> The fraction of people in EU countries who just want to exist on social welfare and have no aspirations is miniscule.
You insinuate that I was talking about people living of welfare which is absolutely not within the "subsistence" definition. That would be more akin to a rent-seeker.
Also, I did not make any political statement. I merely setup a taxonomy: That of subsistence people vs. aspirational people and proposed that EU is better suited for subsistence people while the US is better suited for aspiration people.
That is not at all controversial.
Aspiration seeking and the desire for a strong social system are not mutually exclusive. Whether somebody cares about there being a social safety net for themselves and everybody around them does not indicate how aspirational they themselves are but correlates positively with empathy and negatively with egocentrism.
> That is not at all controversial.
It's a false dichotomy and as a way to cast the comparison it is quite obviously controversial.
Please especially don't cross into name-calling or personal attacks.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Please especially don't cross into name-calling or personal attacks.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
The fraction of people in EU countries who just want to exist on social welfare and have no aspirations is miniscule. That's just propaganda and a narrative spun by the rich to avoid paying taxes as much as possible. Not backed by any data.