Roger Linn Instruments has announced that it’s raising the prices on the LinnStrument, a pioneering expressive electronic instrument, designed by Roger Linn.
As of January 1, 2026, LinnStrument prices will see the following increases:
- LinnStrument: from the current $1499 to US$1,649
- LinnStrument 128: from the current $1099 to US$1149
“While I must increase my prices to stay in business,” notes Linn, “I’ve decided to limit my increases and simply earn less profit.”
Linn says that the price hikes are driven by two things:
- Inflation – Linn notes that he released the LinnStrument 200 in 2014, and hasn’t raised his prices. Since then, though, his manufacturing costs have increased 37%.
- The Trump tariffs – Linn manufactures in the US, but uses many parts made in Taiwan and China. He estimates that the tariffs are adding an additional 10% to the manufacturing cost of the LinnStrument.
Linn adds that “sensing three continuous dimensions of touch, polyphonically on 200 or 128 touch zones, with high accuracy, high sensitivity, low latency and on a large playing surface, is simply expensive to do.”
“As a result of the above inflation, I’ve been steadily making less profit. My annual income from both LinnStrument models is about the same as an engineer’s salary, so I’m not getting rich and have no employees,” he shares. “But I am having a lot of fun!”
You can find details about the LinnStrument at the Roger Linn Design site.
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Admin: Comment deleted – misinformation presented as fact.
Keep comments on topic and constructive.
Well done America, you’ve sliced yourself open, carved up your own liver, & declared to the world you’ve successfully completed an appendectomy (while bleeding over the world).
But it’s not a tax on the people. And if you believe that, we have a nice bridge for you.
Call it what you want but these tariffs hurt customers the most.
Well for niche products like synthesizers then they actually hurt small business the most
Customers can live without synths
Good on Linn for calling the tariffs for what they are.
10% ? You cry babies can’t cough up 10% for a toy ?
Leftists rioted over soy but not gasoline.
Inflation has driven up costs close to 4 times more than the tariffs, but waaahaaahaaa let’s whine about the tariffs because that’s what CNNMSNBC tell us to whine about!
You don’t seem to realize that inflation is now being driven by the tariffs…
The tax should be on trump and other billionaires and not customers
37% inflation, 10% tarriffs. No one is talking about the first which was created by the previous administration and suddently tariffs are an evil thing. Of course Europe taxes everything sold within, with 24% vat, but that is not a tarriff or evil or whatever.
The government doesn’t control inflation, but it does control taxes.
So, yeah, we should be pissed off the Trump administration raises our taxes illegally.
When it comes to Europe’s VAT, they are the opposite of tariffs. They’re essentially a sales tax that pays for government services, and apply to just about everything.
VAT in the EU applies to goods produced in the EU as well as imported, so no, it is nothing like a tariff because it doesn’t discriminate about the origin of the goods.
Also the tariff on many goods is a lot higher than 10%, eg for a while goods imported from China were being taxed at 100%.
So what? It is a tax on everything sold. Does it make things cheaper for the consumer? Does it relieve us from taxes? Is it “free market”? No it isn’t! Everything dictated by lobbying and “friends”…And why is it bad to discriminate on the origin of goods? Because you couldn’t care less if your fellow citizen looses his income?
you couldn’t understand less about vat if you tried
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I’d rather have US made products.
I prefer made in America too but casting Asian manufacturing as “slave labor” is ignorant
By that logic why would anyone outside of USA buy one if it was made there?
I don’t know how Roger’s business does in different markets but people in the USA may or may not be his largest customer base.
You should start and run a factory in the US that creates those parts he needs, then. Good luck.
I think that’s the idea. If it’s just as expensive to buy parts created using abusive labor practices overseas, as it is to manufacture them here, there will be more of a market to just go ahead and manufacture them here.
Do you actually believe your arguments or are you merely playing devil’s advocate?
There’s this great development in agriculture, where at first the trumpies were like, “hey, we’ll grow that shit here”, but once they found out the reality — you don’t just suddenly start mass-producing some crop, especially if the climate doesn’t fit — then they dropped the tariffs.
Howard Lutnick is just a dumb trash-landlord from the Bronx. You think this guy actually understands how global trade works?
Why wouldn’t I believe facts? Component manufacturers are already moving production stateside. There is a company about 5 minutes from my work who used to produce industrial epoxies for the automotive industry in Asian countries who are now no longer planning on shipping their product from overseas and producing them here now. I
The Linnstrument is made in the USA.
It’s not possible to manufacture such advanced product today using only U.S made components.
Even if it were, redesigning would take time, money, and pose serious risks for a small business.
How do you expect any company to compete with Chinese efficiency and scale?
Tariffs are not going to do squat to address the reality that they make components at a fraction of the cost of what it would be in the US, and it would cost trillions in US government investment to convince US companies to take the risk to build the needed factories. Why would any company do this, when the tariffs are illegal and self-destructive to begin with?
It is my understanding that a lot of the components made in most electronics these days are simply not manufactured in the US at all so folks have few options if they want their products to be made solely in America. Perhaps this current climate will inspire an entrepreneur to make these parts locally but until that happens I’m not sure what else Roger is able to do.
Obviously you didn’t read the whole thing.
“Linn manufactures in the US, but uses many parts made in Taiwan and China”.
There you go.
So he only requires parts made from essential slave labor in Taiwan and China. Got it.
Kurt, you’re missing one key point. Taiwan and China have chip factories established that can turn on a dime and produce thousands of units on demand. Give them the schematic and you get a thousand+ working units by Friday. They serve the market. The U.S. simply doesn’t do that.
We all have our nice toys in part due to a social and economic structure people here wouldn’t tolerate. We’re one of the larger markets, so we approve with each purchase. Its hard to bear, because I love my toys like anyone else. All I can do is buy carefully and avoid the more obvious offenders.
Besides, if you work under fluorescent lights all day, churning out papers or widgets, you >are< slave labor. As Bill Hicks said "You're in the Dark Lord's territory, there's no point in being coy!" 😛
What makes Taiwan and China special though? Oh yeah – that labor that costs them nearly nothing. It’s so great that they have to have suicide nets around buildings to keep their workers from flinging themselves from rooftops out of despair. I make a lot of more than the average Asian factory worker, and I own my own home.
The point you are missing is that that if dirt cheap cost due to labor isn’t a factor, that manufacturing can just as easily be done stateside. Yes. manufacturing facilities will have to be built, but the idea that we should decimate our own production capabilities for cheap stuff, which is a huge national security problem, is pretty short sighted.
beware, your toaster is going to spill all your state secrets. ^^
oh wait, no, its your politicians that do that. no need for external interference. ^^
You live in a fantasy world and obviously don’t make these kinds of decisions in real life. Go read some actual information about how changing supply chains affects companies rather than the facebook BS you’re repeating. You think it’s easy because you don’t have to deal with it in real life.
Im not talking about supply chains. im talking about the “honorable” Pete Hegseth. you didnt get the hint, that tells me you are living in a dreamworld.
That person is replying to Kurt Knopp, not you. Perhaps it’s not obvious if you’re on mobile, but replies to people are indented from the message they’re replying to. The comment about supply chains should have been a clue, since that was the topic before you showed up.
I work for a manufacturer that builds in China and Malaysia. The workers most certainly do *not* earn “nearly nothing.” Wages and the standard of living have risen significantly over the past few years, which is one of the drivers behind higher prices. Combine that with import taxes, higher shipping costs and shortages and you have a recipe for inflation.
The cold reality is that if you want your electronic components manufactured in the USA by people earning USD$80K/year, you’re going to pay significantly more for iPhones, TVs, computers and nearly every other bit of tech. That will cause the American standard of living to fall sharply.
Companies that use semiconductors produced by TSMC in Taiwan: AMD, Apple, ARM, Broadcom, Marvell, MediaTek, Qualcomm, and Nvidia. I think that just about covers all of the integrated chipsets in American-made smartphones and CPUs and video cards in computers and laptops. Guess you’ll need to get off Synthtopia if you want to stay on your high horse.
I get it Kurt. You’re a Trump fan. Just admit it. Confession is good for the soul.
You keep saying ‘slave labor’ like that’s a given, and something different than the common practice of US employers playing poverty wages, and politicians letting them to do this with underage Americans.
About 1/4 of US jobs pay so little that the employees can’t make basic living expenses.
Right…..
Your comment is a lazy smear dressed up as moral outrage. The insinuation about “essential slave labour in Taiwan and China” is not only xenophobic; it is economically illiterate. Modern electronics arise from globally interdependent supply chains—chips fabricated in one nation, substrates in another, assembly elsewhere, logistics everywhere. To pretend exploitation is a foreign import is to absolve the United States of its own well-documented abuses: wage theft, union-busting, coerced undocumented labour, predatory subcontracting, migrant exploitation, and the “independent contractor” façade that guts worker protections while enriching intermediaries. If you wish to discuss ethics in manufacturing, begin by acknowledging that the dirt under the American rug is not moral pixie dust.
The chest-thumping myth that Americans are uniquely “free,” economically sovereign, and governed by an administration dedicated to domestic manufacturing collapses under even casual scrutiny. Freedom without accessible healthcare is a ransom note. Freedom with stagnant real wages and housing that outstrips median incomes is a fiction. Freedom tethered to a for-profit education machine that delivers under-resourced graduates shackled by decades of debt is a gilded cage. Meanwhile, political theatre trumpets “reshoring” while quietly extending the same corporate carve-outs and tax engineering that encourage offshoring, monopolistic consolidation, and round-tripped profits. Spare us the flag-waving sermon; material conditions tell the truth.
Donald Trump, who postures as patron saint of the “forgotten American worker,” has funnelled tens of billions of dollars into the commercial and political machinery surrounding himself and his two profoundly unimpressive sons. Far from defending ordinary citizens, this family enterprise has treated the state as a personal cash-flow instrument—sweetheart arrangements, influence peddling, and the laundering of donor and government resources into a dynastic fiefdom. The hypocrisy is staggering: loud proclamations of working-class solidarity while siphoning public wealth into private pockets.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, self-styled as visionary industrialists whom have perfected a system built to privatise gains and socialise losses. Their corporations rely on tiered labour structures, anti-union intimidation, quota-driven injury cycles, and a contractor ecosystem that removes security while delivering record compensation to the very top. They take home astronomical pay packages while lobbying for tax treatment more favourable than that afforded to the warehouse labourers, drivers, and service workers whose toil props up their empires. The cynicism would be comical did its consequences not fall on millions.
Let us speak plainly: coerced and coercive labour is not an exotic foreign commodity; it is structurally American. From institutionalised corporate culture that makes the prison system seem almost liberating, to meatpacking lines; from warehouse quotas to algorithmic gig piecework; from wage theft to “independent contractor” alibis—abuse is domestic, routine, and spectacularly profitable. Healthcare is a ransom. Education is a debt trap. Wages stagnate by design. These conditions are constructed and defended by politicians who perform as tribunes of the people while sluicing benefits to donors and family brands, and by tycoons whose compensation and tax arbitrage would make a robber baron blush.
If your standard is “no coerced labour, living wages, enforceable safety,” apply it to your own America First before you lecture Shenzhen. Until then, your outrage is not moral; it is performance, your only real export, proudly stamped Made in the USA.
Thou shall not read (and understand) the whole story!
Otherwise your believes will come crushing down on you…
>slave labor
worn out stereotype. Factory work is not the most exciting, but conditions in the typical factory in China are no different from a small business in the US. For electronics it’s mostly assembly and QA work, with the really tedious stuff (soldering components to circuit boards being wholly automated.
Do you really imagine capacitors, diodes, and switches are being cranked out of dank satanic mills by crying children? China and Taiwan are modern countries with some advantages and some flaws.
Most electronic components are manufactured in China, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Malaysia. Slavery is illegal in all of these states. China, the largest manufacturer, has laws for minimum wage and maximum working hours. And unlike the US, they have national health insurance for 95% of the population, paid maternity leave for a minimum of three months, affordable education, legal abortion, high public safety, advanced public transport… I’m not saying it’s paradise (obviously not), but the picture you paint in your comments seems a tad outdated and biased. Especially since the US is currently not a particularly safe place for many of the workers that could potentially produce electronic components, lacks the infrastructure, and know-how.
The average Chinese factory worker makes $4 an hour, and often times has to live on-site working insane long hours. Just because there are laws against owning the workers doesn’t mean they aren’t being taken advantage of, being abused, and being treated inhumanely. But hey – get those cheap electronics off their backs! LOL
I know facts will not change how you think because it seems your mind is set but the average monthly salary for workers in China’s electronic technology, semiconductor, and integrated circuit industry is $1,694.
This amount has a purchasing power equivalent to approximately $4,900 in the United States, based on the latest purchasing power parity (PPP) data.
That would equal a monthly salary of approximately 4,556 Chinese Yuan, placing the factory workers at the upper end of the average Chinese middle-class income. An upper-middle-class salary in the U.S. is generally between $117,000 and $150,000. With an average annual income of $60,843, electronics factory workers in the US earn only about half that amount, placing them at the lower end of the middle class.
That apart, nobody keeps American companies from making electronic components domestically, and I am sure many people would be happy to buy them. Currently, they don’t exist, so we either have to import them from Asia or we can’t have any electronic devices.
Kurt – The lowest US federal minimum wage is $2.13/hour, for workers that have to work crazy hours and rely on the generosity of strangers’ tips to be able to survive.
People 20 and under can be paid $4.25/hour.
BUT CHINESE SLAVES!!!!!
Yeah, hopefully Trump’s tariff nonsense will work and we’ll finally be able to rest easy at night knowing the components in our electronics are manufactured by homeless US workers making $7 per hour with insane hours and no access to healthcare and fewer and fewer workplace protections thanks to eroded government regulatory power! God bless America.
Corporations shifted the manufacture of high tech components to cheaper countries decades ago. There is no significant manufacturing base in the USA, unless you’re making $20 million military aircraft, guns or plastic garbage bins.
Kurt – Comment deleted, you’re stating misinformation as fact.
Keep comments on topic and constructive.
If he covered it in gold leaf and renamed it the Trumpstrument, Roger would get an import exemption.
But then nobody would buy the instrument.
But then it would only be capable of making fart sounds.
Fully polyphonic, three dimensional, fart sounds.
Brostep revival?
Hahahaha! Made my day this!
I wish he got rich
Linn is a genius and a great guy.
Based on how it turned out for Bob Moog, Tom Oberheim, Linn, Roger Smith and other pioneers, Instrument design isn’t the field to go into if you want to get rich.
Somehow, I don’t see the problem with tariffs.
After all most of you guys probably voted for Trump to begin with… LoL
Stop buying so much imported shite then. But uk manufactured stuff. Great reason to go modular. The tariffs should encourage more people to support their own ….
Tariffs kill manufacturing, cause inflation and increase unemployment.
These are well-known economic facts, and we’re definitely seeing this as the result of the Trump Tariffs.
Support uk brands …. That’s how you beat it.
On one hand people are voting these far Leftists all over the place — where government control over everything is the MO, on the other hand they have an issue for the federal Government doing what they were voted to do.
So, If you really want a Linn instrument, just buy it. It’s a very specialized instrument and the increase of the $150 is not going to make a difference in the long run.
I filled my gas tank last night, $124!
Nice of Linn to explain why the increase, even though not necessary in my opinion.
The increase means nothing in today’s economy… Moog raised prices… heck, even Behringer raised prices…lol.
Still better than a Haken at $5K and up…
Go get it and enjoy it…
“people are voting these far Leftists all over the place”
Right wing media likes to label Democrats as lefties and commies when they promote things that are standard in every other developed country – like universal healthcare, parental leave, progressive social policies, etc.
Can you name a real ‘far Leftist’ in the US?
Fyi, I am an independent, I have no interest in either party other than common sense policy and economics. And to answer your question:
NYC Mayor, Boston Mayor, Chicago Mayor, CA Governor, etc., etc., etc.
Look at the policies they promote and you’ll find out.
The semantics of what a ‘real Leftist’ is, but I am not sure you have an understanding of the end result of that ideology. I have lived under a regime that started as a Socialist society and very fast went into full blown North-Korean style regime.
So, let’s keep simple:
People voted on a presented platform and now they’re keeping that promise to their electorate. You and I may dislike it, but this is democracy in action.
I do think the Linnstrument is a great controller, the price hike seems to take effect in Jan 2026, there is time to save for the $150 increase. At the end of the day, if you really need it you’ll get it regardless. Move on to making music…
You’re confusing Democratic Socialists with commies.
Anybody doing this either has an agenda to mislead people or is clueless.
Name a ‘lefty’ policy of any of these guys that isn’t commonplace in Europe.
Free buses, affordable housing, universal healthcare, a living minimum wage, etc? These are all standard in other modern countries beside the US, people are happier and live longer in those countries, and the countries are not at risk of ‘turning commie’!
US media is owned by the oligarchs, and has brainwashed many of the simpletons in America to think that these things are impossible or ‘commie’. Trump wants to make you think that 2/3rds of Americans are a bunch of freeloaders, too.
Alright man…. you win 🙂
Just let us know if you’re getting the Linnstrument and if you end up liking it or not…
lol
Free buses, affordable housing, universal healthcare, a living minimum wage, etc? These are all standard in other modern countries beside the US, people are happier and live longer in those countries, and the countries are not at risk of ‘turning commie’!
Free buses? Where? I was in Berlin, Prague and Vienna last September, and nothing is free regarding transportation. Affordable housing? Where?
European countries that have social programs galore have far lower populations than the United States, yet working citizens there often pay high taxes. Before he passed away, my German uncle lived near Nuremberg. As an engineer and in management, he had a good salary with a large, well-known German company. My aunt and uncle paid a 45% tax rate. Are higher tax rates to fund an even larger social welfare system what you want here in the United States?
Many of these European countries are fiscal trainwrecks:
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/britain-may-economic-mess-france-050200265.html
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/11/30/germany-is-in-a-bizarre-fiscal-mess-of-its-own-making
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/10/22/what-is-the-uks-real-debt-crisis/
The famous quote attributed to Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with Socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
Social programs should be a springboard to self-sufficiency, help when needed. They should not be a hammock for people who live their entire lives with their hand out expecting other people to fill it.
Higher music gear prices are definitely a First World “problem.” If you can’t afford an additional percentage due to tariff “taxes” on musical gear, then you probably couldn’t actually afford the gear to begin with.
“Free buses? Where?” – your personal holiday is not a data set. You went to three cities, bought some tickets and concluded that fare-free transport and social provision are myths. That is not analysis, it is sightseeing. There are European municipalities with free or effectively free buses and trams for residents, and cities with massive social and non-profit housing sectors that keep rents down for millions. Asking “Affordable housing? Where?” just advertises that you have not looked beyond your own itinerary while lecturing everyone else about economics.
Your tax story is equally one-eyed. Quoting a 45 percent German tax rate without mentioning what people receive for it is not honesty, it is accounting theatre. Those contributions buy universal or near-universal healthcare, stronger pensions, cheaper universities and more robust safety nets, while Americans often swap lower taxes for higher private bills and worse health outcomes. Waving around articles about the United Kingdom and Germany as “fiscal trainwrecks” conveniently ignores that the United States runs very high public debt and persistent large deficits, and that Britain’s stagnation followed a decade of austerity, not a socialist spending binge. Thatcher’s line about “other people’s money” is not an insight, it is a lazy bumper-sticker for people who would rather sneer at social democracy than engage with economics or evidence.: every government, right or left, spends “other people’s money”! The question is whether it buys longer, healthier, more secure lives. In much of Europe, it does.
Finally, the tariffs remark gives the game away. Saying that if people cannot absorb an extra tariff-driven mark-up on instruments they “could not afford it anyway” is not hard-headed realism, it is class disdain. A double-digit price rise is exactly what pushes something from “barely attainable after months of saving” to “out of reach” for working musicians. Tariffs are regressive by design: they bite proportionally harder at the bottom than at the top. When you dismiss that, lean on anecdotes as if they were data and reduce complex welfare systems to “hammocks”, you are not defending fiscal responsibility or freedom; you are defending your comfort with other people having less, and trying to wrap it in wise-sounding clichés.
And for the “conservatives” who must always reach back to the imagined glory of yesterday’s relics rather than invest in any new thinking to confront the present – stripped of the mythology, Thatcher was less an “Iron Lady” than a reductionist class politician, whose entire economic project boiled down to a single principle: dismantle protections for the many to entrench privilege for the few. I lived through it and I come from old money!
Free buses? Where?” – your personal holiday is not a data set. You went to three cities, bought some tickets and concluded that fare-free transport and social provision are myths…
Free transportation is the exception and far from the rule.
Asking “Affordable housing? Where?” just advertises that you have not looked beyond your own itinerary while lecturing everyone else about economics…
This section of your rebuttal is entirely ad hominem. The question remains: Where is there affordable housing?
Your tax story is equally one-eyed. Quoting a 45 percent German tax rate without mentioning what people receive for it is not honesty, it is accounting theatre…
Dishonest? It doesn’t matter what the people receive. 45% percent is a high tax rate. That’s less money in the pocket of the worker who earned the money and less money for the worker to spend as the worker sees fit. Are higher tax rates to fund an even larger social welfare system what you want here in the United States? Apparently, you do.
Thatcher’s line about “other people’s money” is not an insight, it is a lazy bumper-sticker for people who would rather sneer at social democracy …
Of course you don’t like the Thatcher quote, because this reality conflicts with your ideology.
Finally, the tariffs remark gives the game away…
What game? That I am a proponent of tariffs. Yes, I am. I cheered when President Clinton enacted a multi-billion dollar tariff on Chinese goods. I cheered when President Obama enacted a 35% tariff on Chinese tires (conversely, I was disappointed when they respectively signed PNTR, NAFTA and TPP). I was a proponent of the second President Bush’s steel tariffs. Had President Biden done this sooner, the Democrats may have held the White House:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/13/us/politics/biden-tariffs-chinese-goods-clothing.html
Saying that if people cannot absorb an extra tariff-driven mark-up on instruments they “could not afford it anyway” is not hard-headed realism, it is class disdain…
Your rebuttal here is entirely subjective. I disagree with your opinion.
And for the “conservatives” who must always reach back to the imagined glory of yesterday’s relics rather than invest in any new thinking to confront the present – stripped of the mythology, Thatcher was less an “Iron Lady” than a reductionist class politician, whose entire economic project boiled down to a single principle: dismantle protections for the many to entrench privilege for the few. I lived through it and I come from old money!
Invest in new thinking? Raising taxes to create a larger social welfare state is new thinking? A social welfare state utopia doesn’t exist anywhere, never has and never will.
Yes, I am informed by the pragmatic reality of sharing risk and burden, while you desperately cling to a blinding ideology that distorts hard truths into false equivalences.
You asked “Free buses? Where?” as if the idea were fanciful. It is not. There are European cities and even whole countries that have made local or national public transport free at the point of use. You can argue they are exceptions or that you dislike the policy, but you cannot pretend they do not exist and then quietly retreat to “well, it is rare” when challenged. That is not analysis, it is moving the goalposts.
The same manoeuvre appears with housing. “Affordable housing? Where?” is not a serious question when cities such as Vienna have deliberately built and maintained large social and limited-profit housing sectors precisely to keep rents low for ordinary tenants. You are entirely free to oppose that model, but not to behave as though no such model exists and then call it “ad hominem” when someone points out that you have simply not looked.
On tax, you finally state that it “doesn’t matter what people receive” in return for a 45 per cent rate. At that point you have left economics and entered dogma. For anyone concerned with outcomes, it matters very much whether higher headline tax buys universal healthcare, pensions and security, or whether lower tax reappears as inflated premiums, medical debt and foregone treatment. The United States spends more per person on healthcare than its peers and delivers worse average health. Many higher-tax countries deliver longer, healthier lives and less financial ruin. Reducing that to “less money in the worker’s pocket” while ignoring the bills that arrive in other envelopes is not hard-headed, it is selective.
Your use of Thatcher’s “other people’s money” is the same sleight of hand. Every modern state, right or left, spends other people’s money; that is what a state does. The real questions are who is taxed, by what means, and for whose benefit. You deploy the line only to delegitimise spending on health, housing and income support, while saying nothing about the very large flows of “other people’s money” that end up as subsidies, tax breaks and procurement for the already comfortable.
On tariffs, listing the occasions when you applauded them under Clinton, Bush, Obama or Biden does not answer the basic question of incidence: who actually pays. The recent experience of United States tariffs is clear that a large share of the cost is passed on as higher prices at home, which makes tariffs a de facto regressive tax. Against that, you offer only “I support tariffs” and dismiss anyone priced out by the resulting mark-ups as someone who “could not afford it anyway”. That is not an economic argument; it is a declaration that those on the margin do not count.
And no one has promised a “social welfare utopia”. The claim is simply that wealthy democracies can choose to pool risk and fund essentials collectively so that fewer people live one illness, one redundancy or one rent rise away from catastrophe. Many European countries already do this, within plainly capitalist economies. You erase that reality under the word “socialism” and pronounce it impossible.
You are entitled to prefer lower headline taxes and higher personal risk. You are not entitled to pretend that working social-democratic models do not exist, that outcomes “do not matter”, and then baptise your preferences as neutral reality. That is not a critique of socialism; it is a defence of your comfort with other people bearing the cost.
I like your derogatory writing style. Let’s try it.
You asked “Free buses? Where?” as if the idea were fanciful. It is not. There are European cities and even whole countries that have made local or national public transport free at the point of use…
It’s obvious that you are desperately clinging to an ideology while you blindly look the other way when that ideology conflicts with reality. Again, free transportation entails few exceptions and is far from the rule. Entire countries? Yeah, the next time I’m in Luxembourg or Malta, I’ll make sure to catch a free bus.
The same manoeuvre appears with housing. “Affordable housing? Where?” is not a serious question when cities such as Vienna have deliberately built and maintained large social and limited-profit housing sectors precisely to keep rents low for ordinary tenants…
You seriously expect people to believe that housing is affordable throughout your social welfare utopian states?
Apartments? Where are there affordable houses? Why do the majority of people in countries with social welfare systems have to live in apartments?
On tax, you finally state that it “doesn’t matter what people receive” in return for a 45 per cent rate. At that point you have left economics and entered dogma…
And you haven’t left economics for dogma? Again, that’s less money in the pocket of the worker who earned the money and less money for the worker to spend as the worker sees fit. You seem to think that more money should be taken out of the American workers’ pockets before they see their paychecks. Why stop at 45%? Why not tax people at 100% and hand them everything in life? Why not? Let’s hear your answer to that.
On tariffs, listing the occasions when you applauded them under Clinton, Bush, Obama or Biden does not answer the basic question of incidence: who actually pays….
Again, your rebuttal is subjective. I disagree with your opinion. Who actually pays? The US worker who lost his/her job thanks to NAFTA, PNTR and TPP. But yeah, let’s let China and other countries continue to stick it to the USA. Let’s take even more money away from the US worker in higher tax rates to pay for utopian freebies while jobs go overseas. Let Nancy Pelosi explain it to you. This was years before she realized that there was/is more money to be had by embracing the system than by fighting against it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LayOiPkvKBw
And no one has promised a “social welfare utopia”. The claim is simply that wealthy democracies can choose to pool risk and fund essentials collectively so that fewer people live one illness, one redundancy or one rent rise away from catastrophe.
Pool risk collectively and fund essentials? Another one of your Leftist utopian ideals that don’t work in reality. Why did I see beggars in Berlin? And in Prague? And in Vienna?
You are entitled to prefer lower headline taxes and higher personal risk. You are not entitled to pretend that working social-democratic models do not exist, that outcomes “do not matter”, and then baptise your preferences as neutral reality…
Yes, I am informed by the pragmatic reality of working hard to make a living, while you desperately cling to a blinding ideology that distorts hard truths into false equivalences.
This is not debate; it is deliberate deception: you assemble half-truths, dodge measurement and manufacture noise and still no amount of cacophony can cover up the thunderous collapse of your rotting system you so hopelessly attempt to protect.
You attempt to reframe the existence of free public transport by shrinking the field of view to two countries, and then presenting that as though it answered the point. The fact remains that there are more than 170 ‘municipalities’ within European states that offer and operate free-to-use public transport systems, not as curiosities but as deliberate policy choices. Whether you like the policy or not is entirely separate from whether it exists. When confronted with its existence, you simply minimise it and declare victory. That is not argument; it is evasion.
Your response on housing repeats the same manoeuvre. No one claimed that “housing is affordable throughout” any country. The claim was that Vienna and comparable jurisdictions have engineered affordability by maintaining substantial social and limited-profit housing sectors. Instead of engaging with that, you shift to “Why do most people live in apartments?” as though the built form were equivalent to unaffordability. You conflate density with deprivation and then declare the model invalid, while ignoring the material outcome: stable rents, secure tenure, and far lower levels of housing stress than in the United States. Your reply sidesteps outcomes because outcomes contradict the assumptions you began with.
Your attempt to portray progressive taxation as a march to one hundred per cent taxation is a textbook strawman. No one proposed confiscatory rates, and no serious economist equates a forty-five per cent top marginal rate with a prelude to full state appropriation. The point you avoid is that lower headline taxation in the United States does not result in lower overall costs for most citizens. It simply displaces the cost into healthcare premiums, deductibles, medical debt, and other privatised liabilities. Your insistence that taxation is always and everywhere “less money in the worker’s pocket” ignores the documented reality that Americans pay more privately for inferior health outcomes than citizens of many countries with higher taxes. It is not dogma to recognise this; it is empirical observation.
Your discussion of tariffs ignores the central issue of incidence. The question is not whether you support tariffs emotionally, nor whether particular trade agreements harmed particular communities. The question is who pays the cost of a tariff once imposed. You did not answer that question, because the answer undermines your position: consumers pay a significant share through increased prices, and those price rises fall most sharply on low-income households. Calling this “subjective” does not make it so. You substitute indignation for analysis and hope no one notices the switch.
Your remarks on “beggars in Berlin” are another deflection. No one has proposed that social democracy abolishes all misfortune or that no European city contains poverty. The point is that pooled risk, universal services, and collective funding reduce insecurity dramatically relative to systems that rely on private payment for essential services. You ignore this entirely and instead present the existence of any hardship anywhere as a refutation of the model itself. By that standard, the presence of homelessness in the United States would invalidate every model you endorse, yet you do not apply the logic consistently.
Finally, you close by mirroring my language in the hope that the appearance of symmetry will substitute for substance. But repeating words does not equal a counter point, I get it, you have none. You still cannot reconcile with the existence of functioning social-democratic systems, the evidence on health and cost outcomes, the distributional effects of tariffs, or the empirical results of public housing models. You gesture towards “hard truths” while avoiding the measurable ones.
The reality of your system, ideology, and its hollow defence is the remains of a carcass: financialised, extractive, unequal, and dependent on public intervention to stave off collapse. My advice to you: learn a foreign language, and familiarise yourself with global asylum laws.
To the moderator, this will be my final comment/reply on this topic. Thank you for your patience with our back and forth.
This is not debate; it is deliberate deception: you assemble half-truths, dodge measurement and manufacture noise and still no amount of cacophony can cover up the thunderous collapse of your rotting system you so hopelessly attempt to protect.
Wow, you use a lot of descriptive words. More ad hominem.
You attempt to reframe the existence of free public transport by shrinking the field of view to two countries, and then presenting that as though it answered the point. The fact remains that there are more than 170 ‘municipalities’ within European states that offer and operate free-to-use public transport systems:
You wrote previously, “…and even whole countries that have made local or national public transport free at the point of use.” That “whole countries” comprises two, Luxembourg and Malta. You keep trying to convince yourself and others that free transportation is widespread. For the third time (let me emphasize it with capital letters), free transportation is the exception and FAR from the rule. 170 municipalities? Per Google:
There are approximately 92,247 municipalities in the European Union and around 160,000 local governments across all 47 Council of Europe member states.
170 municipalities out 92,000. And you’re trying to extol the virtues of free transportation in social welfare utopias as if free transportation is widespread? Who is being deceiving?
Your response on housing repeats the same manoeuvre…
You accuse me of evading? You never answer questions. Again, you seriously expect people to believe that housing is affordable throughout your social welfare utopian states?
Again, why do the majority of people in countries with social welfare systems have to live in apartments? Don’t write prose that provides an ad hominem attack, answer the question.
I have a 31 year old son who a few years back bought and lives with his wife and kids in a beautiful 2,800 sq ft. house. I have a 27 year old daughter who bought and lives with her husband and kids in a beautiful house. They would never have these houses and be living in these houses in their 20s in your social welfare utopian states.
Your attempt to portray progressive taxation as a march to one hundred per cent taxation is a textbook strawman…
Yet again, you didn’t answer the question. What is an acceptable tax rate? Why stop at 45%? Why not an even higher tax rate? Why not tax people at 100% and hand them everything in life? Why not? Let’s hear your answer to that. You think that higher taxes and better social welfare societies go hand and hand. Don’t write more evasive gobbledygook. Answer the question.
Your insistence that taxation is always and everywhere “less money in the worker’s pocket” ignores the documented reality that Americans pay more privately for inferior health outcomes than citizens of many countries with higher taxes. It is not dogma to recognise this; it is empirical observation.
My wife and I have great healthcare coverage via health insurance provided by my employer. So do my kids. We pay less per month out of pocket than we would at a higher federal tax rate. For those who do not have employer provided health insurance, there is subsidized ACA health insurance. For those who can’t afford ACA, individual states have programs that provide health insurance coverage to low-income residents (e.g., BadgerCare in Wisconsin where I live).
Again, you didn’t respond to my comments/points regarding tariffs. What exactly did Nancy Pelosi say that is wrong? What? Did you listen to Nancy previously? Let Nancy explain it to you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LayOiPkvKBw
Your remarks on “beggars in Berlin” are another deflection…
The point is that it’s no better in your social welfare utopia states than it is in the United States. I have been to many parts of the world and far prefer the United States.
Finally, you close by mirroring my language in the hope that the appearance of symmetry will substitute for substance. But repeating words does not equal a counter point, I get it, you have none…
Here in the States, we have a term: know-it-all. This is the Google AI definition of a know-it-all:
A “know-it-all” is a person who acts as if they know everything and often dismisses the opinions of others. They can be arrogant, condescending, and may dominate conversations.
This is how you come across, as a know-it-all. I like your derogatory writing, but derogatory writing doesn’t become anyone.
No society is perfect. Never has been, never will be. If you think that social welfare states with higher tax rates are better than the United States, by all means go live there. In my opinion and in the opinion of hundreds of millions, the United States is the best place in the world to live. Since you don’t like the “rotting system” as you so called it, you are certainly free to live elsewhere.
If you truly believe your former government “became North Korea,” you are asserting a political transformation that has occurred exactly once in modern history, and only in North Korea. No other state has reproduced its structure. Not Cuba. Not Venezuela. Not the Eastern Bloc. Certainly not the Scandinavian welfare states. If your description were accurate, political scientists would be writing about your country as the second case in history. They are not. Because the claim is implausible at face value….
You also invoke “the semantics of what a real Leftist is,” then immediately demonstrate that you do not understand the ideological distinctions you are criticising. Social democracy, managed capitalism, welfare-statism, democratic socialism, state socialism, and totalitarian autocracy are not interchangeable. Lumping all into a single slippery slope fantasy of “socialist today, North Korea tomorrow” is not analysis. It is propaganda.
I will not continue debating this. At this point the exchange is not about policy at all; it is a small illustration of a much larger phenomenon. The United States is living through the consequences of a political culture in which bad-faith actors ascend by promising renewal while embodying, in practice, the very pathologies they claim to oppose: corruption, disdain for institutions, exploitation of division, and an economic model that strips public capacity while enriching private intermediaries. And your reply repeats the same pattern that has characterised this exchange from the outset: a refusal to engage with what was actually said, replaced instead by selective framing, personal anecdotes, and a determination to reduce complex systems to slogans.
On public transport, your fixation on “two countries” evades the substantive point. The reference to more than one hundred and seventy municipalities was not presented as a claim that Europe is uniformly fare-free; it was presented as evidence of policy reality. More importantly, you overlook the way these municipal systems propagate their model outward. Once established in major municipalities, the financing structures, administrative templates, and shared procurement frameworks extend to thousands of smaller cities, towns, and villages. This is how policy diffusion works: not by waiting for every jurisdiction to act simultaneously, but by scaling proven models through regional and inter-municipal cooperation. The only way to miss this is either not to know how European governance functions, or not to care. In either case, the simplification you offer is not analysis; it is misdirection.
On housing, you again avoid the central issue. No one claimed that every resident of a social-democratic country enjoys universal affordability. The claim was that jurisdictions such as Vienna demonstrate, empirically, that sustained public and limited-profit development can stabilise rents, ensure secure tenure, and dramatically reduce housing stress. Your reply replaces evidence with personal biography, as though your adult children’s ability to purchase detached homes in the United States were somehow a proxy for national housing outcomes. Density is not deprivation. Built form is not failure. What matters are outcomes, and the outcomes in these systems outperform the ones you are defending. You sidestep those outcomes because they contradict your premise.
Your attempted reductio on taxation is equally misplaced. It is not a “march to one hundred per cent taxation”; it is the observation that total household cost is what matters. In countries with higher formal tax rates, healthcare, education, childcare, and other essentials are delivered at lower total cost, with better population-level outcomes. Your individual experience with employer-based insurance does not negate the structural reality: the United States routinely produces the highest healthcare expenditure and some of the weakest outcomes in the developed world. Pointing to your own satisfaction with your private arrangement is not an argument; it is an anecdote that ignores the system’s documented failings.
On tariffs, you still have not answered the basic question. The issue is not whether you like tariffs. It is not whether a politician framed them persuasively. It is who pays. The economic incidence of tariffs falls disproportionately on consumers, particularly those with lower incomes. That is not ideology; it is the finding of every serious analysis on the subject. Your refusal to address this reveals a simple truth: confronting the numbers would collapse your position, so you avoid them.
Your remarks about poverty in European cities are another attempt at sleight of hand. No one claimed that social democracy eradicates hardship. The point, which you continue to avoid, is that systems built on pooling risk and providing universal services materially reduce insecurity relative to those that rely on private purchase for essential goods. If the existence of any hardship anywhere is enough for you to declare an entire model invalid, then by your own standard the American model fails outright. You apply this metric only in one direction because applying it consistently would undermine your argument.
Finally, your characterisation of disagreement as condescension is simply a way to avoid confronting evidence that does not support your worldview. A discussion grounded in measurement cannot progress if one side treats every data point as a personal affront and every structural comparison as an attack on national pride.
And this brings us back to the larger dynamic. The unravelling we are witnessing is not the result of foreign systems or social-democratic experiments elsewhere; it is the internal corrosion produced by leaders who have risen to prominence by presenting themselves as the cure to the very distortions they have helped entrench. A figure who promises to cleanse corruption while surrounding himself with it, who claims to defend the republic while undermining its institutions, who denounces decay while accelerating institutional breakdown, becomes the purest embodiment of this rot. This inversion — the claim of renewal masking the engine of degradation — now defines an entire political movement, and the consequences are plain to see.
Your replies reflect that same inversion: rhetoric in place of evidence, indignation in place of analysis, and a refusal to look directly at the measurable outcomes of the system you defend. There is nothing to be gained by repeating the cycle. The structural issues are empirical, not emotional, and no amount of argument-by-assertion will alter them.
Defending billionaire psychos is insane
The republicans did that.
Thank you, Mango Mussolini!
Tariffs and inflation are both irrelevant.
He hasn’t increased prices in over a decade. To match inflation Linnstrument would have to cost $2050, not $1649. The new price is a massive cost reduction compared to the original price, all things considered. Other companies increase prices by far more, you just don’t notice because they do it every year or whatever.
10% cost increase from tariffs is nothing. You only know about it because he told you. Otherwise you wouldn’t question it. China uses underpaid labour, no environmental controls, questionable quality control etc. and then dump on the open market. This is a very real and damaging problem from virtually every country.
They’ve also been exploiting trans-shipment to bypass global trade regulations.
Tariffs are completely justified. Financial illiteracy is annoying.
There’s more to life than feeding your gear addiction at the lowest possible price.
Wow, I don’t visit Synthtopia for a week, then return and see THIS thread.
Roger Linn is a class act. It’s impressive he’s managed to keep prices flat for a decade. Wish there were more companies that could/would do that.
Hope the decision to hold off for so long hasn’t affected his ability to live comfortably. What would be most people’s retirement years.
I’ll buy a Linnstrument when Trump give me that $2000 check ? A few bucks more and I’ll get a Microcosm as well ? If it doesnt happen then its Congress fault ?