"What's wrong? Yeah... That's covered. You have the flu? a cold? diabetes? You need a new liver? You're losing your hair? Your nose is too big? Your penis won't stay hard? You need a sex change? You're not sure, but you feel tired and worried that something's wrong? Yeah. That's covered."
Yes, it'd be difficult to impliment... It would have to come in stages. We can't go from "You have money? No? Well, fuck you, you're gonna die." to "free cosmetic surgery for everyone!" overnight. But we can do it, and we should do it... Because if we do this, we'll cure cancer and AIDS and halitosis and impotency and baldness and disease and genetic disorders and congenital disorders and maybe even old age... And we'll do it whole orders of magnitude faster than we would otherwise... Because if we can make it work for us, we can make it cheap, then nearly free to us... Then we can make it cheap and nearly free to the rest of the world. Because if we do this, the amazing US economic powerhouse of the Clinton years will look like a ten year depression in Kuala Lumpur compared to the explosive global and solar economy we can build.
It's all about long view. We need to stop saving, and start investing.
And now the long one.
That's a popular point of view in America, because that's what the rich have been telling the working class for generations... Because it's in their best inerest to keep us on that frame of mind.Gengar003 wrote:I'll agree people want a better life. And many probably want to work... In America, that's because, mainly, of the "better life" thing, but also, you don't really have a choice. In Europe's socialist states, people don't have to work to live. Bottom of the barrel, maybe, but there are lots of people who would settle for that. If you can live off of welfare/healthcare provided by the government, then slowly but surely people ARE going to stop working. Maybe not their current generation...But eventually, they will stop. This happened/is happening in europe.
Note: That's not some socialist whine "Oooh... The Man's trying to keep me down!" It's a matter of political science and history. The differences between the natural and logical political strategies of those who are rich and those who aren't, or those who would like to be are well understood, well documented, and have been since before the formation of the US... In fact, the fact that those philosophies and tendancies were well understood by political professionals of the time had a great deal to do with what was and was not put into our constitution. Not only do we know the talking points on this one, we know why:
It's a very popular form of propagandization, though, because it works. Whatever's bothering you, it's this other guy's fault. That german guy we don't talk about used the same principal, in the thirties. "Not happy? It's not your fault and it's not just the way life is. It's that guy's fault! He's robbing you of your potential, stealing your job, soaking up your tax money, sleeping with your daughter, and feeding your dog table scraps while you're not looking... Help us crush him, and things will be fine as frog hair. I promise!"Rich Politician wrote:You work for a living! You're a good, hard-working American, in pursuit of the American dream... And the reasons you don't have what you want, the reasons you can't get ahead...? It's because of those lazy, unscrupulous people who don't want to work! They're killing you with the heavy tax burden that is all they contribute to society! The poor are not your responsibility! They're only poor because they don't want to work! Because they don't subecribe to American values, where you pull yourself up by your bootstraps and do for yourself! In this land of opportunity, everyone who works hard and lives right can acheive the American Dream!
It's manipulation and misdirection and slight of hand. And sadly, as I said... It works.
And what about that American Dream? And further, what about those poor Europeans who've mortgaged their future to the socialist pipe-dream of better social services? Well, the info you're repeating there is a combination of outdated, misleading, and just plain false.
Intergenerational upward mobility is down in the US. It's more difficult to "get rich" in America than it is in many other nations... It's more difficult to get ahead, it's more difficult to just not stay poor. Americans who live in poverty are almost twice as likely to remain in poverty as their European counterparts. In Canada, also, it's easier to rise out of poverty than in the US. We're not talking lifetime welfare... That -is- considered poverty. We're talking upward social mobility... An area in which the US is among the worst of industrialized nations.
Our rich get richer. Our poor stay poor, which helps to make our rich richer. We preach upward mobility and legislate stagnation.
Those countries who have advanced better social services since world war two are the ones who are beating us in that race. Social services there aren't spawning a full generation of non-workers, satisfied to live on food stamps in the projects. They're (finally) allowing people to advance to better lives... While our president is praising a single mother for working three jobs, so she can barely get by... calling it "uniquely American". Sadly, with a record like his, that was one of the most accurate statements he's made in his presidency so far.
You're reacting to old information. You're thinking of cold-war europe and the Europe of the Regan era, my friend... This is the EU. This is where the best upward mobility numbers in the civilized world live. This is the most powerful economic market on the planet. This is not a lethargic welfare wonderland.
The hopeless ennui you're talking about, where the world began to worry that in a few short years, European "socialist" countries would implode under the weight of a welfare state that simply had no drive to work or improve...? That was never about welfare. As I said in my last post, that was about a perceived lack of options. That was when Europe was really nothing but the primary battlefield of the cold war, and a tourist attraction on the side.
You try living in the shadow of two warring giants, either of which could crush you with a single stray footfall, who seem wholly intent to fight to the death, and to do it right in your livingroom. Keep on mind, in our little thought experiment, that this is not only the world you were born into and the world your parents grew up in... It's been going on for two full social cycles, and nobody really expects it to change, ever, except possibly in a giant, final, world-wide mushroom cloud. Try living with the day to day knowledge that all of this is assumed to be almost guaranteed, and that there is next to nothing you can do about it, and see how interested you are in working hard in college and building a better life for yourself and the future of society.
The Europe of that time period wasn't lethargic and apathetic and nihilistic and uninspired because they had welfare and health coverage and high taxes... They were all of those things because they had a non-optional invitation to a universal end of the world ass-kicking party, and they'd been elected to supply the ass.
And that's not all... If you look at the social trends of the time, the young people of the US and Canada and Russia and Japan and Australia... Everywhere where they were either A) involved or B) had an even essentially free media... Young people in all of those areas began to show more and more... disturbing behaviour. It was blamed on something else in every location. It was the fault of communist stagnation in the USSR, socialist over-mothering in most of Europe, over-americanization in Japan... And here in the US we had violence in media, declining family values, drugs, and a perrenial favorite... popular music.
Even though it was the single most talked about thing in the world at the time, nobody thinks all of these problems might have been due to all of these people growing up in a world where the actual expectation was that we'd all eventually die, brutally and badly and soon, over some ideological differences? It was the end of the fucking world, and our white surrogate grandparents expected us to go to work at a fast food resturant..? Small fucking wonder we were nihilistic and disinterested and rebllious.
Anyway. The short version is this: No. Decent social services will not make people, on a large scale & in the long term, refuse to work. A perceived near-total lack of hope or opportunity is the only thing that can do that. And that's exactly what you're going to have in the United States if we don't grow the hell up, and soon.
