Maybe we weren't bombed to the extent you were, but the whole country worked and sacrificed to support the war effort. People grew "victory gardens" so they could live off of that produce instead of the agricultural crops. Food, fuel, and rubber were also rationed. The arms, food and other supplies were shipped overseas by the merchant marines who suffered the greatest percentage loss of life than any other service in WWII except the German U-boat fleet. This isn't even talking about B-17s my father flew where 7/10 were killed. Sorry to rant, but I think we *did* more than your observation makes clear.
In Britain one house in four was damaged or destroyed. Factories produced only war materiel and the bare essentials. Rationing of virtually everything, food, clothing, fuel, continued until 1954. The country bankrupted itself to continue fighting, and it showed. I do not think the average American civilian was so inconvenienced. Nor by WW1, the Civil War or the War of Independence. Life carried on much as usual.
I find it interesting how upset people get when Americans say they don't like socialism. I don't understand why people not living here are upset by the fact that some American's (myself including) don't want the same socialist environment that exists elsewhere. I understand that people have different ideals and beliefs and some people want socialism and others don't. If I wanted to live in a more socialist state then I'd pack up my bags and start looking for jobs someplace in Europe. While providing for the impoverished and needy does increase the standard of living of society as a whole I don't feel that government handouts are the answer to every situation. Since government redistribution of wealth inherently reduces the total wealth of a nation the more you redistribute the more you lose to bureaucracy. Certainly the healthcare standard in the US has some room for improvement as do other areas but no country is perfect and no country ever will be, regardless if it's socialist, communist, capitalist, etc. Government should reflect the ideals and attitudes of the majority of the people (over the long run) and I believe this is the case in the US. Of course my whole point of view is biased since I will be in a position not to have to rely on the government for healtcare, foodstamps, or a pension.
As I said, we weren't bombed to the extent you were. But, the average American was highly inconvenienced and factories were converted to produce war material to a large extent. We had more military losses. Your original comment seems to ignore this entirely. I was only talking about WWII. I wasn't aware that the UK was bombed extensively in WWI. It's my understanding that Zeppelins did a pretty poor job (from the German viewpoint). WWII losses - Total 1939 Pop./Military Deaths/Civilian Deaths/Total Deaths/Deaths as % of 1939 population United Kingdom[56] 47,760,000 382,600 67,800 450,400 0.94% United States[57] 131,028,000 416,800 1,700 418,500 0.32%
What goes around comes around. Look who's number one...the inefficient socialists... You see, in our folk stories, Robin Hood is the good guy. In yours, the Sheriff of Nottingham has the white hat.
Can we not turn this into an "Europe is better than Amerikka" thread please. If you want those kind of discussions then go to 4chan. Stay on topic pl0x. I've said it before and I'll say it again - Americans are on the whole opposed to socialism because of social attitude.... As summarised in the first post. Have we made any advances on that?
I guess the immediate form of socialism isn't possible to describe. It's a combination of government and private social programs. We have plenty of that here. I've tried to give examples and they've been ignored, so I guess I don't know what I'm talking about. In times of need we all come together to help one another. Some programs help more than others. But, on the whole, the job gets done in some fashion. We've come a long way since the Great Depression. During the Great Depression preceding the passage of the Social Security Act, "soup kitchens" provided the only meals some unemployed Americans had. This particular soup kitchen was sponsored by the Chicago gangster Al Capone While the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, it has had many amendments.
i have read every post and have come to the conclusion, the reason Americans don't like socialism is.... fear of the unknown and fear of change, there is also a lot of FUD going around refusal of external ideas, from your neighbours and friends, on how to be more efficient. i see a pattern here, some say it is not moral to take money from people that work hard for it, i agree that it is "nasty" but it is necessary, can you imagine a country without taxes? (i know some exist but they exist only because of the huge riches of oil) can you imagine a country without any form of gov? to summarize: imagine the USA but without taxes and the socialist government it has, huge corps would not be bailed out, laws are made by private groups, police, firemen and army (every gov service) are all private, would this work? would you like the worlds biggest super power in the hands of the company that also sells you your cars?
I don't think we do get upset. It's your funeral. How you feel about things is not a rational argument. The facts are that US private health care is about three times as expensive as UK socialist health care because of the bureacracy involved: For being the most expensive health care system in the world, it has a 20% higher infant mortality rate than the UK (more than twice as high than Sweden), and ranks 37th in the world for overall performance (UK: 20th; France, 1st). I think it is just about cultural myth. The US created for itself a myth of how it became the most powerful nation in the world by dint of hard work and independence, but really just stole it from the natives and built it on slave labour (like so many other countries: think of Holland's "Golden Age" and the British Empire). It likes to think that it is defending the free world but in fact acts like a bully on the geopolitical playground --especially where oil is involved. Simply put, it wants to believe that it values ambition, freedom and independence, but in reality it is just about greed and not wanting to play nice and share with others.
Ahhhh...but the question is, more efficient at what? Providing health care to all? Education to all? or productivity per capita? number of new small businesses? dynamic markets and trade? innovation, or bringing innovation to market? The EU does many things well, but I would never go so far as to say efficiency is one. Socialism does bring with it a bit of paperwork and civil service. and that means inherent inefficiencies.
Wjat bugs me about health care issues this election is that McCain says, "Obama's health plan would just put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor." I am dumbfounded by this. Do people really believe that there isn't some insurance representative doing everything to deny coverage so the company can make a higher profit? Do they really believe that they won't get denied coverage where ever they go with a preexisting condition? Furthermore, do they really believe that the health plan they have will actually give them the full coverage that the best plans offer? Things like chemotherapy limit of $13K/yr which doesn't cover even the first treatment. By the time a person could have coverage again, they'd probably be much worse off with the delay. Or, having to pay a deductible before coverage begins to kick in, the plan then requires a 20% copay until you've paid a single person/family limit of 10K/25k before 100% kicks in. The games they play with medication coverage and having special considerations to escape paying $100 or $200 for a copay, is really ridiculous. I liked Clinton's health plan better than Obama's because it was more universal in nature. It would have been a major reform of the medical insurance business, but I'm not sure what will happen now.
Capitalism brings competition for the same market; that should encourage efficiency, but it also incurs duplication of facilities and a large advertising budget. You've also got the need to give shareholders a return. The UK has capitalism with a safety-net. WFM.
What a cheap cop out, using Nexxo's cliche. You accuse the Americans of not taking ideas from others on how to be more efficient. Yet you refuse to acknowledge that efficiency has many ways of being measured. And, in spite of your love of the socialist system, you can't/won't admit that it comes at a price. Governments in the EU have arranged an easier life for the citizens. But at what cost? have you seen the unemployment figures for the last few years*? As much as I love the place, Portugal barely has an economy. Spain has been stuck in a rut for years. France and Germany have made it almost impossible for small businesses to get started and the cost of failure is so high that no one wants to. There are more highly educated and unemployable people per square kilometer in the EU then anywhere else. Unions and labor laws have strangled growth across the EU, leaving a market stagnant compared to other places in the world. With out your beloved socialism, America has driven market growth across the globe. It can be argued that that alone has raised the standard of living of more people world wide then any socialist program ever could have. Just look at the Asian markets since the 1950's. Look at Europe since the 1950's. American has provided more employment, more opportunities, more wealth to the world then any socialist country ever has. The flip side is: you don't even know how much government involvement in the US economy has grown in the last 50 years. You think that socialism is just health care and free uni? Take a long look at our "free" market and you'll see that the government meddles by far to much to to not be considered socialist in some ways. Our unions are slowly chocking industry and cry like little girls when the jobs move to friendlier markets. There are now almost as many labor laws in the US as in the EU. Money is now harder to get and more expensive. Subsidies to various industries are at an all time high. Market regulation is at an all time high. We are a socialist economy in everything but the name. If you had a clue, you'd see that only a communist would think that the US isn't socialist enough. Because, as a libertarian, it shocks me to see what the US has become. I am also smart enough to know that my political views are largely theoretical, having seen that most countries have to find their own balance between an open, dynamic market and providing basic services to their citizens. But why are you so adamant that the US has failed? Even with our failings, we have done more in a short time in raising the standard of living for our citizens then just about any other country in the world. Since the second world war, only Saudi has seen a greater shift in wealth in a shorter time frame. Personally, I think you live on a tiny island off a tiny country that spoon feeds you. You have a tiny little view on a very large world that is by far more complex then the kindergarten you are living in now. I worry that you will fly off that island and get your ass handed to you once land in a country that cares little for your simplistic views on other people's countries and politics. My advice? NEVER go to New York City. *based on March figures: 2005 US- 5.1% EU- 8.9% 2006 US- 4.7% EU- 8.4% 2007 US- 4.4% EU- 7.3% 2008 US- 5.1% EU- 6.7%
Outside of web forums, I pretty much am a hermit. I live in a town with one traffic light and approximately one person in my demographic (me), and I leave the house mostly just to get coffee or groceries. Granted I hate pretty much everything about where I live; the one perk is that NH doesn't have any state income or sales tax. And yet somehow we still have paved roads and water and electricity and roofs on houses and wheels. Yes, you read that right - no state level taxes and yet society doesn't fall apart; the fact that I don't care much for most of society is irrelevant here. Hell, the next town over has fiber rolled out to a good chunk of the population. Believe it or not, our landscape doesn't look like one giant hillside mansion surrounded for miles by collapsing hovels, which is clearly what happens when we don't all share our money through the government, if my sleep-deprived interpretation of what you posted is reasonably accurate. Seconded. The government meddles in more than enough as it is. The only reason anyone thinks America isn't largely socialist is because our government would never admit to it and we continue to have privatized healthcare (which admittedly has plenty of problems, but plenty of those have spawned from the government allowing ambulance chaser lawsuits to go on, among dozens of other things). Socialism basically amounts to government-managed insurance. Price-wise it may work out favorably for some and less so for others, but it really stops being insurance once it's no longer optional. There's nothing terribly wrong with that, really, but our government is doing so much to socialize the country while maintaining a strictly capitalist issue that both sides get horribly screwed up. The fire department is pretty much the only government-subsidized organization that functions as it should, and around here at least it's primarily a volunteer-based system.
Yeah, but you are entirely dependent on the taxation of business, land and the distribution of federal taxes. Should businesses find greener pastures, the value of land plummet suddenly, or the level of federal income tax drop; then NH is in a pickle. The New Hampshire model is also limited to a small demo- and geographic area. I doubt that it is transferable to the US as a whole. and, IIRC, the wealth distribution is fairly flat. If you had to support more people that needed social services but didn't have the means to contribute, it would collapse fairly fast. So it works as long as you have a low number of poor and a large number of (relatively) well off.
True, but that may just suggest that the US as a whole is simply unmanageably large. Look at some history on the federal income tax: It didn't exist for nearly the first hundred years of our country's existence, for most of the first ~150yrs, and had at a point been declared unconstitutional. I mean to say, look at why the country was founded in the first place. Also consider that the more social services become available, the more people are destined to abuse them. There's a difference between ensuring that someone who just lost a job doesn't starve while he's looking and allowing people to live off the system indefinitely. Look at the chav way of life in England - get pregnant at 13 so you can start getting checks from the government, and continue having kids to make the checks bigger. Arresting those kind of people wouldn't bring justice, as they'd still be living for free off of the system they had been previously abusing. I expect that the wealth distribution in the state is reasonably flat. I think that if you look at most regions of this size, you'll find that to be relatively true. The heights of your plateaus may be all over the place as you move around the country, but there tends to be a reasonable degree of uniformity within a region. It's certainly why it costs $5000/mo to live out of half of a rented garage in Silicon Valley where that rate would get you a fully owned house and land within a year in other places. If we're going to talk about tribal behavior, we need to remember that tribes are not groups of hundreds of thousands to millions of people.
