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I didn't actually mean the American system specifically. (I'm in the UK, for what it's worth.) My own preferences are quite leftish and I would prefer the UK to

• eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  >But, still, the US seems to be quite effective in producing new technological things, and maybe that's partly the entrepreneurial mercenary culture as well as the mere fact of being a rich country. Speaking as a born USAian, I honestly believe it's more that the USA can and does brain-drain the entire rest of the world. When you actually raise people in an environment of mercenary capitalism, what you mostly get is poor people. When you let social-democratic states across the world raise and educate people, let them fund their research or their early attempts at businesses, and then steal those people when they get successful enough to be an easy bet and put them in a ruthless entrepreneurial environment, then you get a seemingly high concentration of high-talent, high-productivity businesses. It's kind of like how people outside Israel say we've become a high-tech powerhouse through the discipline of our military training, but actually the Israeli army is one of the world's worst bloated, effort-wasting bureaucracies for every soldier outside a tiny elite.