That’s odd, I recall the debates in Canada over the creation of your current national health service, and it was fairly universally termed “socialized medicine”, just as it was in England and elsewhere. Whether a nation is ‘called’ socialist is often a matter of convention or the leanings of the speaker. India was an officially Socialist nation when I was last there, but like many other equally proud Socialist nations at that time, no one ever called it Socialist.
And just so you know, I have heard Canada referred to as small-s socialist, even by Canadians. I don’t know about all provinces, but the central economic planning in Ontario might startle many of your neighbors to the US.
To cite two examples:
- I had a friend in Missisauga who found herself without a resume and marketable skills after a divorce. She wanted to start a beauty shop. The planning commission said “No, we have enough beauty shops” and denied her a license because they had already reached their local planning goal. The nearest town that had an available slot was Toronto, but alas, she didn’t have a car, and lacked enough cash to both start a shop and license/register a car
Worse, she’d have had no customer base in Toronto (their per capita goals were higher, but they already had many more shops per capita), while she had an eager and enthusiastic following in Missisauga - mostly friends she’d styled as an amateur, because the local women were firmly of the opinion that there were absolutely NOT enough beauty shops (or at least, good ones) in the area
In the US, hair stylists, manicurists, etc. are often licensed by written and health examination (to prove that they know the public health laws and don’t have, for example, hepatitis B), and the shops may need a business permit (to assure they pay taxes, have adequate and safe facilities, etc.) but very few industries (like taxicabs in the cities, a legacy of the horse and buggy days) limit the number of licenses issued according to some central plan. The free market customer base is allowed to decide how many beauty shops it will support, at what cost, and more importantly which beauty shops will thrive or fail. Indeed, opening a small beauty shop is among the easiest source of supplemental income in the lower social classes - the first step on the ladder up, if no one will hire you.
- A friend of mine was a recently board certified psychiatrist in Toronto in the early 90s. He was told that he couldn’t be a psychiatrist – or more accurately, he was told that the local board had decided to decrease the number of psychiatrists in the area, and had decreed that, though they had no right to prevent him from practicing, since he was already licensed, they wouldn’t pay him. Now, in a nation with socialized medicine, being cut off like that is almost a professional death sentence. True, he could have possibly found patients willing to pay entirely out of their own pocket for his services, despite the presence of free or near-free care from other psychiatrists, but not many people or businesses could survive under those conditions (Actually, they planned to cut his payments every year for 3 years. He left the country before they hit zero)
The right psychiatrist is a wonderful thing to have, but the right fir is entirely personal, so it’s impossible for a patient to know if a new psychiatrist would be better for him/her than the old one was. What patient would justify paying big bucks out of pocket on that offhand possibility? The local board would let him practice as a general doctor, but not if he even dared call himself a psychiatrist on his card , so he’d have had to effectively discard the years of postgraduate in psychatry he’d just completed, and practice a kind of medicine that he’d never liked, and hadn’t practiced in years. Who benefits?
They suggested that he move to Saskachewan, where there were few psychiatrists, but where the populace was scattered, and not as interested in receiving psychiatric care. Obviously, he didn’t want to leave his family, patients and home to move to a place with a different culture and climate, whose lives and stresses he wouldn’t have understood as well.
My point is not to rail against the Canadian system. I could make hundreds of complaints against the US system. (I know it far better) My point is that this sort of central planning and control (or in the case of the psychiatrist, near-coercion) is precisely what many USAns consider the hallmark of true socialism. Perhaps all societies must have some element of ‘socialism’: planning and a concern for the commonweal -certainly all the ones I know do- but the two cases above reveal a mindset that is quite different from the US.
Just so we’re clear on where I stand: I was a staunch Objectivist [1] in my youth, and a Libertarian until 1980 when the party seemed to hang a sharp right angle to all rationality and became a haven for loons overnight, however, my experiences with the US medical care system make me quite open to -nay, eager for- a properly instituted universal medical coverage. Doctors want to treat the ill, not turn them away. We certainly don’t want to memorize fifteen different sets of care standards, subject to change at will, or spend weeks in contract negotiations with insurers and other businesses.
I guess that makes me a Socialist, too.
[1] I stopped calling myself an Objectivist when I heard Ayn Rand repeat her famous decree “Objectivism is whatever I say it is” at her annual Ford Hall Forum speech at Northeastern University. Since ‘objectivism’ as I knew it would never allow me to blindly follow the philosophical decrees of another mind, I was instantly out. I sometimes wonder if this wasn’t just her way of sticking her tongue out at the wannabees - a secret philosophical litmus test, if you will.
