As per the title.
Why does the word socialism in the US cause frothing at the mouth? Not comming from the US I don't understand this, I can see socialism and capitalism both have positive points as well as negative ones, but it seems crazy to me that when Obama talked of changing the healthcare system there were all these people protesting saying "Government hands off my health" and such.
After watching "Sicko" on TV the other night I think the average US person has little knowledge on socialism. I live in Australia with what would be called a "socialist" healthcare system and I think its great but we are not a socialist country.
So, without getting political, why is the culture of the United States of America so fixated on capitalism?
Yes, your post about our cancer survival rates are all great, but that does little to show what our healthcare system is like. Our health care research and technology is top notch. There is no doubt about it. But there is something very troubling about our country/government that allows its citizens to go poor when their health goes poor.
Your talk about credit scores being a problem is very skewed as well. Credit score is merely an "effect" but is not a cause of anything. I don't understand why you would want fewer people with good credit scores. That is just totally stupid. To say that credit scores is what inflates the cost of things is so far from the truth. Credit score is relative and completely reactive. It still all comes down to whether or not a bank will take the risk to lend the money to someone who doesn't deserve it. Credit score is just a system to measure that risk. If everyone had poor credit scores, then that would mean that all those people did something to deserve those poor scores...which would mean that they probably aren't paying off loans...which would mean that the lenders probably shouldn't have given out loans to them in the first place. All that would result in is a poor economy (much like the one we have). I think I understood your main idea, but simply saying that you want fewer people with good credit scores will likely result in a tanked economy...which is not what you are looking for, I'm sure.
Hmmmm, to be honest I looked at the data, thought "I don't really have time to look too hard at it, I'll trust Gods own peer review system to keep me safe", and that was that. I was always prepared to be wrong, there is no reason why cancer care in the US couldn't give better results, the US governments "you scratch my back- I'll scratch yours" relationship with big pharma means they could have slipped more developmental drugs through more quickly.
There is a lesson in that for me, cheers GW.
psychoak, whats your opinion of the NCPA? Fair and unbiased? Do you know anything about them? It doesn't matter if you don't, simply because GW says they are possibly biased doesn't automatically make it so (even though they published a paper in my eyes there were automatically unbiased, I'm just too trusting...), but I havn't finished all the pie yet, there is still some for you
Hilarious GW, really.
The NCPA can be a communist outfit and it wouldn't matter. They didn't even do the research, they're just reporting on it. I've seen multiple studies done in different years over the past decade, they've all said the same thing. We spank the shit out of everyone else. You should really get over this habit of looking at the medium first, and data second. Considering D.C. is run by a bunch of verifiably corrupt, habitual liars, you shouldn't be so distrusting of people that distrust them anyway.
There's something very wrong with a country/government that forces others to pay for the problems of individuals. These problems are often self caused as well. You have no right to spend a few hundred thousand dollars of someone elses money, whether you earned your ailment or not. Taxation is not charity.
As to your understanding of economics, terribly surprising that you don't know the drawbacks of credit, really...
The great depression was started by the federal reserve tightening the money supply. What does that mean? They thought there was too much credit, the debt level in the country was massive. So they started restricting it. All of a sudden, billions of dollars, trillions in todays values, vanished overnight when the margin calls hit on the dropping stocks. There wouldn't have been any margin calls, no failed banks, no lost empires, if everyone had actually owned the property they had. Credit amplifies the business cycle. It takes that natural, and unavoidable boom and bust cycle that comes with a free market, and ramps up the growth. What goes up, comes back down. What should be a slowdown in growth as saturated markets lose the weaker comepitors, becomes a 40% drop in gdp.
Too much credit is financial suicide, too little stifles growth by denying those worthy candidates of an investment. We have way too much debt right now, it's more than enough to kickstart a depression to make the last one look like a cake walk.
That actually works backwards. The only thing saving the medical research not done in the US is the fucking FDA. It's prohibitively expensive to get things through the process, new drugs occasionally hit European markets years in advance due to minor snags in the beaurocracy. We're the best because we spend so much, not because of any back scratching by uncle. In this country, a 60 year old can blow several hundred grand on sustained cancer treatments over several years time. In most, they'll give you pain killers and tell you to go home after the first round.
I write organizations off when they post misleading information. I write research off only when it's in question. The research wasn't done by them, their validity as an organization is fairly irrelevant. All of those graphs are labeled with source information. If you find the numbers questionable, it's easy enough to do the fact checking and hunt those sources down. I've done this previously, on multiple occasions, and those numbers are similar to the last time I went through this, so I'm not worried about them being faulty.
I do call into question the sanity of people that hold a bias against classical liberalism though. It can't possibly be more obvious than it already is, our respective governments are abusively powerful and still growing even while they collapse the world economy. They're sticking their nose into every aspect of life, and idiots on the social left and economic right just sit there acting like retards over bullshit like gay marriage or stem cell research instead of figuring out they'd be in agreement if they just had the brains God gave a gnat.
psychoak, your so negative your positivly positive in your outlook.
"A cancer epidemiologist would probably explain the data this way: In the U.S., we conduct far more tests, which turn up many more cancers. That in turn leads to higher survival rates because we wind up treating some cancers at an earlier stage. It probably even saves some lives that otherwise would have been lost to the disease.
But there's a downside to all those tests. They have relatively high false positive rates. In other words, they turn up minor cancers that may never have progressed to full-blown neoplasms. Yet, they are treated anyway since determining which ones will progress is impossible at that early stage."
Hmmmm. So the higher survival rate figure could be over inflated by minor cancers that wouldn't kill anyway (no metastasise)?
Bah! All data and evidence on an internet forum is moot anyway, its the guts of your language that counts
Tumors are tested to determine malignancy even if removed before a biopsy. It's important to know whether it's cancerous or not, because just having it means you need to be screened regularly for recurrance as you have an established predisposition to getting it. Cancer that doesn't metastasize is by no means a false positive.
The survival rate for catching a cancer after it's already metastasized is universally shit. Basically, you're fucked. You'll have somewhere between zero and maybe a 30% chance of making it those five years The problem is there's rarely a sign that you have cancer until after you're screwed. The tumor itself has to either be noticable, or directly screw up some function. Catching and killing them before they metastasize is the easiest way you survive cancer, and even the mild cancers like breast cancer aren't really good odds with a 30% chance of spreading. Something like pancreatic or colon cancer always metastasizes, and the US spanks Europe on those too.
That's not true.
Methinks you might mean me, in which case you're quite wrong. John Stuart Mill is one of my favorite theorists, even before he began to seriously consider the plausibility of some socialist ideas.
The real rub for me with folks with an NCPA take on classical liberalism is that they have no good answer for the legal perversion that is the modern corporation. Classical liberalism depends on individual rights, not abstractions that can operate as either contractual arrangements or legal persons depending on which is more advantageous at a given moment.
And Europe spanks the US in other areas. Health care is a complex system and one system might excel in specific areas and loose in others. Generally I'd say that overall quality of health care would be similar throughout western states as training of doctors, use of treatments, use of technology etc. are more or less the same (usually doctors would prescribe the same pill instead of giving out some magic drink made from rhino balls).
This is probably a relatively unbiased report on the US health system and its spendings if somebody does not really dismiss any form of statistical research:
http://www.oecdwash.org/PDFILES/Pearson_Testimony_30Sept2009.pdf
To sum it up: The US spends more than any other country on health care, excels in cancer treatment, looses in asthma and diabetes treatment. Costs might be explained by faster use of new technologies (which might partly explain the cancer results), higher prices, high administration costs. Higher prices may be explained due to the private nature of the health care system which does not give many incentives to constrain costs (the European systems would be at an disadvantage when it comes to available treatments as these might be restricted to specific (cheaper and tested) ones).
Thing is that introducing more European elements in health care in the US might get really expensive as there is not a cost constraining system in place. Either the US would have to go much further and restrict treatments for universally insured, control prices on certain medicaments, regulate which medicaments/treatments maybe even doctors the universally insured could use or they might face a cost explosion when the new costs are just added to the old ones.
This of course does not have anything to do with socialism but with high costs of changing systems...
pretty much. Classical liberalism is about as utopian and convincing as socialism.
Explain, are you claiming pancreatic cancer doesn't always metastasize? From the research I've seen, 80% of the people diagnosed with it die inside a year because it's done so already, and of the remaining 20%, three quarters of them are toast inside five.
Did I miss the article for corporate structuring in the Constitution? Having a problem with the way we've set up corporate law is hardly cause to skip out on classical liberalism. I'd have guessed the legal morass in general is one of the primary complaints they have, it sure as hell makes my list.
Businessmen should never have been given an out to evade the consequences of their decisions.
The asthma I wasn't sure about, so I started digging. It's kinda funny. Half of those countries listed in the asthma category have higher death rates per capita. The UK, which has one of the worst health care systems in Europe, is the best, yet has the highest rate of asthma in the world at the same time. The rest of the countries have comparably low rates of asthma. By my math, we come in around an astronomically distant second, relatively tied with Europe in general. We just have higher rates due to all the cars we drive. The UK is a mystery though, I'd love to get an explanation there. Maybe they all die of it, but it gets reported as something else?
The diabetes on the otherhand is inexcusably obvious. That's lifestyle, not healthcare quality. I know lots and lots of diabetics, most of them are fat. Who's the fattest fucking country on the planet? The US. Who's got more diabetics than any other country? The US. Sorta goes without saying that the US is going to have both more complications per diabetic, and more diabetics in the hospital.
You cannot take the rate at which a country obtains a disease due to contributing factors separate from the health care industry, and then blame the health care industry for those rates. If it were statistics done per diabetic, or per asthmatic, then they would be more useful. The per capital rates only say we're a bunch of fat, chain smoking slobs that drive to the mailbox in the morning.
That might have sounded like exaggeration, but a lady that lived down the street from me when I was a kid really did drive to the mailbox at the end of her driveway...
Well, in regard to the original post, I don't think most people know what "socialism" is or what it means.
And aside from that, I bet they've never even heard of the U.N. Human Development Index. For those of your who don't know, it was a massive multinational endeavor by demographers to to assess the development of each nation based on per capita standard of living (money), education, and life expectancy. Wonder who ranked in the top 9? Not the U.S.A. They were all... uh oh... Socialist Republics. Care to guess where the good ol' U.S. of A. ranked? 13th, right above Austria and right below Finland. Whoops...
So yeah, I'm tired of people using socialism as a derogatory slur to insult their rivals. Sure, call them communists--- communism failed, so at least you'd be consistent. But why would you accuse your rival of something that is tried, true and brought prosperity to other nations?
Every developed nation is a hybrid of socialism and free market, the United States included. We just tend to have a little less socialism than, you know, the top 9 most developed nations that rank above us...
Better question:
Why is the world (read: collectivist nations of Europe et al) obsessed with the political philosophies of Americans? Are we not free to choose our own system and reap its benefits? Why does it concern you that we are different? Is it envy? Fear? Ignorance? Since the United States of America declared itself free from the whims of European leaders, the rest of the world has scowled at our independent nature. We are not like you. Leave us be.
Oh please, don't pretend like the United States is the only nation with an "independant nature." When the most powerful nation in the world begins slinging around its might in haphazard brush wars with false causus belli and has its oaffy paws in everyone else's business, it's everyone's concern.
You're probably just jealous because the era of European imperialism is now over. Its now America's turn to tell the world what to do. You Europeans had your chance to dominate the world and you couldn't hold onto it because you kept fighting amongst yourselves.
Was*
Unless we wake up, like yesterday, we're going down the toilet.
Its the natural economic byproduct of Legalism.
In a world of perfect Confucian ideals, we wouldn't NEED any particular form of economics, because through Ren we would all be exemplary human beings working in harmony with each other.
People would internally strive for that which is best for Each Other via Morality, or rather the exemplification of Virtues which in turn exempify what it means to be good or harmonious.
Alot of this has to do with Independent view of Self (western) vs Interdependent view of Self (eastern)
American lawmakers are generally born and bred in those areas of the USA with the greatest prevalence of Independent view. Therefore, Independence of thought and Legalism are the highest priorities for the United States. This style of pyschology leads to Value-tempered Utilitarianism. The natural state for a moral-tempered Utilitarian Economic system is a Free Market (with legalist regulations in an attempt to temper the corporations with values).
Ill just go ahead and point out that the definition of Fascism is the rule of the Country by Corporations, enforced by the military. Fascism is Utilitarianism NOT tempered by Values. When you impose Legalistic Values you get a Free-Market Democracy, still largely run by the Corporations although with actual freedom of the people.
The less Virtue-ethics is present, and the more legalism is present, the less likely people will hold internalized Virtues dear. Truly a non-legalistic society, only ruled by the Wisdom of man, will have among them selfish people that Take advantage of those more virtuos, as Virtue comes with it a certain amount of vulnerability ... although someone who has internalized virtue would rather be virtuous than have power ... therefore he is free from the Prisoner's Dillema and the Security Dillema. While a Virtue-ethics based society will have SOME people that take advantage of others, the majority will be virtuous and upstanding. Meanwhile, a legalist society is the world of lawyers, and breeds selfishness, arrogance, and other vices. Not because of any malignant desire inherent in the social model, but because the values and virtues of life are not internalized, and the only things of "true" import are these external laws and regulations.
Im more than happy to live where I live today ... I merely felt this needed to be said.
So basically your overall point is if men were angels, they wouldn't need government?
Legalism tends to make people Cynical. A man that follows a Virtuous path will have as a lifelong goal the internalization of his ethics, so that they become his basic and natural disposition.
And having such a problem is no certain indicator of having skipped out on classical liberalism. I'd prefer it if national academic standards required that anyone earning a BA or BS had read On Liberty and written a proper (or excellently improper) essay in response.
This statement, and statements made prior, seem to be exemplar of Xiaoren.
No, I do understand credit. The problem was that everything you just said in that post has nothing to do with what I said in response to your original statement. Credit is not the same as credit score and they are not interchangable.
In your first post you said:
That is completely idiotic. Like I said, credit score is a measuring system and is not the same as credit itself. So when you make a dumb statement like you did saying that you would prefer more people to have fair/poor credit scores, you are essentially saying that you'd like it if more people defaulted on their loans. Credit score is a reactive measurement process. You don't earn a credit score unless you've done something to earn it. What you probably meant is that you'd prefer it if there was less credit available to people regardless of their credit score. But, you didn't say that.
USA use to be portective socity of buiness not a free market they use to actully require copreations to prove they where doing worth while things for USA people or they would get there licinces revoked and would not be allowed to do buinessnes in USA
we when we where frsit setup and for about 100 years where a Mercantilism country be closes thing i can think of what we use to be.
USA required charters to be issued to large cporations and only way to get them as i said was if company did good things like health care or built roads for the people so forth if large company did not do anything worth while then there charter was revoked and they where kicked out of the USA 1900 or so they I think revoked the chraters.
and in 19th centry they start limited liablity meaning companys where not really respoanblef or things they do and that kinda started corporate law.
biggest issue with copreations is best qouted by Adam Smith Wealth of nations when ownership is sperated form managmet the latter will invitably being to neglect the intrerest of the former, creating dysfuction with in the company.
recent events like the banks and fincanly criss and actully the 3 major encoammly crisses in USA could be used to reinforce Smiths warning about the danagers of legally protecting collectivist hierarchies.
if you want information on how copreations where orginaly setup to run by our founding fathers in usa this is good web page
http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/history_corporations_us.html
it also kinda puts out mtyh of the free market in USA
I think cloes true freemarket is amsterdam no country can to have a claim free market if they put embargs on countrys or goods.
Ugh the spelling and grammar mistakes make my head hurt...and I was only a C english student in college...I hate english, I hate your spelling more.
I can't (OK, won't) parse that post either. But the short essay at http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate_accountability/history_corporations_us.html is good side reading for the larger discussion here. After all, corporations are almost a form of 'socialism,' given that their existence depends entirely upon civil government.
They're also, not surprisingly, horribly inefficient entities that drag down growth.
It's such a short book though! I haven't liked reading things under 500 pages since elementary school.
Aparently, you don't. This is what I said when not ripped out of context so you can make stupid replies:
Completely idiotic is pretending you have something to argue with. Can't you just not post when there isn't something vaguely sensible to say? I had a rather specific target with my statement, if you had functioning neurons you'd stop building entire posts upon quotes out of context.
I would like it if more people defaulted on their loans though. These bullshit bailouts to prevent just that from happening should never have been done, it's no less necessary than predators culling a herd. It would return sanity in pricing to the housing markets, wake up some seriously out of touch consumers to their severe mental shortcomings, and end some of the less intelligent banking enterprises that need to make way for smarter management. Not to mention the hellfire that rains down on the politicians responsible for setting these shenanigans up would be a blast to watch.
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