Iran, but with a different religion?
Somalia.
No taxation, no restrictions on trade, no minimum wage.
No public services, no public healthcare. If you can’t pull yourself up by the bootstraps, too bad so sad.
You can practice whatever your holy scriptures sanction or demand, no matter how violent, and nobody will interfere. Presuming that you have the strongest militia.
You can have all the guns and explosives you want.
Sounds like American right-wing heaven to me.
I don’t know tons about it, but in Ireland supposedly 79% of all health care spending is done by the public sector.
In the US it is closer to 50-60%. And a 79% spending rate by the public sector is close to the rate of Canada or the UK.
Plus in Ireland hospital charges are maxed out for consumers at €75 a day or €750 in a 12 month period. There is no max that you can be charged in the US for drugs or hospital visits.
Ireland has a far better health system than we have, and I would consider it UHC because it has so many cost controls to stop bankruptcy and ensure coverage for everyone (things we in the US don’t have).
Except many of Chile’s economic accomplishments were achieved or at least started during Pinochet’s military dictatorship. It’s easy (or at least a good deal easier) to make painful changes to economic and social policies when you don’t have to worry about getting re-elected. I don’t think they want Obama going down that route. Well, except they already seem to think we’re there.
Oh, and no right-wing party has been in power in Chile since Pinochet reluctantly stepped down in 1990.
Pinochet is probably an honest assessment of the kind of leader the right wing is proud of and aspires to, at least today’s right wing. He was a strong free market proponent, and he was also a military dictator who hated liberalism and communism. The sad reality is he is an example of what many of the tea party protesters are looking for. They want a fusion of free market economics with a strong disdain for liberalism and a strong presence of the military and police. Right wing authoritarians are not libertarians. Libertarians want a weak social safety net, but they also want a weak government and tons of personal freedoms. Right wing authoritarians (who have overtaken the conservative movement) want to disband social safety nets, but they also favor the oppression and purges of ‘deviants, liberals, communists, radicals etc’, which usually requires a strong military and police force. Libertarians are happy to live and let live, right wing authoritarians are not. The people who show up at town hall meetings with loaded guns and signs that imply we need to start assassinating political leaders are right wing authoritarians, not libertarians.
William F Buckley, considered a founder of modern movement conservatism, used to praise Francisco Franco.
General Franco is an authentic national hero. It is generally conceded that he above others had the combination of talents, the perseverance, and the sense of righteousness of his cause, that were required to wrest Spain from the hands of the visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihlistis that were imposing on her, in the thirties, a regime so grotesque as to do violence to the Spanish soul, to deny, even Spain’s historical identity. - William F Buckley. 1957
So an honest assessment of the kind of leader that today’s right wing can aspire to would probably be people like Pinochet or Franco.
Mussolini in Italy was the closest. He wanted Fascism which is government with huge control by corporations and the military. That is pretty much what the conservatives think is ideal. They want the news controlled by the few chosen ones too. Everyone else is identified as an enemy of the state.
I have heard several conservatives I know call for a military coup to ‘save’ the country from the perceived radicalism of Obama.
Glenn Beck and Michael Scheuer were on TV not long ago saying that the only hope of America being saved if is Bin Laden attacks us again.
It may not be PC to say it, but the kind of leader who has existed overseas that the contemporary right probably wants to come to power here would probably be a military dictator who came to power during times of turmoil and leftism and who started purges in pursuit of moving the country to the right. Franco, Pinochet, the Shah of Iran, the overthrow of Ibarra in Equador, etc.
I have heard more than one right winger speak enviously about a military coup in the US. In fact I saw a letter to the editor in a local paper about someone fantasizing about a grassroots military coup against Obama. No idea why a respectable paper would publish something like that.
And you have leaders of the conservative movement calling for Bin Laden to attack us again in the hopes that another attack will make people reject liberalism.
Different, yes, but still a result of. The realities of life over there certainly had a strong effect in shaping American character and so on, but they didn’t simply leave everything behind; they took their baggage with them.
I think we might be in agreement; i’m not denying there were influences at work different than those of your average joes back in the Old World. My point is that they were at work as well, rather than instead of. That American political history, even up until today, could well be described as a result of that European political history - an unusual, relatively unique result, but still a result.
I thought mass graves were bad. Saddam’s mass graves were a bad thing. But Franco’s and Pinochet’s must be acceptable. Where’s the moral clarity?
The correct answer is:
AMERICA!
In other words, the OP’s comments on ( compared to Democrats ) conservatives proposals being based more on political theory as opposed to facts, and that they believe in American Exceptionalism are correct. It certainly helps explain why conservatives ruin everything they touch.
Well, yes – the “model” for the more ideological American conservatives, as far as I can determine, is an idealized vision of some sort of Arcadian “America As The Founding Fathers Would Have Had It If It Weren’t For Those Pesky Libs”. More practical conservatives would tell you “well, the thing is you can’t really translate what works in ________ to what will work in America, every country is unique and different, we need a solution that’s uniquely fit for us”, which is more sensible.
Well, more or less yes. The Conservatives you speak of ruin everything they touch because they believe that all things American are best because they are American, not because they are best. The Liberals ruin stuff in different ways.
Some traditional conservative values are good - hard work, family, duty to country and community, fiscal common sense. But unfortunately, these values have been corrupted by a Right Wing agenda of religeous fanatacism, xenophobia and anti-intellectualism. It is an agenda designed to play on the fears of hard-working white, middle and working class rural and suburban God-fering traditional Americans that their way of life is going to be destroyed by the growing number of Americans who don’t fit into that traditional demographic profile. In reality the greater threat is to not adapt as a nation to the changing global landscape.
As I said, I was speaking about primary care. Not hospital care.
All that says is how bad the US system is. The Irish system is far worse than other European ones.
But it doesn’t ensure coverage for everyone. There isn’t coverage for everyone for primary care, which is an absolutely essential element of a universal health care system.
And whatever about you considering it “UHC”, I don’t know anyone here who does. See this recent(ish) news item for example.
Yeah but how much does primary care cost? In the US I can get a doctor’s visit (or a visit with a PA or NP) for $20-60. The Irish system covers prescription medications and hospital visits, which are areas where the real money goes.
As far as what you consider UHC, it is a personal standard. In the UK, dental is covered by the UHC system. In Canada it is not. However I don’t know of anyone who says that Canada lacks a UHC system because it does not cover dental. I think Taiwan’s UHC system covers alternative treatments (acupuncture, etc) whereas other nations do not cover things like that.
The Irish system covers hospitals and prescription drugs, and I doubt anyone there goes bankrupt or loses a home or retirement savings because they get sick. And I doubt victims of domestic violence or car accidents are denied health care because of pre existing conditions). That is a pretty good system (by US standards), even if it is the most stingy system in Europe.
The United States of America pre-1965 and Hippie Revolution.
Yep. I think that, in many American conservatives’ minds, the difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives want to keep America America, while liberals want to turn it into, oh I dunno, France or Sweden or something, if not communist Russia.
So if you’re modeling your vision for America on some other country, Why Do You Hate America?
Cite? Specifically what kind of pornography are you allowed to posses in Germany that you are not allowed to posses in the US? Same question wrt privately showing it.
I already answered that. Each visit to your GP costs an average of $87. (That’s an average based on what GPs charge. Some charge less, but none charge a lot less. And some charge more.) You will have to pay on top of that for tests. And prescription medicine is only covered once it exceeds $145 per month. There is plenty of evidence, both anecdotal and from research, that the consequence of this is that many people do not go their doctor when they are sick. If you are on a low income, but not low enough to qualify for our equivalent of Medicaid, you simply cannot afford $87 per visit plus whatever for tests plus up to $145 for your medicines a month. This is a major, major problem in Irish society.
I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. Those are specialty areas of health care - but primary care is the gateway to the whole health care system. And I doubt whether people in Canada and Taiwan would consider their systems universal if they lacked universal primary access. I doubt whether Obama would be considered to have brought in a universal health care system if he brought in a system where access to basic primary care still depended on whether or not you could afford health insurance. Do you really believe that he would?
Ireland is less awful in those respects than the US, certainly. But people do still die because of the lack of access to universal health care. They die because of a system that prioritises private patients and pushes those without health insurance to the back of the queue, even for those aspects that are “universal” (see the case of Susie Long). It is a shitty, nasty, totally inadequate system and praising it just because it isn’t quite as shitty, nasty and totally inadequate as the US system is a bit like saying the system in Michigan is great because it’s not as bad as the system in Utah or whatever [substitute states as appropriate, I don’t actually know anything about the systems in Michigan and Utah]. Seriously, come over here and tell the people suffering under it - and I encounter plenty of them in my work - that they should be thankful for the great “universal” health care system we have.
I realise that it’s politically expedient for advocates of universal health care in the US to claim that every other advanced nation has one, but that’s simply not the reality on the ground here.