Having a baby in the United States, The New York Times reported this week, is more expensive than pretty much anywhere else on earth. This is, of course, exactly the opposite of what Americans should want, as a public policy matter. It’s going to take lots more babies growing up into productive, healthy adults to get us through the country’s long-term Social Security and Medicare funding difficulties.

The high cost of childbirth in the U.S. is the product of a mix of private- and public-sector decisions, not a straight-out result of government policy. But it nonetheless got a few of my HBR colleagues and me thinking about what strange and not-so-strange economic incentives Americans face relative to citizens of other nations. So here is a mostly unscientific Independence Day list — compiled with lots of help from the databases of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a.k.a. the OECD, a.k.a. the rich nations’ club — of what sort of behaviors we’re collectively encouraging and discouraging.

1. We don’t want our fellow citizens to have kids. It’s not just the high cost of childbirth. In general, U.S. families get less help with the cost of child-rearing (in the form of tax breaks, government services, and cash handouts) than those in almost any other affluent nation. On the OECD’s list, only Mexico and South Korea devote a smaller percentage of GDP to family benefits. The U.S. also has just about the least supportive parental-leave policies in the developed world. Of course, we still do have kids, and the fertility rate in the U.S. is above the OECD average. So either (a) financial incentives don’t matter all that much or (b) for lots of societal and other reasons (we have more space, for example) Americans are inclined to have more kids, even though government policies discourage it. I think it’s b, and the financial incentives are beginning to win — the U.S. fertility rate is now barely above the OECD average, and some surprising countries — Sweden, Norway, France, Great Britain — are now producing more babies per capita than we are.

2. We don’t want our fellow citizens to go to college. Higher education costs students more in the U.S. than anywhere else in the OECD. We also have especially great universities, and lots of financial aid. But the general trend has one of skyrocketing tuition at both private and public institutions, and aid for students that, while rising, hasn’t kept up. Sure enough, the level of educational attainment in the U.S., once the highest in the world, has slid toward the middle of the OECD pack.

3. We want our fellow citizens to drive a lot. Among OECD countries, only Mexico levies lower taxes on gasoline and diesel. Then again, only Mexico and South Korea levy lower taxes overall, but the disparity on fuel taxes is much sharper than on the rest of the tax code. And I would imagine the U.S. spends less on public transit than other wealthy countries, but I’ve been having trouble finding evidence for or against this. (Any help would appreciated.)

4. We want our fellow citizens to be charitable and religious. The U.S. offers relatively big tax breaks for gifts to non-profits and religious organizations, and sure enough, the U.S. has higher rates of charitable giving (“private social expenditures,” in OECD lingo) and church attendance than other wealthy countries.

5. We want our corporations to keep their money outside the country. This one has been in the news enough lately that I’m not going to bother explaining it here. But it is pretty weird, no?

6. We want our fellow citizens to get their health care through their employers. The list of perverse incentives and disincentives relative to health care in the U.S. is so long and controversial (the tendency to favor health-care spending on the old over spending on the young and unborn, for example) that one could fill several lists with them alone. But this one is just so weird and pervasive that it deserves special mention. The country’s single biggest “tax expenditure,” by far, is the exclusion for employer-sponsored health insurance. If your employer subsidizes your health insurance, all that spending is tax deductible (for your employer). If you pay for your own, the tax breaks are much more limited. The result is a subsidy that delivers the bulk of its benefits to high-paid workers, incentivizes high spending on health care, discourages self-employment, and encourages companies to get themselves into trouble (GM was the most dramatic example of this) by overpromising on health benefits.

7. We want our affluent fellow citizens to save a lot for retirement. Next up on the tax-expenditure list are the various breaks for retirement savings. Encouraging people to save for retirement seems like a good thing, and it is a good thing, but the current U.S. array of tax incentives for 401(k)s, IRAs, Roth IRAs and the like all share one characteristic — the higher your tax bracket, the clearer the benefits. Yes, there are income cutoffs for some of these tax breaks; in general these programs are designed to benefit the upper middle class, not the wealthy (who have enough other ways to shelter their savings from taxes). And for lower-paid workers, Social Security actually does a pretty good job of replacing income in retirement. But the focus of U.S. retirement-income policymaking over the past few decades has been on encouraging those who already save to save more, not building true retirement security for the middle class. (Sorry, I’ve long been kind of obsessed with this one.)

8. We want our fellow citizens to own homes. Tax expenditure No. 3 is the home mortgage interest deduction. The reasoning here, I guess, is that homeowners make better citizens. More to the point, they vote. But home ownership can be pushed too far, as we learned in the recent real estate meltdown and financial crisis. And even if we want to encourage home ownership, the current tax treatment of mortgage interest is a spectacularly inefficient way to do it, with most of the benefits going to the people with the most expensive homes.

9. We want our fellow citizens to be fat. Corn is the most heavily subsidized crop in the U.S. It’s of limited nutritional value. It’s used to fatten up cattle, in the process making their meat far less healthy to eat. And it’s used to sweeten soft drinks, a big contributor to America’s skyrocketing obesity rates. On the plus side, ethanol subsidies in recent years, whatever their other dubious effects, at least diverted some corn from our guts to our gas tanks. On the whole, though, U.S. farm policy is geared toward encouraging the production of grains, soybeans, cotton, meat, and dairy — not the fruits and vegetables we’re supposed to be eating more of.

10. We want our fellow citizens to start businesses, sort of. The U.S. ranks fourth on the World Bank’s “Ease of Doing Business” index, behind only Singapore, Hong Kong, and New Zealand. That’s down from No. 1 when the index was launched almost a decade ago, which may or may not have any significance. But what definitely seems significant is that when you dig into the sub-rankings, the reasons the U.S. scores so high have entirely to do with its strong financial and legal systems. On factors that Congress or state lawmakers could easily affect, like how hard it is to get a construction permit, register property, or figure out your business taxes, the U.S. ranks much lower (17th, 25nd, and 69th, respectively).

Obviously, there are tons of other candidates for this list, and my selections owe much to my own biases and what happened to catch my attention one summer morning. Please feel encouraged to add yours in the comments. Happy 4th!