Consumer protection in general is far, far better in Europe than the US.

As with many other areas, we've decided not to support restrictions on people who are trying to fuck us because, damn it, one day we might get to be the ones doing the fucking.

Or, if you prefer, in the US maintaining the purity of abstract ideology wins over demonstrable real-world benefits just about 100% of the time.

See also: health care, mandatory vacation, sick days, and maternity leave, labeling laws, etc., etc.

This really is Economics 101. The maximum profit margin comes at the point where the supply curve and the demand curve meet. Raising prices above that point results in fewer sales and therefore less profit. Companies won't stop following this rule just because they have an "excuse" for raising prices. Partly because they didn't need an excuse in the first place, but mostly because they still have to compete with other companies.

Maybe you should have stuck around for Economics 102.

I don't want cable with one channel--I want HBO streaming.

Netflix can do it. I'd pay *more* for HBO, despite its smaller amount of content. They could make it work, they just choose not to.

It is entirely absurd to expect a majority of the population to invest the time and effort required to understand enough about politics, economics, international relations, etc. to make anything approaching intelligent decisions on most legislation.

Hell, people can't even be bothered to understand how existing legislation affects them, even when it's something as direct and quantifiable as how much money they pay on their taxes.

Choosing representatives to do it for us is far simpler, and we're not even good at that. Direct voting on bills would be a disaster.

What advertising revenue? Does HBO have ads now?

I just want to pay more than the cost of adding HBO to cable service but less than it costs for a cable subscription + HBO to watch HBO's original shows online. Seems like a reasonable proposition to me.

Bingo. I'd pay more for HBO Go than I do for all of Netflix, but I don't have the option unless I *also* pay for cable, and I want exactly nothing from cable except HBO. I don't want to pay $100+ for the DVDs because I doubt I'll re-watch the show.

I'd have to pay something like $60 a month (a guess--it might be higher) for one channel, which is ridiculous. $20/month for all of HBO Go? Hell yeah.

I would guess it's just yet another person who hasn't looked up what "corporatism" actually means on Wikipedia, and is consequently misinterpreting that sort-of famous Mussolini quote.

Quite possible.

Thanks for the civility; Slashdot may have gone downhill over the years, but it's still one of the few sites where discussions like this can take place without always turning in to a mess.

I concede the original point--it was an overeager, off-the-cuff generalization on my part, and it's not defensible. However, if it's possible to prove conclusively that healthcare in (as I understand it, quite literally) every other OECD country isn't substantially cheaper than that in the US, I'd expect the news to be fairly widespread as there's been no shortage of money behind fighting universal care in the US; I haven't seen it, and I've looked, but if there are data sets or analyses that indicate that's the case I'd be interested to see them.

To get back to the topic of the costs of education, everything a quick Google search turns up indicates that US education spending is on the order of double the OECD average, at every level; some higher-than-average spending may be justified but that seems extreme, and it does make it look like government involvement in other states is not driving their costs up the way that our system is, which looks to me to rule out the broad category of government spending/involvement as the culprit behind our out-of-control costs, though some subset of it (which might possibly not be a problem with some other combination of regulations or factors) may well be to blame. I simply don't see evidence to support the notion that government spending must drive up prices this way, nor even that it typically does.

Taxation aside, it's hard to believe that others spend more on education when they... don't. There are plenty of other differences to explain the tax disparity (and in the case of Denmark in particular, being at one extreme of the effective taxation spectrum, it appears you are correct that the disparity is substantial).

A fair point on transit--though, seriously, my state's transportation infrastructure is shit, that's not just Europeans-can-do-no-wrong grousing. We're bad even compared to other states in our region, which is made obvious any time we cross the border with one of our neighbors and the roads suddenly get smoother.

I'd certainly take the health care system of just about any other OECD nation, at their cost (I've never seen anything indicating this isn't a massive, massive net savings, despite higher taxes, to say nothing of the other benefits of not having to worry about losing coverage for one reason or another), and I'd certainly take the 12% lower salary in exchange for 4 weeks plus 10 holidays of guaranteed vacation every year, that I could actually take without jeopardizing career advancement or having to change careers entirely (and, to take the specific example of Denmark, they might even have more vacation time than that, as IIRC four weeks is the low end in the EU).