for those in need, things I believe really help the society as a whole.

you're not contributing to that system freely though - the mechanism of the state takes away your agency to freely help others in this way. You can rationalise it that you're contributing to the welfare of others, but the reality is that your money is being taken from you and put into a bucket marked "welfare" that will go to welfare but also be inefficiently wasted, spent in ways you don't agree with, and so on. At least under private charity you can engage in effective altruism (or at the very least claim altruism).

I have nothing against private charities but see them only as a complement to state-run programs. The social improvement that comes from people having healthcare/education/etc requires that the vast majority of people have it, not some, and not even a simple majority.

I view it somewhat similarly to herd immunity through vaccination. When you have a 95% vaccinated population, diseases can be eliminated. When you have a 50% vaccinated population, it's of course good for those 50%, but doesn't provide the same global benefits.

Is some of the welfare money wasted due to inefficiency? Yes, of course. But for a task of this scale, which has to provide benefits to everyone in the country, I only trust the state with it, and not a private entity.

Can I opt out of the system? No, but freedom isn't a single variable you can straightforwardly optimize for. In this case, I believe the infringement on individual freedom through taxation results in considerably higher total freedom when considering all individuals in the society.

see, I don't think the state is very good at dealing with issues like this because from such a high viewpoint, the state can either apply a one-size-fits-all policy, or provide a localised but drastically oversimplified strategy for specific regions that will require more overhead for managing the many regional subdivisions. Providing for social healthcare is a good thing (at least within the context of how our nation states currently operate), but I think it should be devolved down to local authorities with perhaps a state-level overseer to monitor their performance.

I'm of the strong belief that central management at scale is unilaterally inferior to decentralised and devolved decision-making that can more effectively take local variables into account.

> But for a task of this scale, which has to provide benefits to everyone in the country, I only trust the state with it, and not a private entity.

Trusting the nation state and trusting a private (presumably either commercial or charitable) entity are not the only two options. The charity and taxation options can both occur at a local authority, or a community, level.

Too much centralization is definitely bad (for an extreme example see the Soviet economy that was centralized to a ridiculous extent). But government doesn't have to mean centralized, to take the Swedish system once again, the healthcare is handled at a regional level, within the national legal framework. This does take local variables into account, which is important - different parts of Sweden can actually have significant differences in the medical situation.

It's still state-run in the important sense that the legal mandate comes from the state. This is a major advantage over private initiatives in my opinion. To take a simple example, say there's a legal requirement that people who cannot use their legs are entitled to receive a wheelchair. When that's the law, it means the government (regional, local, whatever applies) has to make it happen, even when it's inconvenient or expensive. When it's a charity or a private initiative, it might not have enough money/incentive/commercial interest/insert reason here to cover everyone.

Admittedly my views on centralized vs. regional governance aren't sophisticated due to my background. I live in a country of 10 million, which isn't too big globally, and I moved here from a very centralized country of 2 million where devolved decision making only makes sense in truly local issues.

that seems reasonable to me. To recontextualise it in software terms, the requirement comes from the state but the solution comes from the local level. As long as the requirement isn't overly prescriptive (e.g. "people who can't use their legs are entitled to a wheelchair" vs "local authorities must invest 50M SKR in departments X, Y and Z") that's a good solution. My aversion to the idea of a central state (though I don't have a proposed solution to this) is that because there is no antagonist to push back on poorly thought out requirements, states trend towards centralised prescriptive solutionising which I believe to be the root cause of the problem with centralisation. A classic example was the Soviets as you mentioned earlier, with their economic planning committee (Gosplan) explicitly telling factories how much steel to produce and who to send it to. It's one of those problems that pops up in different areas like software development and management practices too.

Markets are good at preventing this because they separate the requirements (the customers) from the solution (the producers) and provide a Darwinian process to optimise for the best performers, but markets have their own problems and inefficiencies that make them a poor fit (like markets' tendency to ignore customers with unique or rare requirements, meaning people with rare diseases or multiple problems get rejected or priced out by medical markets). There are market-oriented solutions that libertarians propose, such as evening out costs through medical insurance, but markets will always leave cracks people can fall though (such as those who cannot afford insurance, or immigrants with pre-existing health conditions) and introducing state mandates into the market often fundamentally break the market itself (see: US health insurance market). State legislation leaves cracks too when written badly, so neither is a perfect solution in practice. I don't have a solution to these problems because I think they're rooted in patterns of thinking rather than systemic design, but they're interesting to think about.

Ideally, the "requirements" (laws) that the state creates are kept reasonable by the "producers" (population) through democratic mechanisms. Or, put it more simply, if the government passes stupid laws, the elected officials can be voted out and replaced. This is a check that only exists in a democratic system - in the case of Soviet economic planning, there existed no democratic mechanism to change the system.

I was amazed by the concept of free markets when first learning about it, and it seemed like letting market forces play out should result in an optimal situation for consumers, though now I am more cynical and mostly expect bad consequences like monopolists putting effort into not allowing competition.

So due to the different nature of efficiencies and inefficencies of state and private actors, I currently prefer a system where the government is very involved in key areas of human rights, social welfare and basic needs (so education, healthcare, welfare payments, management of physical/mental disabilities, the justice system), and the private sector is mostly handling technical innovation, consumer goods, manufacturing, most services, etc.

Hopefully we've not yet reached the global optimum of these systems and can see both government and markets evolve positively.

lmao if you think people are taking antidepressants because of a 40% tax rate

Jobs are taxed equally, but the people who earn more also contribute more. There is no shame in that, it allows most Europeans to actually live in a society worth contributing to.

You keep telling yourself that while tons of engineers, doctors, and scientists keeps leaving to the states or Canada.

It's easy being happy about the taxation regime when you do 35 hours a week. It's not uncommon for a doctor to do closer to 60h and up to 70h.

And quality of life isn't even that great. Crumbling infrastructure, long wait for public hospitals, dirty streets etc.

I've lived in France and the US. Until your friends have taken the bus in a major US city (or a suburb thereof) in a non-tourist area they have no idea how good their quality of life is. And I was in Paris where, yes, most side alleys smell awful and most areas with anything resembling nightlife have at least one poor soul passed out on some porch in their own fluids by 1am. Still doesn't compare to the look on the faces of the (mostly black and Hispanic) legions of America's glad-to-be-working class.

The US has in some ways a fascinating culture. People there, especially in the middle class, can be driven and open in ways that are usually outside of the imagination of even middle-class eighteen-year-olds in Europe, well-educated or traveled though they may be. But in America some of them start out having already lost, and they know it, and they truly in their hearts believe it's their fault. And it's heartbreaking.

I paid taxes in the US, you know? And it was the worst. Because I was still paying those 20% or whatever it really was, but I couldn't see where they were going. It could have been the court system I guess. Every other block had some kind of sign with something prohibited and "violators will be prosecuted" written on it. The roads were nice.

I don't know the statistics of how many leave, so you might be right.

I don't "do" 35 hours per week, so I'm not sure where you are going with this.

The last bit is (almost) laughably wrong and tells me you have no idea what you're talking about. Even if that was all true, the US has tent cities of vagrants that keep being kicked to another city to be their problem, people that freeze to death in the streets with literally nowhere to go. Let me wait 6 months or however long it is in your fantasy universe. Anything to prevent contributing to a society that treats people like the worst of the meat industry treats it's cattle.

In the UK, once you reach £100k they tax you at the 40% rate plus begin removing the tax-free allowance. Giving you an effective tax rate of 60% up to about £121k. That's on top of the 20% VAT and 20% corporation tax paid out by the company. And employer's/employee's national insurance. And the VAT on any goods you buy with the earned money and fuel duty if it's petrol.

I'm a contractor so I can choose to stop earning at that point - and I do. If other people are taking the same philosophy I'd imagine they're losing quite a lot of money.

You can't sum the marginal rate to get the 'effective rate'.

The effective rate of income tax in the UK is closer 37%, not 60%, at an income of £121k. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Percentage_IT_and_NI_and_...

Ugh. I meant marginal.

That's the feedback I have been getting constantly from my friends (young couples most of the time) who are now doctors (cardiologist, gynecologist, etc.). It really sucks for them, I do not envy their situation one bit. It's in France btw.