Nope, ain’t gonna happen. Liberals are whingers. And contrarians. And they have to have some way to think they’re better than everyone else. It’s in their blood. Should the country ever become liberal in fact, they’ll become conservatives.
I see plenty of countries in financial distress because they DID it. The result has been massive cutbacks in countries like the UK and Greece and people are rioting over it.
No, that would be the Tea Partiers.
Yes, if you switch to a government system all you get are waiting lists. Look what it’s like in Canada :
Just six months ago, the clinic delivered same-day care to most callers, the gold standard from a health perspective. But in October the delays crept to four days, then 19 in November and 25 in December. In January, HealthServe temporarily stopped accepting new patients, and almost immediately 380 people put their names on a waiting list for when the crunch eases.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/19/AR2009041902239.html
Oh, did I say Canada, I meant North Carolina.
Well, there was that one guy. “Budgets? Budgets? We don’t need no steeenking budgets!”
Really? I see even more countries in even worse distress because they followed the IMF’s “austerity” and “shock therapy” measures.
That’s not answering my point. Exactly who is calling for indefinite deficit spending?
Countries like the UK and Ireland are in massive debt due to bailing out their private sector banking systems which blew their respective economys up due to not being regulated. Ireland actually had a budget surplus pre-2008 meltdown. Greece has been in default or thereabouts more than half the time since the 1800s, well before anybody heard of socialism. It’s more mass corruption down there than anything, failure to collect taxes etc.
Yes, when the country finally has equal rights for everybody and decent public services like every other major economy it’ll be exactly what conservatives have spent the last hundred plus years fighting for.
No, then they can quit and go fishing.
It’s a spurious question to ask. Obviously nobody stood on a soap box and said vote for me and I’ll bankrupt the country with indefinite deficit spending. Didn’t stop them from doing it.
No, but they did go on TV and say, hey, we’re going to start a war! For nothing! And borrow the money! But hey, the real estate market is great! Everybody is making tons of free money!
The countries in the most fiscal trouble in Liberal Europe are the ones that tried to be like the U.S., not tax and spend, but spend and spend. They forgot the high revenues part (Greece) or thought they could deliberately emulate us with a “perpetual growth” Reaganomics regime (Spain).
The right wingers who push the “Starve the Beast” idea, who want to drive the economy into another Great Depression and the government into catastrophic debt so the government will have no choice but to cut back on the Ultimate Evil of social programs like Social Security and Medicare. And if people end up starving in the the street or the nation collapses - well, that’s better than the utter evil of socialism.
Not to get off topic, but why do all the Ayn Rand Superfans on this board have jobs that are decidedly not “Randian”. Howard Roark was an architect. Hank Rearden ran a steel mill. Dagny Taggart ran a railroad. They designed and built and ran things. They didn’t hock vitamins or Cutco knives or work as a tax attorney.
Well, it seems like the US is becoming more like the PIGS (Portugual, Italy, Greece, Spain) countries than the other way around. Mind as well throw in Hungary, Latvia, Iceland, Italy, Romania and UK as well.
It’s all part of the same problem. Governments spending more money than they are taking in, corruption, debt and bubble economies. People have this fantast that the government in its infinite wisdom can solve all their ills while money-making companies will provide an endless source of revenue. I don’t see what is so hard about creating a sustainable system. It would be basically an accounting problem except that governments lack the political will to say “no, we can’t afford that”.
I like to push the “the unemployment rate will come down after the next cold snap” idea.
Not wanting to continue flogging horse that has already been flogged to death on this board, but you really should check out some of the comments on that blog post to get an idea of the context of those claims. As the cliché goes, there’s “lies, damned lies and statistics”.
Except that defense budgets are completely immune to calls for austerity*, which leads to the spectacle of conservatives screaming “Cut Spending! Cut Spending!! CUT SPENDING!!! Oh, and appropriate another trillion dollars for our military campaigns”.
*Except in Britain
Well, for one thing, it seems like there aren’t that many “Randian” jobs to go around in America any more, if ever there were. Even (especially) if a factory-worker’s job counts as “Randian.”
The problem is not so much that governments lack political will as that corporations do not.
Left to their own, companies that can’t balance their budgets go out of business. National governments don’t have to balance their budgets because in simple terms, they can simply print more money. Print enough money, however, and it becomes effectively worthless.
Rand wrote her work in a more industrial age, but I don’t think the particular industry was what was important. She seemed to advocate competency, innovation and free competition. It didn’t matter if you pushed a broom. You should do it to the best of your ability and should be rewarded if you figure out a way to do it more efficiently. The same priciples apply if the field is steel, telecom, biotech or whatever.
The question people should be asking is why should Americans enjoy a higher standard of living if other countries have the ability to manufacture products better and more cheaply?
I guess Mr Smashy has forgotten his defense of the power of the free market in restoring Germany and Japan post-WWII.