The wild thing is that even if you were to apply Scandinavia's highest tax bracket of 57% to this (which someone in the lowest tax bracket would never pay), you'd still come out above the US national minimum wage, out of which one is also expected to pay for healthcare and budget for unpaid time off.

By my very limited calculations, you would be paying effictively about 33% tax, because of baseline deductions, and beeing in the lowest tax bracket. remember you still have free healthcare, education, paid vacation, paid maternity leave etc.

Don't you have industry-wide agreements, negotiated with unions, on minimum wages in these industries though?

Yes they do, which is why the US made that in impossible in the 30s. Making it so that unions can only form on the basis of company level votes, along with myriad other restrictions, made it so that the labor movement could never have as much power as it does in Europe.

Don't multi-company unions exist, though? The UAW is a pretty famous example.

Unless you're saying that the problem is that the US doesn't make every new auto manufacturer a UAW shop with no opt-out?

In parts of Europe, individual workers choose their unions. You don’t necessarily join a union simply because it’s the one that is exclusive to the company. Instead of fighting myriad individual battles to unionize workplaces, workers join independent unions, the unions collaborate to bargain in a sector, and set things like wage floors and working conditions across the industry.

The US specifically did not want this to happen, which is why it made unionization only valid on the basis of the adversarial, shop-vote model, but grandfathering in some unions that already functioned along similar, sectoral lines, such as the Hollywood unions.

yes unions are mostly big and exists across companies. However you are also free to join any union you like or none at all. For jobs a restaurants, factories etc. salary is mostly the product of Employer - Union negotiation. As a software dev, you negotiate yourself (unless you work a gov job).

Yeah and that has nothing to do with the monopoly that the gp comment is talking about.

Wouldn't it be great if you let in a million people from countries where people make lot less than $20. It would be fastest way to raise standard for those people

Yeah, and pressure their system and degrade their standards, they've build over years themselves (in 1900 Sweden was not much different than a third world country today).

Why do those other people get some automatic raise?

> Why do those other people get some automatic raise?

Because other people are constantly told how great Europe/Scandinavia is. So these 'other people' just want to have good life by moving there.

This is understandable (wanting it). Getting it is another thing. I want some of Bezos' money too, but my chances are slim :-)

Sweden and Germany did just that.

Wealth availability and spreading is a multidimensional problem. More wealth can be made available to the average person (median) in a variety of manners. Having more wealth producing centers like intact factories not destroyed by world war 2 bombing is one way to give a locality more average wealth and higher minimum wages. This increases the mean and total wealth. Another manner of increasing the median wealth is through managing income distribution and inequality. Socialist policies, labor unions, etc etc, will raise the median amount of wealth even if the mean stays the same.

Scandinavia isn't a country

Perhaps they mean Denmark+Norway+Sweden collectively?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavia#Use_of_Nordic_coun...

I kinda agree with GP: when someone isn't specific about where they're from, then nobody can really respond to them. It's like when people say they're from Europe or how great things are from them there. Even if you wanted to look up how your argument applies to their country or how their country addresses your point, you cannot.

It works when where they are from is used as a counter-example. I may be jaded, but I often find people from the US say, "this would be impossible".

Then it's often interesting to point to various places in the world where in fact, the thing is possible.

We are all aware of that. Doesn't change that their policies are extremely similar by all accounts.

The point is that I can't determine where his country's wealth comes from if he doesn't state his country. Also I'm skeptical f this person actually even being from the region. For example, if he is from Norway most of his wealth is derived from oil.

Im from Denmark, none of the money is derived from oil.

Denmark is selfsufficient in oil production. It helps ... but so is the US.

Thanks to fracking, the US is actually a marginal net exporter of oil, depending on the average price of oil (traditional wells can squeeze out frackers with their lower production cost)

As you said, oil helps, but it’s not determinative. Norway is interesting in that they’ve used their oil money very wisely, but it seems pretty clear that other policies are necessary in order to ensure that economic prosperity is well distributed.