Feel free to move to Canada if you want half the wages, twice as expensive housing, and a multi-year wait to get a family doctor. There is a reason why so many Canadians end up working in the US on TN or H1 visas.

Canada heavily subsidizes the healthcare and post secondary education of all those people who then move to the US, often those people move back in retirement for the healthcare.

That no doubt has a detrimental effect on the Canadian economy as Canada pours resources into people and America reaps the benefits of that while Canada suffers.

The problem is that Canada's healthcare system is a command economy. The government decides how many med school spots there are, how many residency places, and how many procedures will be funded each year. In order to keep costs down this results in rationing. You can't even pay out of pocket - it is against the law for Canadians to purchase private care in Canada. The end result is that people with means end up going to the US, and everyone else waits 6-12 months for medically necessary hip or knee replacements. Even critical medical imaging is backed up weeks. I know someone who waited multiple weeks for urgent cancer screening. The same scans are available in the US in 24-48 hours, for a few hundred bucks.

While some of the issues that Canada faces are definitely self inflicted as you describe, the ultimate source of all of Canada's problems are that it is an American vassal state. This relationship results in Canada subsidizing the development of many talented individuals who then make the totally rational self-interested decision to move to the United States where there is significantly more economic opportunity for them. Not only is this a massive drain on Canada's resources and it prevents Canada seeing a return on the investment that it makes in people who are often their brightest and best.

For many Canadians visiting America is a trivial drive across the border, in fact some Canadians make this trip weekly for access to cheaper consumer goods. Hell, I just looked it up and I can get a round trip ticket to Las Vegas for $160 CAD and I'm no where near the border. Hell, I remember a boss telling me that he used to get round-trip tickets to Vegas for $60 and him and his buddies would go there on long weekends. Canadians can travel visa-free and stay in the US for 6 months.

Many younger Canadians who are interested in immigrating may already have grandparents who spend the winter in places like Arizona or Florida[0] so they can draw on the experiences and resources that their grandparents have to make the transition easier.

Additionally most Canadians are native speakers or near native speakers of English usually with accents that are identical or easily masked to blend in with Americans. Canadians who have attended post-secondary have attended institutions that are quite similar to American ones and their accreditation is easily transferable.

I'm not too sure on the specifics but I know that it's easier for Canadians with certain post-secondary education or trade tickets to get work visas in the United States under NAFTA/USMCA.

Culturally speaking the sports are very similar, there are MLB, NHL, and NBA teams in Canada, music is the same, fashion is the same, the food is the same. It's less relevant in the age of the internet but when I was growing up I could watch many local TV stations from the US and watch the nightly news in obscure places like Spokane.

All of this is due to the cultural assimilation and defacto integration of Canada into the United States.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-snowbirds-u-s-winter...

Well except for Quebec, the Indigenous tribes, and the monarchists/loyalists, who definitely are more doubtful and will likely never allow a full integration.

The media environment is also still substantially different, previously even more.

- The US government also effectively decides the number of US residency places by how much they will fund Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

- Many places in the US won't see you if you are on Medicare.

- It is quite common to need to wait 6-12 months to see specialists in the US too.

This is Denmark's model and it works very well. Denmark is considered the easiest to do business in Europe, and #4 globally (https://www.copcap.com/news/denmark-is-the-easiest-place-for....).

Banks seems exempt from this. I’m not financially savvy enough to know if bailing out banks is good or bad.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/governmen...

But for core commercial actives it seems like a fair observation.

I agree that utilities are a special case. The main point is that you don't want them to fail at all, ever. If they do fail, well, there aren't any good ways for that to happen.

Banks are squarely on the infrastructure side. They're a foundation that people rely on to do the really interesting stuff, and as such should be 1) low risk, and therefore 2) not profit-maximizing.

I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but this is my conclusion after spending 25 years growing up, living, working and building startups here.

The US is also willing to neglect and disenfranchise significant portions of the population and let them live in poverty, homelessness and ghettos. When you walk around SF, LA or New York it's astounding that you have super rich people live next to destitute people but the rich are perfectly fine with this as long as they can have their nice houses and neighborhoods. Or that there are significant part of the population who can't get meaningful healthcare.

Despite what you read online, the amount of Americans who see unsheltered homeless on a daily basis is very low.

- The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) today released its 2022 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) Part 1 to Congress. The report found 582,462 people were experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2022 (https://www.hud.gov/press/press_releases_media_advisories/HU...)

- Largest college football stadium: Michigan Stadium (Ann Arbor, Mich.) 107,601 (https://www.ncaa.com/news/football/article/2018-07-30/25-big...)

- The population of Baltimore, MD is 576,498 as of the last census, so would be a closer point of comparison.

    Something like 80% of Americans live in an urban setting

The key TL;DR determination factor (there are others, read for yourself) is this:

    In order for a block to qualify as urban, it must have a den-
    sity of 1,000 people per square mile (ppsm).

I don't think I've ever seen a homeless person outside a major city... you just don't see it in suburbs or rural areas.

Again, major problem, it's just that most Americans don't see it on a regular basis... which perhaps is part of the root of the problem. Makes it easy to ignore.

I'm most familiar with Philadelphia where you'll either see multiple homeless people every day... or rarely. Depends on where you live and work. Every other city I've been to in my life seems similar.

Anyway, I don't want to get too far in the weeds with my nitpickery. I don't even remember what we were originally talking about!

Instead of being in the middle of the city, there are entire tent metropolises hidden in the woods in Berlin.

The US is below most of Europe per capita in homelessness.

Reading the , the stat on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_... for the US is ~500k, while the page linked in the table, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_S..., starts with "In the United States, the number of homeless people varies from different federal government accounts. In 2014, approximately 1.5 million sheltered homeless people were counted." so the higher ~1.5M would seem to correspond to the definition for number reported in the table from France.

It says it operates on that principle, but the stranglehold that establishment industry has on the country says otherwise.

Consolidation of capital and political power is exactly what we're seeing in banks, fossil fuels, mega-agri-firms, retailers, insurers, and healthcare providers. All of it results in a nightmare that is 'not working' for the public, but works very well for the people at the top.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...

All of the empirical evidences indicates this slows economic development. Individuals being responsible for their own safety nets is more efficient, and creates better incentives, than large government bureaucracies socializing the cost of safety nets.

This capital is managed by the individuals who will derive the entire benefit from it, so they are incentivized to manage it effectively, and not hand it over to inefficient union-run bureaucracies, which give their employees early retirement at 55 with massive pensions:

https://www.hoover.org/research/california-state-government-...

They are also incentivized not to be lazy and draw upon it, as doing so hurts their own interests, by depleting their own savings.

When people pay for their own expenses, their incentives are aligned with the goal of national economic efficiency.

Government, meanwhile, ultimately becomes a rent extraction mechanism, no matter what its ostensible purpose is:

https://twitter.com/SpencerKSchiff/status/125276128577685913...

When you're falling out of a plane, it doesn't matter how strong your incentive to fly is. You aren't going to grow wings by incentive alone.

It's not a perfect system with no one falling through the cracks, but it is a system more resilient to systemic collapse as seen in the USSR when it went bankrupt, and one that produces greater economic/social development overall.

The zero-risk bias means people prefer to bring one type of risk to zero, even if it means increasing overall risk. I believe that is what's at work with government-provisioned social safety nets. Economic growth reduces a host of risks. But a social safety brings one type of risk - that is actually quite insignificant relative to the rest - to zero. So people are willing to trade economic growth for unconditional social safety nets.

Microsoft has entered the chat.