You have to be really careful about assuming that you will actually end up better off as a result of that difference.

Econometric studies suggest that government policy differences in US states account for 64-73% of the cost of the living (The Importance of the Cost of Living and Policies to Address It, Schlomach, 2017).

This means you could be making 50% more money in one state, but actually be worse off then you would be in another state.

Equally high or higher differentials in cost-of-living can often be found between urban and rural areas within a single state.

Through most of recorded human history, the cities have been places of opportunity, and there have been large migrations into the cities. The cost of living was higher, but the pay was also higher, so things cancelled out. However, in recent times (but well before the current epidemic) - particularly in the big cities and especially in California - economic studies show that this historic migration pattern has been changing. The cost of living has gotten so high in many urban areas that the jobs no longer keep up, and people have actually been leaving many of the big urban areas.

At lot of this has to do with something economists call 'rent-seeking': see The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles [2019] for many references, including references that document the migration change.

Rent seeking is where wealthy special interest groups use government to obtain benefits for themselves at the expense of society (e.g. tax breaks for the wealthy, or abuse of tort/patent/copyright law to the benefit of the lawers).

This happens a lot in places like California, which is why ordinary people often end up with a much larger cost of living. This in turn is why California - with the #1 largest population in the country - ranks #45 in percentage of retirees. It's a beautiful state with fantastic weather, but the problems with government and with legal ethics have caused such an enormous increase in cost of living that most retirees can't afford to stay there.

There was an old idea that with improved technology the economic pie would grow, and everybody would benefit. Unfortunately, in practice this hasn't worked out that well. With rent-seeking, with ethics problems in law, with corruption in government, and so forth the economic pie can still grow (a lot more slowly than it otherwise would, but it still grows), but special interest groups often end up taking so much more than their fair share that everybody else ends up with an even smaller share of the pie than they had before.

This seems to be the case in many places in the USA, and that's why people were leaving the cities even before covid destroyed much of the economy.

So in general today it's not necessarily a safe assumption that you're better off in a big city. You have to carefully consider your options and your circumstances.

Because the US Constitution says so. That's what a 'limited time' refers to. Authors are granted limited protection for a limited time, in return for the benefits their work provides to society. It's called a 'social contract'.

If you do trail maintenance on a public park, you wouldn't expect to suddenly own that park, would you? Your labor doesn't magically take over the public interest.

You can make a copy of my house, spending your own money to make the copy, and building it on your own property, and take anything in the copy. You can make a copy of my bank account, using your own money, and take that money back. You can make a copy of my car, and borrow the copy from yourself for the weekend from yourself whenever you want to.

Copyright isn't about ownership of real things, it's about ownership of the right to copy - and the current US copyright system is clearly in violation of numerous legal rights, of which the most important is the 9th Amendment right to ethical practice of law. The Constitution allows for the implementation of a copyright system. It does not, however, allow for the implementation of an illegal copyright system in violation of the Bill of Rights.

That makes the entire US Copyright system an illegal body of law until the legal ethics problems are corrected. As such, under US federal law, the lawyers profiting from enforcing it, and the government officials participating in enforcing it, are collectively criminals ("infringement of fundamental rights, under the colour of law").

An ethical legal profession would never have allowed things to get this bad - but the USA doesn't have an ethical legal profession. A few ethical lawyers, sure, but certainly nothing near a majority. The rich sociopaths running a number of corporations - and super wealthy majority stockholders - are happy to profit off this situation.

Copyright laws in other developed nations have similar problems. Corruption and legal ethics problems are not unique to the USA.

Economic studies published in peer reviewed journals have demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt that the primary economic function of copyright as currently implemented is concentration of wealth (see The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality, Lindsey and Teles, 2019, for references). That's not in accord with the social contract.

Did you know that about 20% of Adam Smith's writing emphasized the need for government regulation, and that such regulation was a fundamental necessity for a market to be free. A free market is NOT a market without regulation, free refers to the ability of people to enter or leave without hindrance or obstacle from guilds or the church or government granted monopolies or cliques within the market.

He was not at all a naive fool - there were all kinds of horrible church and guild regulations that throttled markets in his day and he was opposed to those, but he certainly was not opposed to sensible regulation by government.

For that matter, Smith himself worked for many years for the government, basically doing enforcement of regulation as one of the heads of the government department concerned with customs in Scotland (see Adam Smith in the Customhouse by Shughart and Tollison).

Claims that Adam Smith believed in the absence of regulation are nothing more than a fantasy people have created, either through ignorance or as a deliberate form of propaganda (and both left wing and right are guilty there).

This issue has nothing to do with free markets.

Anything involving copyright and patent does not involve a free market, because both of these - at least as they currently implemented - are government granted monopolies, not all that different from the East India Company's monopoly on the spice trade back in the day. There are also a lot of restrictions on the movie business (and hence the market) from the modern equivalent of guilds. Hence, the movie industry - and any downstream industry based on it's products, including the theater industry - is not operating in a free market.

If anybody could build a theater and show the latest Hollywood movies, at the cost of some percentage of their gross take, then we might have a free market for the theaters. But markets based on government granted monopoly in the form of copyright and copyright related contracts are definitely not free.

Incidentally, modern economic studies show that the primary economic effect of both patent and copyright law (as currently implemented) is not increased innovation or artistic output, it's increased concentration of wealth, and diversion of wealth to special interest groups such as the legal profession. See The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality, by Lindsey and Teles, for many references to studies in peer reviewed journals.

You missed some critical wording in the original post. OP didn't say police shooting was rampant, he or she said police crimes were rampant.

That definitely true, because the USA has huge numbers of illegal laws - and despite the lesson of Nuremberg, the police are often involved in enforcing these illegal laws.

For example, there are massive problems with legal ethics in the legal system. As the right to ethical practice of law can be asserted under the 9th and 10th Amendments, with even the appearance of conflict of interest being a violation of fundamental rights when any reasonable alternative exists, and as the Bill of Rights is the highest law in the land, this means the USA has large numbers of illegal laws, illegal executive orders, and illegal judicial precedents.

Legal professionals are writing illegal laws that violate fundamental rights while working as legislative staff members, they're voting in favor of them or just keeping them on the books (when they should be removing them) as legislators, they're signing them into effect as government executives, they're using illegal laws on behalf of their clients (civil lawyers) or they're prosecuting people under illegal laws (district attorneys), and they are upholding illegal laws and creating illegal precedents to further support the illegal laws (judges).

These problems have been documented in many posts on this forum, with respect to many different topics. These problems exist at all levels of government - federal, state, and local. It seems that every major area of US law now has serious legal ethics problems.

The police are often backing up these illegal policies, which means illegal government policies are associated with the threat of violence - and sometimes the reality.

Some officers do have the sense and integrity to realize the system is broken - and they act appropriately, turning a blind eye to violations of illegal laws. Similarly, some lawyers are ethical and are working against the corruption in the system.

But there are a lot of rotten apples - and things are getting worse. As a fraction of GDP, direct legal expenditures in the USA have gone up 3x since 1950 - while every other developed nation is operating at much lower levels. The indirect expenses, of course, completely swamp the direct expenses, so the economic effect of corruption in government and legal ethics problems is just enormous.

Not everybody understands these issues in detail, but the general public, like Hamlet, has a pretty good sense that something is rotten in the system - and that has a lot to do with the current situation. All of this illegal stuff going on in government and the legal system means that both have been losing the perception of legitimacy among a lot of the US population. People are starting to think that we are living in a Robin Hood scenario, with the lawyers and the politicians and the super-wealthy and other special interest groups playing the role of the crooked Prince John and his cronies - with the police in the role of the crooked Sheriff of Nottingham and his enforcers.

Those that are educated and bother to inform themselves about the problems know that the problems are very real, and something actually IS quite rotten in the system. For example, there's all kinds of rent-seeking going on, where government is used to transfer money from the poor and the middle class into the hands of the wealthy - see The Captured Economy for many examples and for references to many papers that have appeared in peer-reviewed journals. Any decent business school textbook on risk-management and insurance will also provide references, because the cost of insurance that almost every business has to pay for is very high as a result of the legal ethics issues - and there have been a lot of studies on this topic.

These costs compound through the economy, functioning like a hidden VAT tax, and making everything more expensive than it should be. Health care is an especially bad example - the USA spends around 18% of GDP on health care, FAR more than the 9-11% spent by every other developed nation (numbers in both cases are pre-CV), but doesn't even make the top ten list for longevity. It isn't being made up in research, either, the USA spends less as a fraction of GDP than a number of the other developed nations (it's roughly in the middle, though current events may have shifted things).

Then we have the fact that government in the USA is illegally spending money of future generations - and thus engaging in taxation without representation, something the Founding Father fought a war over - yet another violation of 9th and 10th Amendment rights. The combined federal/state/local debt before the current crisis was 125% of GDP. That's an enormous amount of illegal spending. For comparison, the annual military budget runs around 3.4%.

Anybody with any sense knows that there are no significant differences in morality or ethics or intelligence among people of different skin colors.

The USA has a high crime rate among certain minorities not because of genetics, but because they are being screwed by the system - the result of policies such as tolerance for the massive ethics problems in law, and policies such as property tax based funding of education - see Racial Taxation by Walsh.

Some really dumb politicians and judges (including Supreme Court judges) thought they could away with indulging their racial prejudices without a long term cost to society.

They were enormously wrong, and now we're paying the price for their stupidity, in the form of the highest incarceration rate in the world, and a far bigger problem with violence than any other developed nation has. Cut off people's options for the future, destroy their hope, show them that most of the leaders of society are criminals and are profiting from their crimes - and you should expect a lot of those people to turn to high risk/high return activities such as drug trafficking. But when you have too many people involved into too small of a market, and the market is an illegal one, you don't get bankruptcies, you get violence. The police in turn become more violent in response. It's a nasty spiral.

The mere existence of sales taxes tends to be part of the price of goods and services in the USA - even for products such as food that are officially 'not taxed' in many jurisdictions.

The price inflation caused by government is just hidden. People don't see it so they don't realize it's there (mostly because they don't understand how businesses and the economy work and the real cost of goods and services).

Relatively few businesses sell only tax-exempt goods or only provide tax-exempt services.

As such, for the majority of businesses that sell to consumers, there is some overhead associated with making sure the business complies with the tax rules for the goods that are taxed, and can prove it through an audit.

Sales tax rules are notorious for being incredibly obtuse - and they change frequently. If you talk to small business people, you find almost all of them hate sales taxes with a passion because they are such a pain to deal with.

A lot of the rules require human interpretation. In some cases, you can talk to three different government officials about a tax question and get three different answers about whether or not tax is owed and how much.

As a result, the business response to sales tax policy can't be completely automated with a computer program - and even for those businesses where a computer program is practical, some human being has to interpret the rules, usually with an accountant and a lawyer, so the program can be updated every time the tax rules change. Accountants, lawyers, computer programmers - these people don't come cheap.

The overhead associated with sales taxes is significant, and it becomes part of the cost of doing business.

Those costs have to be paid for by income from the sale of goods and services, so typically they are spread over all the goods and services sold by a business, whether or not the individual good or service is taxed.

Thus, sales tax policy increases the prices of goods and services, even those not directly taxed, through creating a hidden tax.

This is one of the reasons why the decision in Wayfair vs. S. Dakota is going to create big problems in the long term *. But I digress.

Since almost every business has to deal with sales taxes, the whole supply/demand curve tends to shift - and you get higher prices as a result - in other words, in most markets nobody can compete against each other to lower the price increase forced by sales tax overhead, so everybody has to raise prices.

As a secondary effect, small business suffers, since the burden of sales taxes is higher for a small business than a large one. This has all sort of negative economic implications, but certainly some of them are overall higher prices on average as a result of less competition, fewer employment options and less bargaining power for workers, lower product quality, and so forth.

A healthy small business sector does a lot of good things for an economy - and the absence of a healthy small business sector does lot of bad things that hurt everybody economically, but the poor and the middle class bear most of the burden.

So, in general, you have two different effects flowing from the existence of sales taxes that have the effect of raising prices. None of this money from the price increase goes to the businesses - so it's effectively a hidden tax created by government policy.

The present situation - where the price of a good is being lowered to reflect a lowered tax by the actual amount of the tax - is actually quite usual. Many businesses are doing a lot of things right now to bolster their reputations - and that's a good thing.

There are lots of hidden taxes that work like sales tax does. Some estimates place government policy variables as being responsible for 64-73% of the cost of living differences in US states [Schlomach, 2017]. It's likely that government policy variables are also responsible for an similarly large portion of the cost of living differences from year to year (otherwise known as inflation).

The present situation - where we actually DO have too many dollars chasing too few goods - is actually pretty unusual - and the primary cause of inflation in normal circumstances is likely to be consequences (unforeseen or otherwise) of government policy decisions.

All these hidden taxes created by government policy are HIGHLY regressive, and a big part of the reason why the proportion of wealth going to the 1% is increasing in the USA. A lot of these policies involve something economists refer to as 'rent-seeking', which basically means manipulating the government and legal system to increase one's income at the expense of society as a whole.

For more information on this problem, you can look at The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality - by Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles [Oxford University Press, 2017].

The type of sales taxes used in most other developed nations (VAT taxes) are actually MORE harmful than US sales taxes, because they are applied at every step, - and they come with every bit as much overhead if not more - so the final price ends up being a lot higher for equivalent goods as a result of compounding through the economy (each business has to pass it's costs on to the next until you finally get to the consumer). This is largely offset in these nations by strong social policies that return a lot of that money to ordinary people through policies such as health care.

But it's not an accident that the Scandinavian nations have higher household debt rates than the USA. Rather, the high household debt rates are a result of the bad tax policies and the high proportion of regressive taxes such as the VAT. Given that a large proportion of US debt is at least in part likely to be associated with medical expenses, and given that the USA does a particularly bad job of regulating banks and credit card companies, resulting in artificially high debt levels, the high household debt rates in Scandinavia are particularly telling.

The rich make up a tiny portion of overall consumer spending. As such, sales tax policy is essentially a tax break for the rich, carefully disguised as something people can somehow 'avoid' if they are frugal. They just don't tell people that they're getting screwed through the hidden tax aspect of sales taxes - and that even the most frugal person can not avoid paying higher prices because of the existence of the sales tax. The cheap inner demon present in most people doesn't carefully scrutinize the real costs of things.

Total consumer and business spending in the USA completely dwarfs the income of governments from progressive income taxes, so even a relatively small impact on consumer and business spending through hidden taxes and tax-equivalent policy means that the poor and the middle class bear most of the burden of government.

Sales tax policy is inherently regressive: a progressive income tax is a far superior solution to the problem of funding government.

* Aside from having extremely serious negative legal ethics implications - what kind of insanity led them to think that requiring every business to know the sales tax laws in every legal jurisdiction where a customer might reside was going to be a good thing for anybody but the lawyers, or how such a policy could possibly be justified given that the 9th Amendment certainly protects the right to ethical practice of law? Even the appearance of conflict of interest must be avoided when reasonable alternatives exist - and they certainly do here ...

Are you having a bad day or something? I'm not sure where your statement came from.

When I looked up "List of countries by charitable donation", Wikipedia told me the USA leads as a percentage of GDP, and the UK is #4 in the list.

When I look up the 'World Giving Index' the USA tends to run #1-#2, while the UK is #6-#8.

For those lists, Sweden is #14 and #25, not terrible, but not particularly impressive. Admittedly, in part this may reflect high household debt rates common to Scandinavian countries - but US households have pretty high debt rates too, so that doesn't seem like enough to account for the differences.

Americans as a whole tend to be pretty generous. It's one of the more positive aspects of American culture.

You can rightly criticize many of the super-wealthy in the USA both today and in the past, who have a well deserved reputation for 'squeezing pennies until they squeal' and 'always needing a little bit more'.

A lot of these super-wealthy people are/were clearly sociopaths - and the influence their wealth gives/gave them over government and the legal system does enormous harm.

But I don't think you can say everyone is in it for themselves.

Rather, most of the problems of the USA are caused by a relatively small percentage of the population - through their actions today, and through some of the institutions, laws, and precedents set up in the past (by the same type of corrupt people that cause problems today).

You won't find greed in the DSM, but it's clearly a mental illness - and many of the super-rich are very sick people.

In the USA there is a lot of deeply entrenched corruption - but most of it doesn't involve ordinary people except as victims.

Politicians, lawyers, the super-wealthy, government and business executives - lots of those people are involved in bad stuff. Not all, by any means, but certainly a large percentage.

But not that many ordinary folks - and in many cases the ordinary folks in the poorest areas are getting pushed into the bad stuff because of how badly they are being screwed over by the system.

It's not an accident that the USA has such high rates of drug-related violence, and the highest incarceration rate in the world - and it doesn't have anything to do with access to firearms. Rather, these problems are caused by the corruption in the system created by those at the top, which has lots of cumulative negative effects on the poor and many in the middle class.

Surprisingly, the poor and the middle class, in spite of being screwed over so often, often end up being pretty charitable. For example, lots of poor immigrants in the USA send large amounts of money to their families overseas in other countries, or 'due South'.

The generosity of many Americans is remarkable - and something you just don't find in a lot of cultures.

Strange. They've delivered some twice to me. I just haven't had any problems getting it.

Speaking of which, I've been thinking about the preppers. A LOT of people made fun of them for many years. But right now, most of them are far better off than the rest of us.

We are going to have to change our attitudes towards preppers.

In fact, I predict some of them will be moving into positions of political leadership after this is over, and displacing traditional political leaders.

They will hold the moral high ground.

After all, they have been stocking toilet paper for many years, so they will be able to truthfully say their hands are cleaner than everyone else!

:-)

I think it's a dangerous assumption that this will only affect the old. There are lots of people with pre-existing lung issues, such as asthma, or damage to the lungs from wildfires. Lung damage from wildfires IS a workplace injury, since many people have breathed bad air in the workplace - the air can be bad for months after a fire ends and who can simply stop working for that long? - but one not currently covered as such to the best of my knowledge.

A lot of people of all ages and all walks of life in the USA have been exposed to wildfires in recent years - and as a result are likely to have some lung damage from smoke inhalation whether they know it or not.

There are also lots of people that handle incredibly toxic chemicals that can do a lot of lung damage, such as hair dressers - the price of gimmicks to enhance female beauty can be a high one, something more women might want to think about: just what is it going to cost other people for you to be a slave to fashion?

Other potentially vulnerable people include construction workers, or handymen (e.g. those that sand drywall), woodworkers (especially power tool users, sawdust!), or even gardeners.

In theory, the government regulates businesses and tries to protect people, by training and by forcing the business owners to be responsible. If you know people that actually work in these businesses, you'll probably discover that doesn't often happen - for whatever reason, a lot of rich people that own businesses are sociopaths and don't take responsibility for the well being of their employees.

Not advocating socialism, but there's something to the idea of not letting people get rich by destroying other people's lives and bodies. Capitalism needs smart regulation to work to the public good - a point Adam Smith made in 1776, and in places like the USA that isn't what we have (too much government corruption, too many legal ethics problems - and ordinary people pay the price).

People that do a lot of DIY work (or even just some forms of cleaning) around the house can also be exposed to really bad chemicals that injure the lungs - and most of them don't know that their paper masks are almost completely ineffective in protecting them from these chemicals.

I am not a doctor, but I strongly suspect all these people with lung issues (most of whom won't realize they have lung issues) are highly likely to be more vulnerable to any respiratory disease.

No. See Racial Taxation by Walsh. The system of funding education based on property tax was set up after the Civil War in places all over the country on a racial basis - and in many states it still works that way.

It is a completely UNFAIR system that basically comes down to giving rich people a tax break and screwing over the poor, disproportionately affecting minorities.

Some states are working to improve matters. The most recent study (in 2016) showed that the 26 states that have increased the education funding for low income school districts saw a significant increase in test scores. But there are still huge problems with US education - and still enormous unfairness.

The 2016 tells us that increased funding can improve education, through in practice if doesn't always work out that way. Sometimes the increased funding get stolen by special interest groups. For example, in some states the number of adults on the staff of schools has doubled in the past 30 years, but the teacher student ratio hasn't changed, in large part because of funding too many non-teaching positions. The teacher's unions also steal a lot of the money via the seniority system. Corruption is a huge problem in the USA -- mostly involving something economists refer to as 'rent-seeking', see The Captured Economy -- and is usually works out to the disadvantage of the poor.

Poor people in most developed countries have much better educational opportunities - and the health care systems in every other developed nation are much more accessible to the poor. It's not an accident that the USA (despite spending 18% of GDP on health care, compared to 9-11% for every other developed nation) doesn't even make the top ten list for longevity. Lots of families have to make bad decisions on where they live and where they work (causing lots of marital strife and all kinds of problems for their kids) because the only way they can get affordable health care is to get a job that provides it - even if there are lots of problems with taking the job.

It's also not an accident that the USA has relatively high violent crime rates, and the highest incarceration rate in the world. Rather these dismal statistics are a consequence of many government policies that screw over people living in poor districts. When people have no legitimate way to get ahead, they turn to illegal ones - and when you have too many people competing in an illegal market, you don't get bankruptcies you get violence and people going to prison.

The USA should get rid of property and sales taxes entirely - both of these (in practice) end up being highly regressive. Even a small fraction of total consumer spending greatly dwarfs the income of government from progressive taxes. Every dollar that goes in the government's budget from a regressive tax is a dollar that didn't go into the budget by a progressive tax (where the rich pay more) - and thus is a tax break for the rich. Then there's the problem that the 'Millionaire Next Door" ends up paying the same property taxes as an ordinary middle class family, because they're living in a middle class class ...

The massive problems the USA has with legal ethics are also something that is very unfair to the poor. Just the direct expenditures on legal expenses in the USA greatly exceed those in every other developed country (as a percent of GDP) - and they have gone up enormously since 1950. The indirect expenses are going to be significant higher. The costs that businesses have to spend to defend themselves against the problems in the legal system have negative results on the public, one way or higher (higher prices, jobs sent overseas, etc) - and those are subject to both compounding and feedback in the economy. You are paying a hidden 'lawyer tax' on every good and service - and the best most non-lawyers will ever get from the tort system is a few bucks over the course of their lifetime from class action suits. That's not a good return for society.

Technically, the US Bill of Rights provides for unspecified rights "retained by the people" under the 9th Amendment, and "reserved to the people" under the 10th Amendment. By definition, such rights can not be taken away by ANY entity of government, individually or collectively, including the Supreme Court - and all government executives, lawyers, and law enforcement personnel sworn oaths to recognize this.

The problem is that the US legal profession has a massive ethical conflict of interest with respect to recognizing the authority of the 9th and 10th Amendments, since it makes the entire vast system of rent-seeking that they've set up over the past 50 years illegal - so for most practical purposes this technical limitation on the power of government is simply ignored.

We are living in a Robin Hood scenario: legitimate authority has been usurped by the collective actions of various special interest groups, who are enriching themselves at the expense of society.

See The Captured Economy for many references to papers on the topic of rent-seeking by US lawyers (it has some good chapters on patent and copyright). You can also find references to studies on legal ethics issues in business textbooks on Risk Management and Insurance - anybody operating a business in the USA needs to understand the dangers posed by a legal profession with serious legal ethics problems.

Only a tiny handful of lawyers are speaking out against the legal ethics problems in US law, because the existence of those problems is enormously profitable for the legal profession. US lawyers make 2-3x what their counterparts make in any other developed nation, as a fraction of GDP. US law is every bit as messed up as US health care - and the problems in US law are part of the reason US health care is messed part.

US lawyers make large campaign contributions to the politicians who select judges. You can clearly see the consequences by looking at a textbook on Constitutional Law: there are many well known cases with serious legal ethics issues that were simply ignored by the courts. You can also see major legal ethics issues in recent cases that haven't gotten into the textbooks yet, such as Wayfair vs S Dakota.

Further, major courts such as the US Supreme Court have illegal policies requiring that you have lawyer speak on your behalf, which ensures that the public can't assert it's rights under the 9th and 10th Amendments in front of these courts unless doing so is in the interests of the legal profession.

Things are not getting better - in fact, they are getting worse. As a fraction of GDP, direct expenditures on lawyers in the USA have gone up by 3x since 1950 - and the indirect expenditures certainly swamp the direct expenditures.

Legal ethics problems function as a hidden regressive tax in the US economy - and one that compounds from node to node in the economy (much like compound increases from month to month), and is also subject to feedback loops. This is a serious problem - and until the public wakes up and decides to do something about it, it will continue to be a serious problem with negative economic consequences for everybody that's not a member of certain special interest groups.

Technology has created many new jobs. Amazon Marketplace and EBay and similar venues allow large numbers of small businesses to exist today that could not have survived in the past, because they would not have had access to a large enough market in their local area. Today, technology allows those small businesses to be located almost anywhere - and they can reach a customer base around the world.

Participation rates in some social activities - such as dance - have gone up by a considerable amount over the past few decades. Technology has facilitated this. Technology allows people to learn the basics of dance much faster - people can use videos (many free downloads, or videos taken at the end of each class) to help them practice at home or during breaks at work, so instructors can use classroom or lesson time to put focus on higher level concepts, ideas, and technique. This makes it a lot easier for more people to participate.

Similar conclusions can be drawn regarding similar social activities such as HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) - which is FAR more popular today than it was a few decades ago. Again, we see the influence of technology - there are LOTs of videos available to help people be aware of the opportunities that exist out there, motivating them to look for an activity in their local area - and then helping them learn faster.

The right to not be subject to Fraud arises under the 9th Amendment, as a right "retained by the people", and the 10th Amendment, as a right "reserved to the people".

Hence, under the highest law in the land, it is already the case that charging people for using their own routers is illegal conduct.

For a lawyer to write or enforce or allow an employer to use a contract to the contrary is placing contract law superior to the highest law in the land, hence creates a contradiction in the law and is unethical practice of law. The right to ethical practice of law is itself protected under the 9th and 10th Amendments. No contract provision can be written that involves Fraud any more than a contract provision can be written to murder somebody.

Infringement of fundamental rights "under the colour of law" is grounds for both criminal prosecution and civil suit - and hence there is already a mechanism in place to go after the lawyers that try to make contract law superior to the Bill of Rights.

So in short, this is already illegal and laws on the books exist to go after people who do it.

But, in practice, the US legal profession has massive and multiple ethical conflicts of interest with respect to recognizing the legal authority of the 9th and 10th Amendment, so they simply ignore their legal obligations. Legal professionals make large campaign contributions to the politicians that select judges (completely dwarfing the contributions made by organizations like the NRA), so it's not surprising that nothing gets done about this misuse of the law to the benefit of a special interest group. Nobody that is likely to rock the legal ethics boat gets selected for high judicial office.

If you have a basic understanding of ethics, then you can easily spot major legal ethics issues in Supreme Court decisions where the court says NOTHING about the issue.

This is why the USA is still the 'Land of the Lawsuit', and why the direct expenditures on legal services are 2-3x (as a fraction of GDP) those of every other developed nation. The indirect expenses certainly exceed the direct expenses (probably by 5-10x as a result of compounding and feedback in the economy) - collectively the direct and indirect expenses constitute a hidden regressive tax that everybody has to pay and most folks don't realize they are paying.

The really sad thing is that the other developed nations have their own share of legal ethics problems - in some cases very serious problems with significant economic impact - so that actual magnitude of the legal ethics problems in the USA is quite a bit higher than just a simple comparison of nations would suggest.

See The Captured Economy - or any good textbook on Risk Management and Insurance - for many references to economic and other studies that document ethics problems with US law.

Corruption will always increase inside a closed system - it's simply another form of entropy - and until the public starts getting serious about legal ethics issues, this kind of thing will continue. It took the better part of a century to get rid of the Jim Crow system - which blatantly violated the Bill of Rights and represented a major legal ethics problem - it will be interesting to see if it takes as long to get rid of the major legal ethics problems currently afflicting the USA.

Another part of the problem here is that the selection system for executives of big corporations seems to result in a lot of sociopaths in executive positions. All these people care about is the bottom line and their own benefits - since they have no empathy for other people, the fact that they are doing harm to others doesn't bother them. Some major legal work on the fundamentals of corporate law is needed to alter the process by which executives get selected and to limit who can serve on a board of directors. But nobody wants to do that work as a result of ethical conflict of interest involving the legal profession.

You have been misled. That happens to a lot of people on political topics.

The USA spends around 3.4% of GDP on the military. Most EU nations are in the 1.5-2.5% range - but have two advantages:

1. They don't need to cross a big ocean to put boots on the ground, or keep their military supplied, and
2. They don't have have substantial Asian commitments.

The difference between US and EU military spending basically comes down to those two considerations.

A huge chunk of US military spending goes into naval and air force assets needed to support trans-oceanic logistics.

Despite many claims to the contrary by various special interest groups, US military spending is actually not that high given the treaty requirements the US has - no doubt there is some pork barrel spending in the military budget but relative to other problems the US has, that's really an insignificant problem.

The EU actually has MORE military manpower than the USA (1.5 million EU versus 1.3 million US active duty, 1.2 million EU versus 846k US reserves), because soldiers are a lot less expensive than warships. EU nations also have lots of adults with military training and still of military age that aren't in active duty or in the reserves - it wasn't that long ago that some military service was mandatory in many of those nations (unlike the USA).

The difference in health care spending, on the other hand, is around 7% of GDP (the USA is around 18% of GDP total private+public, while every other developed nation is spending 9-11% of GDP).

Note that the USA doesn't even make the top ten list for expected lifespan, the simplest measure of health care effectiveness.

In other words, the US is spending enormously more on health care than ANY OTHER developed nation - and getting inferior results for a large enough chunk of the population to drag down statistics.

Since all that extra spending isn't producing results, it is basically being stolen by various special interest groups.

Putting that in perspective, the money being stolen in US health care by special interest groups is more than twice the entire US annual military budget.

This is a huge amount of money - enough to buy hundreds of new aircraft carriers every year. This is why health care in the USA is a such a hard problem to fix - the sociopaths that are profiting from this situation are stealing so much money that they can afford to produce huge amounts of propaganda to mislead ordinary people and even Slashdot nerds about the issue - and they can buy lots of politicians.

  Who says crime doesn't pay?

I don't know that I entirely agree, but I have been thinking along similar lines for a long time. Interestingly, in medical research, from what I hear, it's very hard for researchers to get tenure and most of them do survive only on their grants.

I estimate that only 1 in 5 of my college and graduate school professors were doing their jobs when it came to teaching - based on experience in multiple schools earning multiple degrees. The rest were incompetent at teaching. This experience is common to many of my colleagues, many of whom have degrees from some of the top technical universities in the world. The experience that we often had to teach ourselves seems to have been pretty common - and most of what I learned in both college and graduate schools came from teaching myself and from the 20% that were doing their jobs.

There is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the ethical conflict of interest posed by the publish-or-perish system does enormous harm to upper level education - and thus does enormous long term social and economic harm to society. The reward system needs to change.

Also, from a legal perspective, a right to ethical government can be asserted under the 9th Amendment - even the appearance of conflict of interest must be avoided when reasonable alternatives exist - and this implies universities receiving government funding can not be implementing a publish-or-perish system and still be compliant with the US Bill of Rights. The current system is not only a bad system, it's an illegal system that violates universal and inalienable rights and has no place in any state that wants to call itself civilized.

It's not necessarily clear, however, that it is desirable to have researchers get paid more or be contributing to university profits - or even that universities should be for-profit organizations - and it's also not clear that government research funding should be allowed to result in university profits.

There is probably some benefit to tenure for researchers, so I'm not prepared to throw it out entirely. It allows them to resist pressure from university administrators - who are often incompetent and only interesting in making more money for the university (which is generally the basis for how their performance gets rated). This would allow researchers more freedom to pursue things of long term benefit instead of just short term benefit.

Many schools seem to have made an effort to create some separation between teaching and research - but in my experience publish-or-perish still hides behind the scenes even in these schools and affects many things adversely.

After we fix the ethics problem created by publish-or-perish, we still need to fix the problem of arrogance, and the unwillingness of folks in the hard sciences and engineering to learn basic people skills - the kinds of things that are often taught in or come from the social sciences. It's amazing how time times I saw professors making really fundamental mistakes in interacting with their students - things that are discussed on elementary books on communication stills - without any clue that they were being idiots.

Because politics isn't about reality, facts, or truth: it's about perceptions.

Tech companies are currently perceived to be taking advantage of society, therefore they are vulnerable to sociopaths in government who want more money and don't want to have to work hard to get it.

If politicians were actually looking out for the interests of society, there would be no business taxes other than taxes on stuff crossing borders.

All the income that currently comes from business taxes is income that comes from a regressive tax in practice. They may try to disguise it as a progressive tax - but businesses have too many options for dealing with cost increases - one way or another that seemingly progressive tax will get converted into a regressive tax. This applies to all taxes on business. In the case of money and other stuff crossing borders, it's possible to justify the tax as being in the national interest despite the regressive effects. But in all other cases it isn't possible to do that.

To make matters worse, such taxes have significant negative economic effects beyond just the immediate and direct effects they have on businesses - such as increasing the cost of welfare and reducing social mobility.

So we have a triumph of perception over reality: the perception is that the rich companies are going to be paying the text, the reality is that most of the text gets paid for by the middle class and by reduced opportunities for the poor.

In reality, every dollar that a tech company (or any other) isn't paying through loopholes or quirks of the law is one less dollar that comes into the government's budget from a regressive tax - and every regressive tax is a tax break for the rich.

Many things work this way. It's a damning indictment of the world's education systems. Far too much time is spent on stuff that doesn't matter, and not enough time is spent on things that do matter. There are a bunch of courses that everybody should get in grade school - such as a good multi-year introduction to economics, business, and law - and nobody does.

In many ways, EU nations do a decent job taking care of their people - but the bad aspect of this is that it is funded in large part through regressive tax policy. The government taketh, and the government giveth. It's the equivalent of taking one step backwards to take every two steps forward ...

It could be worse - the USA federal/state/local government in comparison do a terrible job taking care of their people - and there are all kinds of both explicit and hidden regressive taxes (or tax equivalent policies), so the folks in the USA are getting a much poorer return for their investment in government than the folks in the EU.