It would, however, underline the hyperbole you tossed out that I was responding to, namely ‘we have pretty much dismantled what social safety net we had’. Which was the point. As I said, what you REALLY meant is that we don’t spend as much as you think we should, and the rest was simply over the top hyperbole.
It might be, or it might not. But it’s patently ridiculous to say that we have dismantled our social safety net in any meaningful way, looking at the staggering amount we pay towards it.
No, you are shoveling, not buying. I love this attempt at diversion. I wonder…is anyone else buying this?
But, to be clear here, I never said anything about social spending breaking the bank, nor have I advocated any new needless wars in the ME…and, in fact, have been opposed to the two we have for years now. Literally. But you feel free to try and divert attention from the discussion and muddy the waters instead of just admitting that you went overboard with the silly hyperbole that I was calling you on. And keep making yourself feel good by calling me a ‘conservative’ as well.
That’s true. Happily, no one forces anyone (well, in the US or other western nations) to work these days, whether for free or for low wages. Again, that’s hyperbole. People make a choice, and have choices. And before you trot out some bullshit about me not knowing what I’m talking about, I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in MY mouth, gringo.
To make my position clear, I’m among those who don’t see a huge difference between the United States and western Europe in terms of how we run our economies. Both have large governments, though Europe’s is slightly larger as a percentage of GDP. Both have tons of corporate subsidies, though distributed differently among industries. Both have programs to help the poor, though Europe’s programs are mostly national while America’s are shared by state governments.
Moreover, both have seen large increases in standard measures of wealth since WWII, and at least partially by the same methods: enormous debt spending, exporting manufacturing to the third world, and exploiting immigrant labor. Now the bills for all that are coming due both here and in Europe. I don’t see either system as having a good response to that. Greece and Spain have hit a huge financial crisis. So have California and Detroit. All evidence suggests that other European countries and other American states and cities are circling the drain.
When the US turns into a tiny country and finances almost 1/3 of the government by oil revenues, then we can make the comparison between the US and Norway. Until then, it doesn’t make much sense to do that.
If you’d like compare the US to the whole of Europe, that might make sense. And just FYI, life expectancy in CA (where I live) is slightly higher than Norway, and we have almost 10x as many people. So, I can pick and choose within the US and show you better statistics, too, just as you can pick and choose in Europe.
You’re shifting the goalposts. A few posts back you asked:
You didn’t specify that they had to have the same population as the US (and I wasn’t going to facetiously point to San Marino or Macau, both of which have one public hospital each from what I can tell). Neither did you specify that they couldn’t have access to their own natural resources rather than relying on military intervention to secure strategic interests. Though I admit, the former is cheating. We should really fairly distribute all advantages we have as citizens in order to create a level playing field.
No, he’s not…you are simply having a hard time following along. This seems to be a recurring problem with you in just about every thread I’ve seen you participate in…well, that and you are still trying to make sure we all know you took Philosophy 101 last year and really, really got a lot out of it.
So, what you are saying is that to your mind an apples to alligators comparison is fine as long as it demonstrates what you want it to demonstrate, by gum!
Here’s my problem with the OP. If you guarantee everyone a cushy lifestyle, regardless of whether they work or not, you 1) encourage freeloading and 2) raise the cost of goods for everyone else. If I know I can effectively get $10/hr by not working, no one is going to work for less than that, and so you get wage inflation, which drives up the cost of everything.
But back to the freeloading… No humane safety net can eliminate freeloading, but a good one is designed to minimize it, not maximize it. Yes, being compassionate is a human trait, but so is resentment of freeloading. Hell, I wouldn’t let my otherwise healthy relatives freeload off me, much less some unknown person who lives 3,000 miles away. So, if you’re going to play the “it’s part of being human” card, you have to play with the whole deck, not just the cards you like.
It’s a drag on society for healthy adults to be unwilling to work, and I have no sympathy for any who are unwilling. Still, we have to recognize that bad things can happen even to healthy people, and they may need help from time to time. But no freeloading. As a human, I won’t support a system that promotes it anymore than I’ll support a system that allows people to starve.
Counterpoint–people who don’t have to worry about the basic necessities are able to accept more risk in terms of entrepreneurship or gaining skills training to do more productive work.
Counter-counter-point. Necessity is the mother of invention.
It seems to me that the US is the hub of entrepreneurship, not some Social Democratic paradise in Europe. Friend me on Facebook using your iPhone if you think I’m wrong.
Not to you, but I don’t expect that. I thing more neutral observers might feel differently. Not saying you are being deliberately obtuse, but that you have an established position here.
Finland. Norway’s nice too. Those Scandanavians know how to rock a social democracy. I suspect it’s because they have very high social cohesion brought about by living in basically uninhabitable climates. (Kidding a bit here, but seriously, you can’t survive the winter in Scandanavia without food, fuel and shelter.)
I read up on it in Wikipedia but I don’t see how it differs from commune-based socialism.
The US is not a great example of the wonderfulness of capitalism and hasn’t been for decades. Difference is, capitalism seems designed to let people fall through the safety net even when it is doing well, to “encourage” them to work. It’s fucking evil.
Conservatives have been bitching about Europe on this boards for DECADES, describing how it will all fall apart Real Soon Now, and things only got bad in Europe after a financial crisis that was caused, not by events in Europe, but here in the U.S. Excuse me if I am unimpressed by your litany of woes. The Europeans take better care of their average workers than the US, that’s what I see. Both the US and Europe have problems with how they deal with things, what else is new? Between the two, I’ll take the countries that give a shit about their people … and that is not the US envisioned by our conservative brethren.
Well this actually gets to the lynchpin of my idea on how a social democracy should be managed. Everybody has been focusing on my idea of how to have a really good social safety net for the very poor, which strikes me as a minor point. What strikes me as the REALLY radical part of my agenda is managing the capitalist economy so that it benefits the middle class. Basically,I think a large, healthy middle class is the best guarantor of financial stability for any nation. The poor should be a very small part of society as a whole, people who are just starting out or who for whatever reason can’t manage to succeed at anything.
It would also be a good idea to regulate the bankers’ ability to gamble away everyone’s money, but that applies to almost any system of government that has bankers or something like them.
Are there any countries at all that are directly comparable to the US, John? As you say, maybe the whole of the European Union, but the United States, are not really sovreign states like the countries that comprise the European Union, which as I understand it is how a lot of these problems they are having originated. And if there is no country we can learn from because they’re too this or too that, maybe the problem is … us. Or to be more precise … you.
He said to use Europe as a whole…why are you ignoring that and seemingly reluctant to do so? Use the EU and all it’s member states and do an apples to apples comparison. Knock yourself out.
But it was set up that way originally, and it’s the closest approximation you are likely to get to the US. You can’t cherry pick one country in Europe (that has all sorts of factors that pretty much make it look so attractive, such as the oil revenues and low and homogenous population John mentioned) and expect anyone to take such a comparison seriously. If you want to compare the US to a country then there has to be some rough equivalency to make the comparison valid. Why you didn’t pick Canada is beyond me, as though it’s not all that similar it’s a better comparison than freaking Norway (or Sweden).
That’s a problem all right…it’s YOUR problem, since you are the one pushing comparisons. Of course, you could do what you’ve done thus far, which is to handwave away any argument while falling back on the tried and true ‘yeah, but you are a CONSERVATIVE’ as well as the ever popular ‘but Iraq was really bad and stuff’, which seems to be the usual trump in these discussions.
I think it’s best to use Europe as a whole. That particular poster was ripping into the US saying our average life span sucked, when in fact my state (with almost 40M people) has a better stat than Norway, his choice.
But I agree that Canada is an ideal comparison point, even if it’s about 10x smaller. Still, the number of similarities make it an almost ideal test case.
Now, are you interested in telling us more about how your welfare program is supposed to work, or would like to talk more about me? I can start at about age 4 and work up from there, if you’re really interested.
If your answer involved “the US government” are the socialist in Europe going to chip in? What about all the revolutionaries in North Africa and the Middle East? People’s Republic of China? As far as I can tell the entire world is happily enjoying what the US tax payer funded.
In socialism, by definition, ownership of property and the means of production is centralized under a single authority. Distributism would be the exact opposite. It would see property and the means of productions distributed as widely as possible. The distributist ideal would have every person or family owning both a home and a means of support.
I am not now, nor have I ever been, a defender of American-style capitalism. However, I see other options besides socialism and capitalism, so merely trashing American-style capitalism will not convince me to support socialism. The facts about the European approach can be read in any newspaper. Some European countries have successfully managed their economic activity for prosperity thus far, but others have failed to do so. You say your goal is “managing the capitalist economy so that it benefits the middle class”. I ask where’s the evidence that this can be done reliably?
(As for your claim that the European crisis was caused by events in the U.S., I’m afraid I can’t agree. The American mortgage crisis may have been a trigger, but Europe would have been just fine if its own institutions had been in order. The governments that are now in crisis either rung up enormous debts or encouraged their banking sectors to do so. The inability to pay those debts and the fear that a debt default would cause a spreading crisis are what’s brought a continent-wide crisis to the Eurozone.)
