…so essentially More Free Stuff?
As I pointed out in this thread: It’s all for left-progressive social democracy. And, Looking around the world, at all the countries where things in general go as well as iin the U.S., and all the countries where things in general go better than in the U.S., and all the countries where things go worse, what appears to work better than anything else is social democracy. In Denmark, etc., you can still buy your iPhone, etc., plus you get the long vacations and family leave and job security and universal health care and low poverty and economic equality and everything else. Much better than Stalinism, much better than unfettered wilderness-capitalism.
This Country wasn’t created to be a social democracy.
This country was created to be an Anglo-Saxon Protestant agrarian republic. Something tells me that isn’t quite the description of the United States of America to-day.
This country, by which I mean the land, wasn’t created by you or me, nor my slave-dealing WASP cousins who founded the USA.
This polity, however, was sort of founded by slavers trying to make a fast buck on cash crops, chattel labor, and the Triangular Trade. Then it was reinvented by abolitionists. Then it was reinvented again by New Dealers and Social Liberals. Then we discovered we actually needed environmental laws, once we had a river catch fire.
There’s not some holy Prime Version of the USA that we are supposed to defer to.
a) Cite?
b) “This Country” was created to be what the citizens wanted, not whatever your vision of what the United States is supposed to be.
We’ve moved past vision of agrarian America. Welcome to the 20th Century. :rolleyes:
Of course not, because nobody but a few visionary radicals like Thomas Paine had even conceived anything like that in 1789. So what? We all know there are a lot of things about which our FFs were flat wrong, or which they lacked the capacity to imagine. That does not mean we have to let their imaginations limit our own.
England/Britain was not created to be a constitutional democratic parliamentary monarchy, either, but it worked out that way, and all for the best.
Do you people seriously believe that America could successfully adopt the principles of small European countries in which most everyone has the same ethnicity, culture, language, etc. ?
Yes.
How do any of those things make a fundamental difference in the feasibility of public policy?
Socialism requires social solidarity. The US isn’t wired like that.
Yes, we know, the “We’re just different, special, that’s all. American exceptionalism.” argument. We’ve all heard it before.
But can you go any deeper?
How about Canada? They’ve got about the same ethnic mix as us, they’re larger than us geographically, and they’ve got two fully-official national languages. Why can’t we emulate them?
If the U.S. weren’t wired like that we never would have won a war.
:dubious: You mean countries like France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Finland, and the UK? Because none of those is actually culturally uniform, nor (except arguably Finland) particularly small. Belgium is small; it’s definitely not culturally monolithic, though.
I suppose trying to copy Iceland or San Marino might be a pain. Was that suggested?
I believe we could do it better, because of economies of scale.
This country is created to be what the citizens want, if the citizens are in overwhelming agreement(as in, not 51% but more like 80-90%).
As of right now, this country is a decentralized authority with many veto points and a limited government. If you want a more centralized European-style state, just convince the vast majority of Americans to switch.
Social solidarity can be created (for example France well into the 19th Century had numerous provincial dialects that were practically languages) and this is obviously why I detest multikulti (as opposed to multiracialism) as well as why the European welfare states have been eroded in the past generation at the same time mass foreign immigration began into said continent. For such reasons, while simultaneously seeking to expand our social insurance programs we must seek to assimilate our immigrants through English language education programs and the like as well as adopting judicious immigration protocols.
It’s on the List Of Things To Do™. Baby steps, baby steps. Check back in 200 years, we might even have a single payer health care system! :eek:
Some have tried, but it turns out that for some reason the vast majority of Americans prefer to believe exactly the same things as the Koch brothers, though I’m sure it’s just coincidence that the Kochs alone have $100 billion at stake and available to tell the vast majority of Americans what to believe, and all the Koch’s friends and corporations have trillions more to tell them what to believe. Which is, in a nutshell, that government is evil, taxes on the rich are evil, and corporations and rich people are God’s everlasting holy gift to mankind and must be worshipped.
But hey, there’s free speech, right? All someone has to do is start a blog explaining the issues and before you know it, universal health care and social democracy will come to America, persuaded by the brilliant reasoning and all four of the hippie stoners who read it! Free speech is a wonderful thing, as Scalia and Alito said when they ruled on Citizens United. :rolleyes: