It does so better than any other system, but when politicians try hard enough they can manipulate the public enough to get away with a lot. One issue I harp on a lot is the performance of national health care systems. There is no incentive to make sure these systems work well. Through the use of propaganda, governments convince citizens that the health care systems are a virtuous example of national compassion, and any problems are understandable and simply the price society pays for its superior morality. Even when problems become so intolerable that the public demands better performance, responsibility ends up getting so diffused throughout the government that no one is ultimately held responsible and nothing changes. We’re starting to see this lack of accountability in our own government, with supporters of the President claiming that he cannot be held responsible for what his administration does, since it’s so big. Thus democratic accountability is lost.
If you’re thinking of the purist form, no. But our Constitution, which prioritizes individual liberties over the will of the people, has served us well for over two centuries and I continue to think that our robust protections that give our government fits on a regular basis make our country work better than other democracies where the government can do whatever it wants so long as it’s elected.
But that’s the brilliance of the US system. It’s a republic with a LOT of checks to enforce consensus before a law can be passed. Then even if that law is passed, there are even more checks that can throw wrenches into the enforcement gears. States don’t have to help with federal laws, they can leave the entire burden on the federal government to implement and enforce them. The courts can limit the scope or strike down laws.
The US system makes it very difficult on our government in the absence of wide support for a law, and it’s not the democracy that makes that possible, it’s the structure of the Constitution.
The way the right-wing pretends to be the supporters of individual rights, and pretends that the left-wing opposes individual liberties is an example of their 1984-style “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength” propaganda at its starkest.
On a few national-security related issues where some Democrats have joined the GOP in opposing privacy, it is the right-of-center Democrats who’ve joined the GOP in suppressing liberty. Individual liberties are embraced by rational thinkers and progressives, not by the right-wing hypocrites.
I’d ask adaher to peruse a list of individual freedoms and to state which, if any, would be more likely to be embraced by one of his right-wing heroes rather than embraced by a rationalist or progressive:
[ul][li] The right to health-care, to adequate food for one’s children; the right to a free public education.[/li][li] The right of a woman to control of her own body.[/li][li] The right of a person to marry the person of his/her choice.[/li][li] The right of a worker to a living wage.[/li][li] The right of a consumer to expect that drugs and food be safe, that air and water are protected from rapacious corporate polluters.[/li][li] The right to expect that bankers and brokers who’ve assumed a fiduciary obligation will deserve trust.[/li][li] Et cetera, et cetera.[/li][/ul]
Against this, GOP prattlers will produce only examples of property rights, property rights, rights of the rich to pursue their own maximum happiness, property rights, and more property rights.
Oh… And guns. The GOP has bamboozled much of the public to think that the rights enumerated above are irrelevant, and it is the right to shoot to kill trespassers that is the quintessential American freedom.
Most of what you listed are rights to receive things or expect things from others, which demonstrates a terrible misunderstanding of what rights actually are.
If we have rights TO things, then we don’t have any rights at all, because with the right to receive things comes the responsibility to provide things. So we’re all enslaved to each other.
No. It is your system that enslaves the poor to the property owners.
I am not a Marxist, BTW, and do understand the virtues of property rights and free market economy. Where we differ is that I comprehend that America is much too far to the “right-wing” end of the individuals-vs-property spectrum, and needs to tilt leftward, recognizing that humans have value too.
Your ilk doesn’t understand that anything has merit except unfettered dog-eat-dog capitalism.
Your ilk complains that America is becoming too “socialistic.” Can you identify a less socialistic country today? Iraq, maybe? Somalia?
But that’s sort of the point, isn’t it? We are all enslaved to each other, or at least, tied to each other, by links of family, society and mutual obligation. That’s what living in society means.
Well, we are moving to the left recently as the rest of the world moves back to the right. It does seem that we’re at odds with world trends, although I figure it can’t last. The US will always be the rightwardmost Western country.
As for moving more towards individuals when it comes to property rights, I cited an example of where I think property laws should be more friendly to individuals and less friendly to owners. If you have any other ideas for reform, I’d love to hear them. I’d be most sympathetic to ideas that empower individuals. Property rights encroachments in “society’s” interests I have much less sympathy for.
People can choose their level of engagement with society. Humans are not ants, we are social yet individual creatures who choose what we care about and who we care about. When we choose to give our lives to others, we do that voluntarily. No one can force us to work for “society” unless someone chooses to be dedicated to that.
I don’t agree with the OP, we all have to pay taxes, because unless we move out into the wilderness(and people should have that right), we live in a civilization that is configured to make individual rights supreme. We need a government to enforce that. But government is increasingly becoming more about wealth transfers than keeping law and order, and that’s a problem. A large minority didn’t sign up for that, and it was wrong for the slim majority to impose their morality on the rest of us.
In fact, I argue that besides walking, I should have the right to pick the berries, sleep wherever I feel like, chop the wood, hunt the game, etc…
My point is that your claim of property is completely arbitrary. There’s no obvious reason why you could own any piece of land. If you can do so, it’s only by resorting to force. Either your own (you’re the first guy who decided that he “owns” the land, or maybe you’re the stronger guy who took it from him) or the force provided by a government (in the current state of affairs).
You seem to believe that property is a natural right. Not so. Property is an artificial concept that always required the recourse to force. Lacking a society that decided that there would be such a thing as “private ownership of land” and was determined to enforce the attached equally arbitrary rights, there’s no way you could demonstrate objectively that your fuzzy “property rights” trump my much more natural rights to go wherever I want, eat whatever game/berry I catch/pick, chop whatever tree I feel like choping…
Without a governement, you don’t have any property right. You just may have the “right” to prevent me from fishing/hunting/picking berries somewhere if you’re stronger than me, in the sense “might makes right”, and it’s probably extremely unethical for you to act in such a way. You’re just depriving me of ressources for your benefit.
That’s not entirely true. Even animals have property, we call it “territory”, and they enforce their claims by force. There is actually a natural element to it. We have governments not to enforce property rights, they existed before government, we have governments so that it doesn’t come down to brute strength and firepower to decide who gets what property. That way, a single mother has just as much right to her property as an NRA member with 26 guns and two pitbulls has to his.
The system failed. That happens now and then. Can you honestly promise that your libertarian system will never fail? Do you guarantee that it is perfect, and that no corruption will ever occur, no errors will ever be made, no decisions will ever happen in haste?
If such an ideal system existed, why isn’t it standard everywhere?
The system didn’t fail, the country simply got away from constitutional values and temporarily allowed an authoritarian demagogue to take over. Someone who was so beloved by about 60% of the population that he could get away with literally anything. The system only failed because we’d established a new system that went away from the libertarian values of the old system.
That’s one of the big problems with FDR-type governments, they create an awful lot of collateral damage. At the beginning of his term it was small business, who couldn’t compete under the NRA codes, but hey, it was all about social justice. Then it was the Japanese-Americans at the end of his term, but hey, it was all about national security.
Methinks you don’t realize you’re arguing against yourself! Yes, property rights derived originally from personal power or military aggression. And yes, the property rights became “legitimized” often by powerful interests appointing (or bribing) sheriffs. The land you own was bought from someone who bought it from someone who acquired it from someone via bribery, military power, fraud, theft or force.
It’s a system we’re stuck with for better or worse; I am not a Marxist proposing land redistribution. But don’t make us laugh with your revisionist “understanding” of property.
In fact, and specifically regarding land, it isn’t as natural as you seem to believe. There has been societies that completely lacked a concept of private property of land, and societies that only knew collective property for said land (it being atributed temporarily on the basis of the ability to cultivate it, for instance)
So, as you admit yourself, property rights only exists as long as they are enforced by individual or collective force. Please tell me why a government taking money from you by force is any worse than a government preventing me, also by force, from seeking food where it is present? If you’re forcefully preventing me from feeding myself by arbitrarily drawing lines in the sand, you certainly have a duty to feed me, or at least to provide me with an alternative way to do so myself. You owe me a cosy job, don’t you?
Also, how is the governement going to prevent me from feeding myself (as you seem to believe it should) if it can’t take money from you to pay the guards?
This is probably the mostly hilariously inaccurate description of the public perception of national health care systems ever written in the entire history of the world. You could quite literally not be more insanely wrong.
Here in Canada the health insurance system is under near-constant criticism. Admitting its flaws and presenting plans for its improvement are a part of essentially every election platform in every election.
What we are disagreeing about is that right-wing propagandists like you write
“liberty … liberty … liberty … liberty”
when almost all you really mean is
“property rights of the rich … property rights of the rich … property rights of the rich … property rights of the rich …”
Also, on the topic of who is “acknowledging” what, your ignorance about the relationship between government and property rights has been explained to you in several ways. Fought your ignorance yet?
Ah, enlighten us all about the improvements in Canadian health care. Have wait times improved? Do more people have access to a primary care doctor than before?
And if not, who is being held accountable for this lack of progress? Because Canada isn’t the only country with a UHC system and it’s not like they are improving across the board. Some work well, others work poorly, but regardless, no one is ever held accountable.
Thus my claim that democracy does not necessarily mean democratic accountability.
