Something that I didn't understand - why Linus thinks it is completely nuts that people help finance their kids' education locally? Why the only sane thing is to give money to some anonymous amorphous central government, and then ask for some of it back to build the school and hope some bridge to nowhere or festival of cowboy poetry or some bigwig's 500K/night hotel bills don't come first? I understand you can disagr…
I'm from Scandinavia and I think I can answer that. Over here, there's a pretty strong sentiment that having parents that are well off shouldn't give you an unfair advantage to people whose parents are less well off. Equal opportunities and all that. For instance, in Denmark education is free, including university. You even get a monthly allowance from the state if you study. That's probably why if you want to live o…
This is both counterfactual (money alone matters very little - worst schools routinely spend per pupil more or roughly the same as good schools with no improvement in results) and futile. Of course children of successful educated parents would be better off that children growing in broken up family with absentee parents and zero attention to their education. The only way it could be otherwise is to drag everybody down to the lowest possible level. The whole talk about "unfair advantage" sounds insane to me - why not then beautiful people or smart people have "unfair advantage"? Let's do it like in the Vonnegut's Sirens on Titan (or Harrison Bergeron) - let everybody be dragged down to the lowest level, let everybody has poorest education that we can provide to everybody, let everybody be as ugly as the ugliest person alive, as weak as weakest person alive, as dumb as dumbest person alive, as miserable and sick as the most miserable and sick person alive. This is only way it can be "fair". And people seriously think this approach is not only sane, but the ONLY sane one? Just boggles the mind.
The problem is that redistribution does not solve the problem. Moreover, by becoming obsessed with redistribution solving the real problems only becomes harder. We are way beyond the stage where the money were the actual issue, all bake sales aside. The problem is much harder and has to do with the community, the general environment, the history, the social engineering failures, there's a huge mess there, but it there not because of the lack of government involvement. If anything, partially it's there exactly because of this involvement, which failed to predict the consequences.
>>>> That's probably why if you want to live out the American dream Denmark is a better place than the US to do it
Highly doubt it. Somehow where I live there's Google, Facebook, and hundreds others already done, and thousands others in the making, and in Denmark you have.... well, I couldn't name one, to be frank. Maybe there are some, but not many heard of them. Somehow Stroustrup is in Texas and DHH is in Chicago, and we don't have a huge wave of US citizens moving to Denmark to pursue their dreams.
Maybe if you move there, you have higher chance of secure mediocre living, but it's not exactly what people call "American dream".