11 ms·

Having lived in the US for 6 years when I was younger I became very acquainted first hand with Americans' touted importance of freedom, and their pride in the f

Having lived in the US for 6 years when I was younger I became very acquainted first hand with Americans' touted importance of freedom, and their pride in the freedom they get as Americans. At the time I was too young to question this, and just thought of Americans as very proud and free people - I even got the bug myself and felt a great sense of pride and appreciation about having the privilege to live free in America. That was a long time ago and I am now on my fourth country of residence. Now the espousing of "freedom" some Americans often express when discussing living in Europe vs the US is sort of baffling when there are so many examples of Americans being the opposite of free. This is one example of greater restrictions on their lives which Americans are forced to accept. It seems like freedom in the US is crippled at so many turns, either by corporations or lack of government support when you really need it in a bad financial situation. You're not free to expect your health to be taken care of no matter what your financial situation; you're not free from living in often astonishing debt just to to get a higher education; you're not free to feel any sort of real sense of job security when an employer can fire you at will with little protection; you're not free to make a mistake, maybe like this one, without facing overblown charges and/or prison sentences; etc...Living in the US now just seems like it would be so stressful. Europe has its problems, but having lived in both places I know where I personally feel more "free".

maxxxxx 9y ago
To me it feels like American freedom is more and more about the freedom of doing business for big companies without any limitations and not much else. The regular citizen is just there to consume what these "job creators" provide.
indigochill 9y ago
I haven't lived in quite that many different countries, but also find having been born in the US and emigrated to Europe that I find Europe to feel more "free". In fact, I actually moved because I wanted to do unpaid programming work for my company to prove I was ready for a software engineering role. The US office said it would be illegal, but the European office said it would be legal there, so I got a transfer (and shortly after, the promotion I was after).
- madengr 9y ago
  That sounds like indentured servitude. It’s been illegal in the USA for a long time. Sounds like you are being screwed.
  - always_good 9y ago
    Meh, you do what you can. It's an opportunity that might have paid off and given them something they want in life. Not everything is as easy as HNers in SV make it seem.
  - pasquinelli 9y ago
    there isn't the information required for it to sound like indentured servitude.
linza 9y ago
I have pretty wealthy relatives that live in the US, some of them having citizenship. My perception is (and reality coukd very well be completely different), that they have a lot of personal freedom enabled by the money they have. A type of freedom that would not be possible in Europe even with that kind of money.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  The darker meaning of the phrase "Freedom isn't free." Of course, everywhere you go, having more money provides the opportunity for more freedom than having less money, but perhaps nowhere on earth is the difference bigger. In America, if you have lots of money, you can build a space program and launch your own car into heliocentric orbit. If you have very little money, you have virtually no opportunity to do anything. Ask someone who needs to work three jobs to eat how free they feel.
  - tc7 9y ago
    When I first read it, "perhaps nowhere on earth is the difference bigger" seemed like an incredible and obvious exaggeration. But maybe your point is that in countries with much wider _lifestyle_ disparity (widespread poverty vs. corrupt billionaires), those billionaires wouldn't have the opportunity to build a space program? And so the difference in 'opportunity' between the ruling class and starving citizens is less than the difference between the person with three jobs and Elon Musk? Okay, I still don't think I'm getting it. Going out on a limb, I'd say that poor people in the United States have incredibly more opportunity by almost any measure than the bulk of people on earth. Happy to consider where I may be wrong -- what am I missing?
    - tankenmate 9y ago
      And yet the chances of having a stable home (owned or rented) and being healthy are much much lower for those born to poor parents vs those born to rich parents; it is prima facie evident that 'opportunity' is not equally available even taking into account skill and tenacity, the parent lottery is a much larger factor.
Illniyar 9y ago
"You're not free to expect your health to be taken care of no matter what your financial situation; you're not free from living in often astonishing debt just to to get a higher education; you're not free to feel any sort of real sense of job security when an employer can fire you at will with little protection;" I think universal healthcare, affordable higher education and social security are basic necessities and it's insane that the US doesn't have them. But that's not freedom, that's socialism. It's like saying that US citizens are not free to travel because airplane tickets are expensive. Freedom means that you get a choice, even if that choice is going to screw yourself later in life - for instance not buying health insurance. All those things you mention are paid by your taxes - someone is literally taking money away from you to pay for something you might not need - thats hardly freedom. In this sense the US is the freest country to live in, though not necessarily the best one.
- vikascoder 9y ago
  Freedom means having the choice not to buy and have health insurance? Cause who needs it? But you have mandatory car insurance in most states. However much time I spend in the USA, I just can't wrap around my head around these ”freedoms”. What I conclude, after having also lived in Germany, is that one really needs to live and experience this socialism to have a feeling how "free" that actually feels. Most US folks are boxed into their own idea of freedom from having basic necessities from a theoretical perspective knowing no other better way to live so much so that they would actively dismantle whatever protections they enjoy now.
- MereInterest 9y ago
  I think there is a tendency in the US to define "freedom" only in terms of what somebody is not prevented from doing, rather than what somebody is enabled to do. This is partly historical, as the Bill of Rights describes only restrictions of what the government may not do, and does not have any statements about things that the government must ensure. Your use of freedom and socialism as opposing ideas, rather than as two separate axes, suggests that you might be making this assumption.
  - 9y ago
danjoc 9y ago
The Berne convention came from Europe, not the other way round. Thank goodness Trump killed TPP or even longer terms would be enshrined in international treaty. I hope that Trump will see through this and not let Hollywood/Tech push him around in NAFTA renegotiation.
psyc 9y ago
We do have the 1st amendment going for us. For practical purposes, we get roughly as much freedom as we can pay for.
yodsanklai 9y ago
Another point is freedom of speech. In theory, Americans enjoy more freedom of speech (they don't have "hatred laws" that several European countries have), but it seems that due to political correctness, freedom of speech is practically more restricted than in Europe. Edit: Now that I'm thinking about this, another example struck me. When I was living in the US, several friends of mine there spent some time (a couple of nights) in jail for very minor offenses. In Europe, I haven't met anyone personally that has spent even a second in jail. It's only personal statistics, but I'm under the impression it's much easier to get imprisoned or bullied by a cop in the US than it is in western Europe.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  The freedom of speech situation is really interesting. In theory you have the first amendment but in practice the US does a lot self censoring. There are a ton of taboo topics you can't touch without fear of getting fired at your job or somebody getting angry. In Germany you have a few explicit laws against certain speech but in general I worried much less about something I said having negative consequences.
  - falcolas 9y ago
    It doesn't help that "freedom of speech" is broadly taken to mean that the government can't restrict your speech. However, most forums where people congregate to speak are not managed by the government, but by corporations. And most people seem to find it totally OK for a corporation to silence any speech they want to.
    - betterunix2 9y ago
      Most people find it OK until it is their own speech being silenced, and then they have a problem. It's one thing when NAMBLA is banned from a social networking site, and another when your anti-war group is banned. That aside, there is an important difference between corporations and the government: corporations do not typically have the power to imprison or kill people, and when corporations want to impose a penalty they must ask the government to do it on their behalf. GoDaddy can refuse to provide service to nazis, but cannot do anything about nazis choosing some other registrar. A government can imprison people for running a nazi forum, even if the nazis set up their own registrar and maintain their own hosting.
sundvor 9y ago
I personally enjoy the freedom of having to fear being shot, or that I should face financial ruin or hardship if I need medical attention even if my health insurance was to run out. I quite like Australia.
- alex_hitchins 9y ago
  But do you like your broadband? /s
  - sundvor 9y ago
    That was a low blow ;) With cable, my downloads are good enough, but the issue of 100x slower uploads does sting. We've got FTTC in final phases now with the pit work being done just outside, however I'm not excited about it as there's still that last bit of crap copper. The whole handling / political point scoring of the NBN is sad and I'm trying not to think about it.
    - Filligree 9y ago
      FTTC can work quite well. I've got that here in Dublin, getting 400/40 speeds. If Australian internet turns out to still suck, them I don't think it'll be because of the technology. :)
      - alex_hitchins 9y ago
        May I enquire who your provider is? I believe here in England FTTC is maxed at 80mbps. I've very much like that to be wrong.
        Filligree 9y ago
        It's UPC. I've got a business connection, technically, but it's not excessively expensive and the SLA is worth it.
      - sundvor 9y ago
alex_hitchins 9y ago
I have never lived anywhere but the UK and am aware of the problems we have, however my thinking is exactly yours. Seems to an uneducated outsider such as I, that it seems freedom is taken to such an extent, freedom to suffer is an except-able norm as part of the deal. It's a Wild West mentality that still seems to strongly prevail.
tankenmate 9y ago
Having lived on a number of different continents and having gone to school with people from all over the world, my feeling is that the US is far more concerned with individual freedoms rather than societal freedoms. So sometimes you get some really strange and/or unintended emergent behaviour because of less concern for the effects as a whole.
coldtea 9y ago
Free in the US mostly means "without other people's help". It's an old relic from the original religious minorities that founded the place carried over to today (the "rugged individualism" etc). Maybe if the Quakers have won those cultural wars things would have been different... So you can be enslaved to 2000 things, debt, bosses, ugly laws, big corps, banks, health costs, etc., and just lie there and take it, but you are doing it on your own, as a "free" man.
- mixedCase 9y ago
  >So you can be enslaved to 2000 things, debt, bosses, ugly laws, big corps, banks, health costs, etc., and just lie there and take it, but you are doing it on your own, as a "free" man. To those of us who value freedom in the sense you belittle, the extreme alternative to what you proposed is being enslaved to one single thing, the size of those 2000 things you relied on plus another 5000 things that you don't but some other people do.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >To those of us who value freedom in the sense you belittle, the extreme alternative to what you proposed is being enslaved to one single thing, the size of those 2000 things you relied on plus another 5000 things that you don't but some other people do. And how is that working out for you?
    - mixedCase 9y ago
      You mean the second, since I live in a nation (Uruguay) where the state controls far too many services and pushes for more and more "socialism"? Well, I'm forced to pay healthcare for 3-4 people from my salary. I pay an absurdly high price for electricity due to the corruption that blossoms under a government monopoly. I also pay for the most expensive gasoline in the entire continent thanks to that. A car is a luxury that costs double what it does in the US due to taxes (used to cost even more, until the Chinese came in with their cars and forced manufacturers to compete by lowering their cut). And don't come at me with public transportation; you absolutely cannot rely on our buses to be on time and taxis are absolute crap for the most part in price and quality. Thankfully Uber arrived and managed to get the government as far away as possible, which helped a lot. Then there's a whole industry dedicated to eliminating as much import tax as possible since big gov wants big tariffs which is also pushed by merchants that call it out as unfair competition because big gov taxes the shit out of local merchants and so on and so on. So yeah, not working out great.
refurb 9y ago
Not surprising at all, but different people have different understandings of what freedom means. The only thing I'll say is it might be nice when the gov't steps in and does a bunch of stuff, but when it starts to go wrong or isn't what you need, it sucks when that's your only option.
mixmastamyk 9y ago
Sounds like safety rather than freedom.
bufferoverflow 9y ago
Still, the US is not too bad. It's ranked #17 out of 159 for the Human Freedom Index: https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/human-freedom-index-files/2017-human-freedom-index-2.pdf https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/human-freedom-i...
jernfrost 9y ago
Agree, I find Europe much freer. The US has some serious police state vibes. The amount of shit companies can impose on you is staggering in the US. Freedom pf speech and privacy basically has no protection inside a company in the US. The American freedom concept is quite bizzare. No matter of exploited or abused you are it doesn’t seem like an issue in the US as long as the government isn’t doing it. As of a citizen should care which entity abuses them.

maxxxxx 9y ago

To me it feels like American freedom is more and more about the freedom of doing business for big companies without any limitations and not much else. The regular citizen is just there to consume what these "job creators" provide.

indigochill 9y ago

I haven't lived in quite that many different countries, but also find having been born in the US and emigrated to Europe that I find Europe to feel more "free". In fact, I actually moved because I wanted to do unpaid programming work for my company to prove I was ready for a software engineering role. The US office said it would be illegal, but the European office said it would be legal there, so I got a transfer (and shortly after, the promotion I was after).

madengr 9y ago
That sounds like indentured servitude. It’s been illegal in the USA for a long time. Sounds like you are being screwed.
- always_good 9y ago
  Meh, you do what you can. It's an opportunity that might have paid off and given them something they want in life. Not everything is as easy as HNers in SV make it seem.
- pasquinelli 9y ago
  there isn't the information required for it to sound like indentured servitude.

linza 9y ago

I have pretty wealthy relatives that live in the US, some of them having citizenship. My perception is (and reality coukd very well be completely different), that they have a lot of personal freedom enabled by the money they have. A type of freedom that would not be possible in Europe even with that kind of money.

ryandrake 9y ago
The darker meaning of the phrase "Freedom isn't free." Of course, everywhere you go, having more money provides the opportunity for more freedom than having less money, but perhaps nowhere on earth is the difference bigger. In America, if you have lots of money, you can build a space program and launch your own car into heliocentric orbit. If you have very little money, you have virtually no opportunity to do anything. Ask someone who needs to work three jobs to eat how free they feel.
- tc7 9y ago
  When I first read it, "perhaps nowhere on earth is the difference bigger" seemed like an incredible and obvious exaggeration. But maybe your point is that in countries with much wider _lifestyle_ disparity (widespread poverty vs. corrupt billionaires), those billionaires wouldn't have the opportunity to build a space program? And so the difference in 'opportunity' between the ruling class and starving citizens is less than the difference between the person with three jobs and Elon Musk? Okay, I still don't think I'm getting it. Going out on a limb, I'd say that poor people in the United States have incredibly more opportunity by almost any measure than the bulk of people on earth. Happy to consider where I may be wrong -- what am I missing?
  - tankenmate 9y ago
    And yet the chances of having a stable home (owned or rented) and being healthy are much much lower for those born to poor parents vs those born to rich parents; it is prima facie evident that 'opportunity' is not equally available even taking into account skill and tenacity, the parent lottery is a much larger factor.

Illniyar 9y ago

"You're not free to expect your health to be taken care of no matter what your financial situation; you're not free from living in often astonishing debt just to to get a higher education; you're not free to feel any sort of real sense of job security when an employer can fire you at will with little protection;" I think universal healthcare, affordable higher education and social security are basic necessities and it's insane that the US doesn't have them. But that's not freedom, that's socialism. It's like saying that US citizens are not free to travel because airplane tickets are expensive. Freedom means that you get a choice, even if that choice is going to screw yourself later in life - for instance not buying health insurance. All those things you mention are paid by your taxes - someone is literally taking money away from you to pay for something you might not need - thats hardly freedom. In this sense the US is the freest country to live in, though not necessarily the best one.

vikascoder 9y ago
Freedom means having the choice not to buy and have health insurance? Cause who needs it? But you have mandatory car insurance in most states. However much time I spend in the USA, I just can't wrap around my head around these ”freedoms”. What I conclude, after having also lived in Germany, is that one really needs to live and experience this socialism to have a feeling how "free" that actually feels. Most US folks are boxed into their own idea of freedom from having basic necessities from a theoretical perspective knowing no other better way to live so much so that they would actively dismantle whatever protections they enjoy now.
MereInterest 9y ago
I think there is a tendency in the US to define "freedom" only in terms of what somebody is not prevented from doing, rather than what somebody is enabled to do. This is partly historical, as the Bill of Rights describes only restrictions of what the government may not do, and does not have any statements about things that the government must ensure. Your use of freedom and socialism as opposing ideas, rather than as two separate axes, suggests that you might be making this assumption.
- 9y ago

danjoc 9y ago

The Berne convention came from Europe, not the other way round. Thank goodness Trump killed TPP or even longer terms would be enshrined in international treaty. I hope that Trump will see through this and not let Hollywood/Tech push him around in NAFTA renegotiation.

psyc 9y ago

We do have the 1st amendment going for us. For practical purposes, we get roughly as much freedom as we can pay for.

yodsanklai 9y ago

Another point is freedom of speech. In theory, Americans enjoy more freedom of speech (they don't have "hatred laws" that several European countries have), but it seems that due to political correctness, freedom of speech is practically more restricted than in Europe. Edit: Now that I'm thinking about this, another example struck me. When I was living in the US, several friends of mine there spent some time (a couple of nights) in jail for very minor offenses. In Europe, I haven't met anyone personally that has spent even a second in jail. It's only personal statistics, but I'm under the impression it's much easier to get imprisoned or bullied by a cop in the US than it is in western Europe.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
maxxxxx 9y ago
The freedom of speech situation is really interesting. In theory you have the first amendment but in practice the US does a lot self censoring. There are a ton of taboo topics you can't touch without fear of getting fired at your job or somebody getting angry. In Germany you have a few explicit laws against certain speech but in general I worried much less about something I said having negative consequences.
- falcolas 9y ago
  It doesn't help that "freedom of speech" is broadly taken to mean that the government can't restrict your speech. However, most forums where people congregate to speak are not managed by the government, but by corporations. And most people seem to find it totally OK for a corporation to silence any speech they want to.
  - betterunix2 9y ago
    Most people find it OK until it is their own speech being silenced, and then they have a problem. It's one thing when NAMBLA is banned from a social networking site, and another when your anti-war group is banned. That aside, there is an important difference between corporations and the government: corporations do not typically have the power to imprison or kill people, and when corporations want to impose a penalty they must ask the government to do it on their behalf. GoDaddy can refuse to provide service to nazis, but cannot do anything about nazis choosing some other registrar. A government can imprison people for running a nazi forum, even if the nazis set up their own registrar and maintain their own hosting.

sundvor 9y ago

I personally enjoy the freedom of having to fear being shot, or that I should face financial ruin or hardship if I need medical attention even if my health insurance was to run out. I quite like Australia.

alex_hitchins 9y ago
But do you like your broadband? /s
- sundvor 9y ago
  That was a low blow ;) With cable, my downloads are good enough, but the issue of 100x slower uploads does sting. We've got FTTC in final phases now with the pit work being done just outside, however I'm not excited about it as there's still that last bit of crap copper. The whole handling / political point scoring of the NBN is sad and I'm trying not to think about it.
  - Filligree 9y ago
    FTTC can work quite well. I've got that here in Dublin, getting 400/40 speeds. If Australian internet turns out to still suck, them I don't think it'll be because of the technology. :)
    - alex_hitchins 9y ago
      May I enquire who your provider is? I believe here in England FTTC is maxed at 80mbps. I've very much like that to be wrong.
      - Filligree 9y ago
        It's UPC. I've got a business connection, technically, but it's not excessively expensive and the SLA is worth it.
    - sundvor 9y ago

alex_hitchins 9y ago

I have never lived anywhere but the UK and am aware of the problems we have, however my thinking is exactly yours. Seems to an uneducated outsider such as I, that it seems freedom is taken to such an extent, freedom to suffer is an except-able norm as part of the deal. It's a Wild West mentality that still seems to strongly prevail.

tankenmate 9y ago

Having lived on a number of different continents and having gone to school with people from all over the world, my feeling is that the US is far more concerned with individual freedoms rather than societal freedoms. So sometimes you get some really strange and/or unintended emergent behaviour because of less concern for the effects as a whole.

coldtea 9y ago

Free in the US mostly means "without other people's help". It's an old relic from the original religious minorities that founded the place carried over to today (the "rugged individualism" etc). Maybe if the Quakers have won those cultural wars things would have been different... So you can be enslaved to 2000 things, debt, bosses, ugly laws, big corps, banks, health costs, etc., and just lie there and take it, but you are doing it on your own, as a "free" man.

mixedCase 9y ago
>So you can be enslaved to 2000 things, debt, bosses, ugly laws, big corps, banks, health costs, etc., and just lie there and take it, but you are doing it on your own, as a "free" man. To those of us who value freedom in the sense you belittle, the extreme alternative to what you proposed is being enslaved to one single thing, the size of those 2000 things you relied on plus another 5000 things that you don't but some other people do.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >To those of us who value freedom in the sense you belittle, the extreme alternative to what you proposed is being enslaved to one single thing, the size of those 2000 things you relied on plus another 5000 things that you don't but some other people do. And how is that working out for you?
  - mixedCase 9y ago
    You mean the second, since I live in a nation (Uruguay) where the state controls far too many services and pushes for more and more "socialism"? Well, I'm forced to pay healthcare for 3-4 people from my salary. I pay an absurdly high price for electricity due to the corruption that blossoms under a government monopoly. I also pay for the most expensive gasoline in the entire continent thanks to that. A car is a luxury that costs double what it does in the US due to taxes (used to cost even more, until the Chinese came in with their cars and forced manufacturers to compete by lowering their cut). And don't come at me with public transportation; you absolutely cannot rely on our buses to be on time and taxis are absolute crap for the most part in price and quality. Thankfully Uber arrived and managed to get the government as far away as possible, which helped a lot. Then there's a whole industry dedicated to eliminating as much import tax as possible since big gov wants big tariffs which is also pushed by merchants that call it out as unfair competition because big gov taxes the shit out of local merchants and so on and so on. So yeah, not working out great.

refurb 9y ago

Not surprising at all, but different people have different understandings of what freedom means. The only thing I'll say is it might be nice when the gov't steps in and does a bunch of stuff, but when it starts to go wrong or isn't what you need, it sucks when that's your only option.

mixmastamyk 9y ago

Sounds like safety rather than freedom.

bufferoverflow 9y ago

Still, the US is not too bad. It's ranked #17 out of 159 for the Human Freedom Index: https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/human-freedom-index-files/2017-human-freedom-index-2.pdf https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/human-freedom-i...

jernfrost 9y ago

Agree, I find Europe much freer. The US has some serious police state vibes. The amount of shit companies can impose on you is staggering in the US. Freedom pf speech and privacy basically has no protection inside a company in the US. The American freedom concept is quite bizzare. No matter of exploited or abused you are it doesn’t seem like an issue in the US as long as the government isn’t doing it. As of a citizen should care which entity abuses them.