So all you Europeans bashing the US, what other country in the world do you want to be the big shot?
Russia?
China?
At the end of the day discussions like this always have two sides–obnoxious jingoists, and obnoxious anti-American haters. The reality is America is the most powerful and the wealthiest country. “Exceptionalism” is a values/opinion judgment with no meaning. Some people view it as exceptional, some do not.
When jingoism causes Americans to lose sight of areas in which the country can improve, and areas in which the country has behaved badly, it is a problem because it hurts our ability to better ourselves.
But the opposite of this isn’t sweeping pronouncements that America is the worst thing ever, should be deeply ashamed of existing, that most of everything about America is shit, and that it’s all because Americans are big dumb dumbs that don’t know any better.
The counterpoint to stupid jingoism should be that America is a large, complex country with large, complex international commitments and responsibilities. It has a democratic system that mostly works, but has some real bad rotten parts that need improved. It has a set of domestic policies which are mostly okay, but often serve people less than it could and less effectively. Many other OECD countries can offer us lessons here because they’ve spent the 20th century living under the umbrella of American protection and have consequently, been free to devote more resources to some of this stuff than we have.
Iceland.
It is true that you get bashed a lot and often undeservedly, but you must admit that at times you really are asking for it. I mean come on: If someone on this formum were to open a thread claiming that Denmark was the best country in the world in every way that counts and that you should be accepting it as a shining example, it would not be long until a lot of American posters who never had a beef with the Danes would show up with lists of issues where Denmark sucked in their opinion. If you want to be popular, showing some humility might help.
You beat me to that one. 
I suspect the EU, as one entity.
I don’t think that’s an entirely fair characterization of the arguments in this thread. Remember, its OP contends that America is ‘the hope of the Earth, the city on the hill, and the gem of the world’. The response to this, in my eyes, has been an entirely measured pointing out of ways and areas in which America might stand some improvement. To try and strawman this into wholesale condemnation of everything America is and stands for just belies the sort of black-and-white, you’re either for America or against it mindset that’s behind much of the trouble with its self-imposed need for exceptionalism. It eliminates all possibility of measured response, and any even mildly critical voice is shouted down among reminders of how, without America, we’d probably all be Communists or Nazis by now.
America has accomplished many things. But it also faces difficult problems, and one of the greatest hurdles in addressing these problems is America’s image of America, and the widespread inability to even accept and take to heart the mildest criticism.
Who?
If the UK is an indication I wouldn’t make that bet.
You’ve conveniently left out the opportunity to answer “nobody”. I’d rather prefer every country be entirely accountable to a jury of its peers, and not have outliers like the USA or Russia (or the EU as a supranational entity, for that matter’s sake) who seem empowered by their military or economic clout to swing their dick every which way with little regard as to what they end up breaking.
Getting rid of the goddamnable security council which so thoroughly emasculates the actual power of the UN would be an excellent start.
that sounds as possible as eliminating all class distinctions. We saw how well that worked out from 1917-1991.
There’s too much going on here in this absurdly open-ended topic for me to address every point that’s come up, but a few of the things that have bugged me the most …
And as HMHW noted, the Press Freedom Index at Reporters Without Borders ranks US press freedom at #41 in the world. By sheer coincidence (I wasn’t looking for it) I just came across this article last night in the Columbia Journalism Review:
The shadowy war on the press: How the rich silence journalists
Another example I can think of is David Koch’s significant financial contribution to PBS. Who knows what havoc this has already wrought, but we do know that in at least one instance PBS had a film critical of the Koch brothers and decided not to run it. This is PBS, understand: a public, non-commercial, broadcaster, the kind that in other countries would be the one bastion of independence free from commercial and pecuniary interests.
One of my family members was involved in the historic fight to extend public hospital insurance in Saskatchewan to make it the first province in the country to have universal coverage for all medical services. It was also a bitter political battle in which even Americans got involved, with the AMA and American health insurance lobbyists sticking their noses in and making much the same failed arguments that they’re making today. The fight was ultimately successful and the Saskatchewan model worked so well it was eventually adopted by all provinces and became the basis of a national system that was enshrined in a foundational statement of principles in the Canada Health Act. Saskatchewan voters didn’t believe the lobbyists’ lies and fear-mongering, and with an established proof of how well single-payer worked, neither did most other Canadians. Today most Americans still do, as if insurance lobbyists’ mendacious bullshit was a self-evident truth.
In the many decades since, I’ve followed issues in health care economics with interest, especially following such notables as Ewe Reinhardt, a world-renowned specialist in health care economics at Princeton. And in practical day-to-day experience, I and most of my family live in Canada, but some close family members live in the US, and we compare our experiences frequently. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound arrogant, but when someone tells me that on matters of health insurance I don’t know what I’m talking about, and as proof, regurgitates the same deceptive talking points we’ve been hearing from health insurers for half a century, I just find it rather mildly amusing.
Health care economics is an enormously complex issue, and no one has all the answers or even a full understanding of all the factors in complex situations in different countries. Yet underlying the complexity some basic truths can be identified, beginning with the fact that the profits or revenues of the health insurance industry is not the issue at all. The actual problem lies in how private health insurance structurally changes the intrinsic nature of how health care is delivered. At the risk of oversimplying a complex issue, it’s fair to say that it has profound structural impacts in two ways:
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It’s clinically intrusive and administratively wasteful. It shifts a portion of clinical decision-making away from the medical practitioner and his patient and moves it to a bureaucrat who is motivated to avoid or minimize payment. To an insurance company, your health care is technically a “medical loss”. Single-payer or its equivalent is, by contrast, almost completely non-intrusive – a counter-intuitive fact about “government-run health insurance” that is sometimes called Reinhardt’s Irony, in honor of the above. This has a whole plethora of cascading consequences: claims denials and treatment compromises, and high costs because the patient ultimately has to pay both for the insurance bureaucracy that tries to avoid paying claims and for the medical bureaucracy that is constantly fighting it. The net result in an administrative nightmare awash in paperwork and bureaucracy that is enormously costly and wasteful.
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It has almost no capacity for cost control. In private insurance as it exists in the US, there is neither an authority nor an incentive for cost control; insurance companies are happy to pay what the market demands, and pass the costs on to their customers. This is no small factor. The costs for common medical procedures in the US are often many multiples of what they are just across the border in Canada – not a few percentage points higher, but often many times higher. To be sure, it’s technically possible to achieve cost controls in a multi-payer system, but to do that you’d need a strict regulatory regime that imposes negotiated standardized fees and a uniform community-based rating system. But such a regime, as in Germany’s statutory health insurance system, would for all practical purpose be a de facto single-payer system.
Put 1 and 2 together and then look at any chart of per-capita health care costs and see where the US sits, and one can begin to understand.
Incidentally, and quite apropos in a discussion about American exceptionalism, Reinhardt recently made the interesting observation that although single-payer (or its de facto regulated equivalent) is the preferable health care model, it may indeed have problems working well in the US – not because the US is too big, or too diverse, or any of the other talking points we often hear, but because the American political system is too corrupt.
That doesn’t refute what I was saying. Part of the independence movement was indeed to get away from imposed colonialism and rule by aristocracy, which was precisely why such a strong emphasis was put on democratic principles. The reason for the elitism and deliberate hobbling of government that reflected an underlying distrust of democracy is that it was appropriate for the times, when only a relatively small minority like the Founders had any education or any reasonable understanding of the world.
Yes, but you misunderstand the argument. It’s not that the kinds of things some of us have been criticizing are qualitatively unique to the US, it’s the extent to which they have become extreme in the US.
I agree with you that it’s mass shootings that get most of the public attention, and that some of this attention is misdirected to the sensational rather than the more mundane but much more prevalent gun fatalities, but the fact is, both things are problems.
Mass shootings may only account for a tiny percentage of gun deaths, but that’s only because gun deaths are so damn common in the US. The US is plagued by dozens of mass shootings every year, more or less, depending on how you measure them, while other countries go for decades without them or never had them at all. And the problem of particularly lethal rapid-firing weapons with large magazines that have no actual non-military use is a legitimate one. That said, the general proliferation of guns and the day-to-day carnage caused by them is a different and a very significant problem.
Another article I came across by sheer coincidence that I wasn’t particularly looking for:
Tiny trigger fingers: the deadly mix of children and guns in the U.S.
Between 2007 and 2014, 488 children from birth to age 14 were killed in unintentional firearm incidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control. It doesn’t have statistics for last year yet.
Take a look at the picture of the little tiny girl who looks to be about seven years old, with the lunatic towering above her showing her how to fire a handgun. It should be labeled “American exceptionalism”!
I basically agree with that assessment, although I don’t think that the reason you offer in your last sentence is correct.
It’s quite possible. There have been long stretches of history without superpowers, and instead a multitude of Great Powers existing in a state of rough parity of military and/or economic power. 1815-1914 was one such stretch.
Whether such a condition is strictly better than one with one or more superpowers is a matter for argument, but there’s no law of the universe requiring superpowers to exist.
Those rankings are nonsense, the U.S. is one of the few countries where you can print largely whatever you want. Several of those listed above us have hate speech and libel laws that would never survive constitutional scrutiny here. That’s a politically motivated hack-list.
The United Kingdom being ahead of us is absurd–their libel laws are ridiculous. Their laws against commenting on ongoing political elections, likewise absurd.
Looking at their methodology, the only argument against us being #1 is we prosecute journalists who won’t reveal their sources in criminal investigations and we prosecute “whistleblowers” (who aren’t journalists at all.) So the Reporters Without Borders rankings are really just a list of countries that give journalists “supra-special privileges regular citizens are not entitled to”, not a list of actual press freedom.
I don’t much care if you sound arrogant–you just sound simply misinformed. Health insurance companies are not the major drivers of costs in American healthcare. You appear to deeply dislike them, but you simply don’t understand the costs involved.
Hospitals and doctors charge such high prices because they essentially function as regional monopolies and a guild-like work system. If you just swapped out government with health insurance companies that would not change–unless you institute cost controls. Health insurance companies are not why we don’t have cost controls, they are a naturally developing salve to the consequence of not having cost controls. When a product is so needed, and when the producers of it can artificially control its supply (like the AMA does by making sure the number of seats in medical schools across the country has barely budged since the 1970s) then the only means to control costs is with government intervention.
You’ve for some reason chosen to look at the issue 100% backwards.
No-it wasn’t. It was to get away from British elites ruling over American colonial elites.
Opinion with no substance.
American spent around ~8% of GDP on defense for the early phase of the Cold War, decreasing down to 5% under Jimmy Carter, then going up to 6-7% under Reagan. It’s fallen down to around 3.5% now.
Canada, as a point of example (and in refusal to live up to its NATO commitments) spends 1% of GDP, largely because Canada knows it could disband its military entirely and America would still protect it for geopolitical concerns. Canada is a parasitic leach, and so is the European Union, when it comes to defense.
If you don’t think spending 3.5x as much on defense, accounting for 53% of our discretionary spending, has taken money away from other things like domestic social programs, you’re gravely mistaken. There’s an old allegory about guns and butter, that largely holds true.
According to this, we actually have the same tax burden as Canada and a slightly higher tax burden than the United Kingdom. So the idea that we could just jack taxes up isn’t as realistic as it might at first seem (most people forget Americans pay significant state and local taxes, many countries like Britain have very low taxes other than national ones, the council tax which is akin to a property tax in Britain is immensely lower than American property taxes, as one example.)
Why would any of the major powers voluntarily cede power to weak countries? How is that in the interest of the big 5?
Even Ali G knows what’s up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV3ncKB8a4s
Um, fairness ? Not being both judge and party ? Checks and balances ?
Mwahaha who am I kidding. Pass that bottle again.
The question was as to preference, not what is considered realistically achievable. America as a superpower is the least bad option for the foreseeable future - not because it is somehow an exceptionally great country, but because it is less exceptionally awful than Russia and China on a number of important matters. This does not change the fact that I consider the existence of superpowers a blight on the world and would greatly prefer none existed at all - and certainly that none existed in their more-or-less wholly unchecked current state.
That is so astoundingly counter-factual that I wonder if you even read or understood what I was saying, most notably the parts that you didn’t quote, including the two fundamental reasons for US health care costs that I cited. Do you believe those reasons are wrong, and I just “don’t understand” something? Because that’s what every study in health care economics indicates to be the primary cost contributors. Instead, you say something about “regional monopolies”, whatever that’s supposed to mean. First of all, even here in the land of “socialized medicine” in Canada, clinics and hospitals are demonstrably competitive, competing for ratings, patients, service revenues, donations, and capital grant money. And secondly, that service delivery landscape is much the same in many other countries, so if that’s why it’s the big cost driver, why doesn’t it do so in all those other countries?
You state as fact that “health insurance companies are not the major drivers of costs in American healthcare”. Do you understand what I mean when I say that they structurally change the fundamental nature of the entire health care system? Please go back and read those two numbered points again that you failed to quote or respond to. I really don’t think you understood them.
You state as fact that “If you just swapped out government with health insurance companies that would not change–unless you institute cost controls.” That is just flat-out wrong. It’s been estimated that you’d save about $350 billion a year just on the elimination of administrative overhead if there was true universal health care.
Furthermore, that’s just the tip of the iceberg – you can’t just dismissively rule out “cost controls” and, frankly, I don’t think you quite understand what the term means. It’s a concept that goes hand in hand with the community-based rating model of health care funding as opposed to the private insurance risk-rated model; essentially it’s part of the concept that turns health care funding from the failed and inappropriate “insurance” model into an integrated public service model. And it reflects the fact that it’s fundamentally immoral for private business to be meddling in clinical decision-making, let alone making life-or-death decisions, as they frequently do – sometimes in unconscionably direct fashion.
It means that on the “premium” side – the costs paid by consumers either in taxes and/or direct payments – rates are the same for everyone, and claims are automatically paid in full and never adjudicated (hence the absence of clinical meddling and claims denials). And on the payment side, the government (or regulated agency) works with the medical profession to establish a fee schedule acceptable to the providers and matched to available funding, with the providers having full input into the relative medical effort and expertise required for procedures, and this being translated into dollar amounts through collaborative negotiation. And then those fees are paid promptly, in full, usually through automated billing and EFT. No muss, no fuss, little overhead.
Nothing even remotely like that happens in US health care, yet something like it happens in every other developed country in the world. When you look at a chart of per-capita health care costs among developed nations, you see the consequences of that. Anything else is pure denial.
Examples, please.