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So, in your own words, if a country has a single payer health care system than it is "socialist"? And, presumably this is your major argument against a single payer health care system that it is "socialist"?
Please don't insult my intelligence. If you want to find fault with the healthcare system in other countries you can do so. However, do it with facts and logic not by labeling.
Thank you.
It has been my experience that the people who complain most about something being socialist turn out to have zero conception of what socialism is. They are basing their view of socialistic tendencies on the heavily agendized talking heads of talk radio.
So, in your own words, if a country has a single payer health care system than it is "socialist"? And, presumably this is your major argument against a single payer health care system that it is "socialist"?
NO, I NEVER said that. The person who wrote the article obviously seems to be coming from an ideological perspective. I am NOT against socialized medicine, and having socialized medicine does NOT make a country "socialist." There are no socialist countries.
Quote:
Originally Posted by markg91359
Please don't insult my intelligence. If you want to find fault with the healthcare system in other countries you can do so. However, do it with facts and logic not by labeling.
Thank you.
I labeled the author of the article a socialist because of many statements they made. The ideological bias of the article was obvious. And when people are caught up in an ideology, they are seldom objective or careful with facts.
It has been my experience that the people who complain most about something being socialist turn out to have zero conception of what socialism is. They are basing their view of socialistic tendencies on the heavily agendized talking heads of talk radio.
I thnik people wnaing coailised cnetral control of the economy and its fruits no nothin g of what it really does to freedom and the economy in the end.
It has been my experience that the people who complain most about something being socialist turn out to have zero conception of what socialism is. They are basing their view of socialistic tendencies on the heavily agendized talking heads of talk radio.
I think I have a good conception of what socialism is. I think any compassionate society needs some socialism, but it has to be balanced and controlled. Handing more and more power over to the government gradually results in corruption and inefficiency. Power given to a government will not be given back voluntarily. It is true that power corrupts, although it can be a gradual process. This is Human Nature 101. Somehow, extreme socialists never took that course.
The economic systems they have in some European countries are not socialist. They have some socialist programs. So do we, although to a lesser extent. All advanced nations now have socialist programs, to different degrees. But ALL are basically capitalist.
Socialism and capitalism co-exist in all advanced democracies. Individual rights and freedom depends on capitalism, because people cannot be free or have rights if they are not allowed to own anything.
None of the extreme socialist experiments have succeeded. All have failed badly. The only reason China is becoming successful now is because they gave up on socialism. It does not work. You cannot manage a complex economic system from the top.
Extreme socialism always results in inhumane and unfair treatment of the citizens. But that wouldn't be so bad if it resulted in economic security. It does not. It fails to operate, because the whole underlying premise is wrong.
No I am not a right-winger and I don't get my ideas from talk radio. I have read a lot of serious books on politics and economics, and I think for myself.
I definately enjoyed the article. Thanks for posting.
One thing that caught my eye, that guy had to visit a hospital at every stop. he must have eaten some bad food, go figure!
My wife travels for work and has visited dozens and dozens of different countries and she is always happy to come home and never says, we need to move here... at least not yet. She speaks highly of many places but never says this place is better than America because....
No offense to the writer but I will head my wifes opinions over his.
I have no doubt that some of what the author says is true. But the line where truth ends and his agenda begins is heavily blurred. The author gives no sources for anything he says, so there is literally no way to verify the truth. Additionally, he fails to recognize a whole host of other factors that mpact life in these countries. He's choosing one item and making his whole argument on it. For example in education, much has been made by the Republican leaning foes of education about the terrific education system of Finland. But none of these foes bothers to mention that teachers in Finland are the most unionized in the world, and that the unions play a way way more significant role in the education of the children, and that the pay scale for teachers in Finland exceeds even the best pay in the USA. This is how truth is bent and twisted for an agenda.
So... I'm not really sure how much the author says is fabricated from minimal facts and how much he simply ignored.
The countries that he indicates also do not have huge outlays in military spending, nor are they countries which seem to believe that their role is to fight wars all over the globe. If the USA were to stop fighting wars and put the money for these wars and the over bloated military into health care perhaps we could be like them too.
Lots of distorted comments; lots of "truths" obtained by only mentioning part of the truth, not the whole truth so help you God.
Good post. And...in my opinion...as long as our nation believes we are responsible for policing the globe, spending $2 billion per day in the name of defense (manifest destiny...gone wild)...I don't see how we can compete in a global economy. Nations choose their priorities and what they will spend their limited resources on.
Good post. And...in my opinion...as long as our nation believes we are responsible for policing the globe, spending $2 billion per day in the name of defense (manifest destiny...gone wild)...I don't see how we can compete in a global economy. Nations choose their priorities and what they will spend their limited resources on.
Some of our policing is well-intentioned, but regardless it is arrogant of us to think we can fix everyone. When we were the "greatest" nation, it seemed that we had a responsibility to spread freedom and democracy. We didn't really, but it may have seemed that way to some Americans. I agree with the (real) conservatives that we should mind our own business whenever possible. We don't have all the answers, certainly not for other people. We could save zillions of dollars just by letting other people alone.
We don't belong in Afghanistan or Iraq, but we also don't belong in Syria or Libya. There are "progressives" who think we have to fight oppression everywhere, so the "people" can be free. But we can't decide what is or is not oppression, and we can't even define what we mean by "freedom."
But we still need a strong defense, as much or more now than ever. If you believe praying to the Great Mother Goddess will ensure all nations will get along blissfully, then keep dreaming until the first bomb hits.
I think I have a good conception of what socialism is. I think any compassionate society needs some socialism, but it has to be balanced and controlled. Handing more and more power over to the government gradually results in corruption and inefficiency. Power given to a government will not be given back voluntarily. It is true that power corrupts, although it can be a gradual process. This is Human Nature 101. Somehow, extreme socialists never took that course.
The problem is that the USA has more to worry from the Oligarchy that we have always had and that is getting much much worse than from a little bit of needed socialism that has only happened in the 20th century and mostly only since there was a real middle class.
This is basically the form of government we have had since the inception of the Republic. At first you couldn't vote if you didn't own land, and if you were female, and of course were some other race than White. Some of that disappeared over the years, but its still here and getting worse.
Recently a law was passed(and recently upheld by the Supreme Court) which allowed both corporations and unions to give unlimited amounts of money to candidates for office. The next thing that happened was that the Corporations continued a long effort to get rid of unions by convincing the population that they were bad for corporations and thus bad for the worker. This is insane but believed, since the unions were never developed to be good for corporations but only to give the worker a larger slice of the corporate pie. So now instead of a prosperous middle class that has a large part of the business pie, and thus a properous nation, we have a union membership of 12%. So now unions can no longer give unlimited money to candidates because 88% of the monies are given by Corporations. Corporations are made up of the rich and powerful. Corporations have the power to choose candidates for office who are in their pockets, or who are too dumb or too timid to disagree with the corporations. This is why we no longer have any moderates in government, and why all the decisions seem to be of benefit only to the rich and powerful.
But this still won't keep the population doing what corporations want. An educated populace will not believe the stupid things that corporations dump on the middle class such as the idea that unions are bad for them and that the corporation will take care of them. So they need to attack and eliminate public education, and use the public monies to pay for private schools for their own children. During the past 25 years starting with the 1984 document A NATION AT RISK, they have systematically made it more and more difficult for the public schools to function adequately. They have increased the unfunded mandates on puclic education through special education laws until they are now stealing funds from regular education. The major portion of the populace lives and become knowledgeable in regualr education. The special education part was never a danger to the corporations. Their stooges in the Federal Government have put together an accountability program(called No Child Left Behind) which sets physically impossible goals for the public schools(80 years of educational research has shown that you cannot violate the normal curve except for occasional anomalies), and then when the schools fail to meet these impossible goals, the corporate government stooges say that the schools are failing and not educating the populace. And the populace, since they are less and less educated to think for themselves, believe this drivel. Then the corporations have encouraged their governmental stooges to legislate the development of voucher systems to pay public funds for private schools as a way to help the populace with their bad education. No one seems to even notice the fact that only 10% of these schools are better than the scores on the public schools and 37% ARE actually worse, and despite the fact that only a very very small percentage of the population can actually take advantage of these vouchers, since 1) there aren't enough alternative schools, and 2) the vouchers don't pay for the expensive alternative schools, which only the rich can pay for.
The vouchers are just one more way to eliminate public education since they are another way to take money away from the education of the general population and put it into the hands of the rich and powerful. They were never developed as a way to help anybody but the rich and powerful. What poor person can actually afford to send their child to a private school even with a voucher when the cost per student often exceeds $16000 a year.
The end result of this is a gradual and then increasingly dumbing down of the populace.
So you hae a two pronged approach. Convincing the population that socialism is their problem is easy, and takes the increasingly less thinking population away from finding out the real problem before its just plain too late. It may be too late now.
Socialism! Heck, the real problem here is accelerating oligarchy.
I could probably live in northern Italy, Austria, but as a native English speaker I started to yearn to have a conversation in English and to hear it spoken. New Zealand is a possibility but if I hardly ever see family or friends that moved away now unless I travel to see them, while living in Alaska, I'd never see them halfway across the globe. For better or worse the USA is my home and we are fighting here on the local level to help create a more sustainable living situation, a tough proposition given our location.
My mini rant: I do agree on the points where the corporate machine has taken over much of what was once the province of local industry such as food production, health care, even housing and that IMO will come home to roost in a serious way in much of the USA if not the world in general.
The answers of course were always in front of us: Support local producers/industry, buy local, eat in season, reduce consumption and waste, have fewer children. What we have been doing to ourselves and our planet from GMOs, to industrial pollution such as heavy metals, dioxins and phthalates (not to mention radioisotopes) leaking into the food chain in the name of convenience, profit and to support a worldwide population that the earth was never able to support in the style that we've become accustomed to is beyond repair in our or our children's lifetimes but it doesn't mean that we can start to do a better job beginning with our own households and moving to the local level.
Our acquiescence of personal freedom to support our lifestyles in "peace and safety" so we can get more of the cheapest junk made in China from the local "mart", eating fresh tomatoes, grapes or cherries in the dead of winter not as a treat but as a lifestyle rests on each of our shoulders. We get the planet and the governments that we deserve.
Some places may be better that others depending upon the relative degradation (or lack thereof) of local or regional life but as Fukushima has taught us on the west coast, you can be in the middle of nowhere and be affected by events around the globe.
While there is much debatable and much that is essentially correct in that article, my argument with the author is that you can't responsibly run. Each of us has to make their stand where they live to make their corner of the world a more healthy and livable place.
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