In most freedom indices the US ranks below ~15th in terms of human and economic freedom but then the discussion gets very, very nuanced depending on what freedom means to you. Maybe those indices are corrupted? I don't know.
There are also low-key smaller countries where there are more "de facto" freedoms than appear on paper.
I'm interested in what economic freedom means. I drink raw milk, can get fresh eggs, fresh pot and mushrooms, unregistered guns, clean shine... About the only thing I can't get that I want are those sick little Jap trucks.
I want them trucks too, RIP diesel #fuckCAFE
Lol i think it means something else. I can get all of that here too, and I don't exactly live in freedom paradise
I asked ai, and it said zoning and licensing, which is dependent on county and state, then basically a bunch of tax stuff, and minimum wage and union stuff.
So I'm still lost lol
đ Imagine mandated minimum wage being enforced with the threat of force, and access to unions that use their sheild as a bludgeon being the markers of âfreedom.â
I mean yeah minimum wage and union stuff is gay but minimum wage is like $7, is anyone really asking for less than that to pick straw berries?
Like I definitely make less than that farming lol but thats my own business
Right, thatâs the point. It looks like a tiny pebble in an ocean, but itâs merely one symptom of the problem as a whole.
You do make less than that. That means that if you were a business, your employee would be yielding less than that from your labor.
Yet, if your farm was an S-Corp, and attempted to pay yourself (as the employee) the $6.99 youâre worth, then they would say it was tax fraud and unfair compensation.
Sure taxation is theft, but you should be able to pay yourself whatever garbage wage you want. Then, after paying yourself that garbage wage, you should pay taxes at a lower rate because youâre not worth as much.
Anything else is artificial inflation, which isnât free. The further you get from anarcho-capitalism, the further you get from just simply letting the market decide completely on its own, the closer you are to UBI and full on socialism.
I get your point, but maybe it just doesn't make sense to me bc all of these freedom indexes are subjective anyway, but they are presented as an objective list.
They should publish all the raw data and just let me weight what matters to me more or less.
Also, on the minimum wage thing, the federal minimum wage doesn't matter to me because my states minimum wage is higher
Oh ok, that makes sense in context.
I just look at granular things and take them to the extreme. I guess all that was me trying to say âThe extreme of minimum wage isnât freedom, it is totalitarian facism.â (Not in the cheap antifa definition of facism, but the classical definition: federalized corporatism).. the same or less free for the average worker, but way less free for a private business owner.
Both the worker and the ceo are people, so itâs a net loss for the worker to be the same free and the owner to be less free. But ya, itâs a dumb metric for freedom lol
"Bunch of taxes and regulations" yeah that applies to a lot of jurisdictions...
I'm not saying USA is bad, just that it's not the "land of the free". Or why doesn't it rank number 1 everywhere then?
It is the only country in the world that will chase you globally to pay taxes even when you don't reside there, and if you try to renounce your citizenship the exit tax will fuck you over.
I would say it is the land of opportunity, it's a great place to build a business mostly because of the huge market and infrastructure.
Fair enough.
I wonder how it would stack up for folks exiting the system entirely tho.
Like if you make all your money in KYC free Bitcoin or monero or whatever, which country is easiest to thrive in.
Seems to me that "first world" countries make this more difficult, percentage of the population being compliant is very high
