This is becoming a fruitless discussion without getting into the specifics.

Here’s the thing, with my talent and experience, I could easily be earning 4x as much as I do here in Germany. I work in AI, it’s super hot right now. But here in Germany the only job for me is in the public sector, where I get paid like a lowly government employee. It’s completely ridiculous when compared to what my fellows in the US are earning. I earn around $45,000 of which I net $25,000 after taxes, of which $12,000 I pay in rent per year. And my benefits? A fixed two year contract. It’s not even a permanent position.

I have colleagues who decided to pay out of pocket some $120k to do an MSc. in California so they could access the tech network there and secure a job, and all of them are financially better off than I am.

Healthcare is not free. I pay 250€/month here in Germany, and I literally cannot even access it at all. I go to the doctor and get turned away. They have this shitty two tiered system where unless you have the private insurance or are a pensioner, you have to fight against a thousand bureaucratic dragons to get any service out of it.

University is not free either. I paid 500€/semester and had to source my own food and accommodation. And although I got a degree, you cannot really compare, even the top of the top of German universities with places like MIT or Stanford where you get so much prestige and networking opportunities. One has to compare apples to apples.

I am for both universal healthcare and education, but Americans need to understand that you aren’t going to get the American service for the European price point.

But you also get half the salary, compared to the US. Taxes are probably on a similar level, but you get more for your taxes in France.

It’s not all good. As a single, somewhat ambitious guy living in Europe, I’m planning to move to the US, because building wealth in most of Europe is much harder, so you are effectively a slave of the system. You get a barely livable salary, you pay half of it to the taxman, and half of the remaining net salary in rent (or mortgage). If you are a single guy like me, you get barely anything in return. And since the European economy is struggling, and European governments are going all in on austerity, the situation regarding taxes and social benefits will only deteriorate.

PTO is nice, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. At the end of the day, I feel better having the freedom in the shape of $$$ in my pocket, compared to being at the mercy of a government, which I don’t fully trust, to treat me well.

I guess we have to disagree. Growth is an inherently good thing in my view, and I don’t based that on capitalistic ideology. Without growth, the metaphorical pie is finite. What does this mean? It means there is some distribution of this pie, however equal or unequal. Now on one side you will have people like you trying to make the distribution more equal. On the other side you will have war lords, dictators, and power hungry individuals trying to grab more of the pie for themselves. All of you will have to resort to violence to make that happen.

And the magic of economic growth is that you can enrich the world without having to physically fight other people to steal their shit.

The bottom line is, we would have even more imperialism if we did not have economic growth.

I have to differ on your last point. I don’t think capitalism is necessarily at fault, nor must the working/middle classes be struggling for fascism to emerge. If anything, quite the opposite. It is the better off countries that end up turning fascist. All fascist countries are/were first world countries, in various states of advanced development.

I think it would be more accurate to say that fascism is an extreme form of imperialism, because they are ultimately very similar sentiments. A more powerful group taking advantage in various ways, of a less powerful group. Now you could say, “it’s all the same thing”, capitalism, imperialism, fascism, it’s all the same “hierarchy is the ultimate source of evil dynamic”, but it seems to me that this just reduces all these concepts to absurdity.

I was thinking of Israel actually. I don’t think the comparison between the Nazis and the Soviets is apt. The ideological motivations are quite different. And it’s a typical Nazi talking point to point at the Soviets and try to argue that they were worse.

Trump is called a fascist not because of his conservative/traditional rhetoric. In fact none of the alt-right are THAT conservative. I mean, Trump himself is a pretty liberal cosmopolitan playboy.

The accusation stems from his lack of respect for democracy, rule of law and his fascist behavior. Trumpism is a fascist cult in all aspects. The movement has no real coherent ideological basis. It’s literally a cult of personality surrounding Trump.

Sigh. One could also make the argument that capitalism is the only reason we have democracy at all. I am not allergic to socialist thinking, but putting all the blame on capitalism for everything is intellectually lazy.

There is no “recent resurgence”.

• 1. Nazis never went away. Underground Nazi groups, as well as fully fledged Nazi political parties were common throughout post-WWII Europe.
• 2. The people fighting the Nazis weren’t ideologically much better than them. The Americans were still racist as fuck. The British and the French were imperialist world dominators. All of these allies were involved in their own genocides. The Soviets believed in sacrificing huge swaths of their own people to accomplish “great leaps forward”.
• 3. Nazism and similiar ideologies are fundamentally based on in-group bias, and that is just something psychological. There will always be people who are more open to others and people who are less open to others.
• 4. If you look at recent wars, you will see that even the non-Nazi, “moderate”, “liberal”, “centrist” political parties can have blood on their hands and be complicit in atrocities very much reminiscent of the evil the Nazis committed.

I think the bottom line is, you have to unlearn a lot of the just-so narratives that you have been taught about the world.