Originally posted by lilpixieofterror
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The non-American democratic West in the 1950s and 1960s was not communist. Can you get that through your head? France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the UK etc are not communist and have never been communist. Within the last century or so, they've all been democracies, they've not had dictatorships, and they've never been communist. But at various times they've had strong redistributive economic policies, and depending on your definition of the term, you might want to label them 'socialist' or give them that label at certain periods of their history.
So your argument seems to go "well we can't have the policies that worked in those countries because communism didn't work!" which is just stupid. Yes, communism didn't work. I agree. But what did work, and worked very well, was the redistributive economic policies that a wide variety of successful Western countries have tried.
See, the problem with your entire plan is your absolute trust in the government to make it work,
if your plan was so great and wonderful, Europe should be thriving and doing much better than the US, yet the reality shows that Europe doesn't seem to be doing better then the US is.
It also depends on what you mean by "thriving and doing much better than the US". The HDI report you cite makes a little bit of an effort to combine various factors but not a great one, and seems to overly favor GDP. Because, yes, I think that on an overall balance of factors, much of Europe is doing much better than the US and I would much rather live there than in the US.
If your plan was true and accurate, shouldn't most Western European nations be ahead of the US and not at or even behind the US?
The countries that consistently score the best on these multi-factor analyses are the Scandinavian countries, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UK, Ireland, Australia, NZ and Canada. And the US is typically somewhere on the tail-end of this list or off the bottom of it - often quite far off it. You can often almost split the first-world countries into two groups on a lot of these lists, with the US typically being in the 2nd tier of first-world countries, while the historically socialist democracies are all the ones in the first tier. That is how I tend to mentally think of the US - as a second-tier first-world country.
The things these top countries have in common are:
1. Modern western democracies.
2. Free market capitalism.
3. Very low corruption.
4. Strong government services.
5. A history of strongly redistributive government economic policies.
I concede a legitimate discussion can be had over which of these things are more important factors than others. And I also concede that the fact that a lot of these countries have significantly changed the structure of their economies within the last 30 years and significantly altered the strengths of their redistributive policies can make it hard to disentangle whether their current good performance is a after-effect of good historical policies that gave them a fundamentally sound and well-structured society, or whether it stems from very recent policies.
So in 100 years, has the 'non-American democratic west' done any better than the US has?
Let's try dumping a few million immigrants on top of your Scandinavian friends and see how well they handle it
Your precious 'non-American West' was saved by the US and rebuilt after a destructive war ended up destroying much of it
I agree the post-war rebuild was a really good idea and really successful. It's good to finally reach agreement that large government programs to build up economies and infrastructure are a great idea.
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