Originally posted by Starlight
View Post
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.
I do trust my government. I wouldn't trust the american government though. You guys have a serious corruption problem which needs a major solution.
Only some countries in Europe have followed the kinds of policies I support. Other countries in Europe have had fascist dictators or communist ones. So Europe overall is a very mixed bag of different recent histories.
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.
Yes. So on a multi-factor analysis like this one, the US is 21st, behind many European countries. On this OECD one the US is doing better at 7th, still behind the Scandinavian countries and others. On the single factor of happiness (although arguably happiness is itself very multi-factor in origin) the US is 10th, once again behind all the socialist-democracies of Europe.
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.
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.
Yes, generally much better in almost all areas. The US has had certain advantages in some areas due to simply having a larger population. Thus total US productivity and spending tends to look humongous when compared to any of the other much smaller Western countries.
I agree that a high rate of culturally-dissimilar immigration can pose serious problems. However, I note that typically in the US, Mexican immigrants tend to work hard and form a significant part of your minimum wage / lower than minimum wage labor force, doing many of the low-wage jobs such as cleaning and farm-work that a lot of Americans would prefer not to do themselves. And your perceived problem with government dependency is not with Mexican immigrants, but rather is with Black Americans. So as far as I can tell, your Mexican immigration appears to be making your country richer rather than costing you money, because for the most part they are not being given government services and are instead acting as slave-labor. Whereas I get the impression that Black Americans probably are a net economic drain on your system, but they're not recent immigrants.
It's cute how Americans re-imagine themselves as the great benevolent rescuer who swooped in to save everyone. When in actuality, the US stayed out of WWII until they were actually attacked themselves. Not exactly the unselfish motivations you'd like to re-imagine it as being. And the fact that additional forces were enough to tip the balance is not at all the same as winning the war single-handedly.
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.
Comment