Quote Originally Posted by TallGuyLittleCar View Post
True.. but the U.S. isn't New Zealand.
Yeah, but we should try to be more like New Zealand. That country is something to aspire to. I mean, they're an island in the middle of nowhere with an economy mostly based on sheep, and yet it's the cleanest most modern place I've ever seen (that wasn't a dictatorship). There's virtually no crime; one or two muggings in central Auckland is an out-of-control crime spree by their standards. There's accountability in government. There's a lot of personal space and freedom. Yes, people pay relatively high taxes, but they get a lot for their money. The trains and buses are clean and run on time, not filthy and late like they are here. There's good nightlife and good local beer. The scenic beauty of the country is well-preserved. And it's free to go to a doctor.

If they can do it, and Sweden can do it, why can't we? Is it that Americans are somehow inferior to Kiwis or Swedes? Or is it that our country is broken because we've allowed monopolistic practices to take hold? I'm all for trying a free market approach to health care if it's truly a free market... but as soon as the government starts limiting how many players can be in the field, or a few enormous companies take over the system, you have something worse than a government monopoly; you have a for-profit monopoly, that's even less transparent and less accountable than an equally monolithic government-run bureaucracy doing the same thing. And that's what we have here now, and these corporations have a stranglehold on the US, right down to controlling and degrading the character of public debate on the subject.

I'm leaving the country again, soon, thankfully. But being here and watching this all go down, it's hard not to just throw up my hands and wonder what the heck is wrong with people here, that they're so terrified by the word "socialism" that they can't see that it's just not feasible, it just doesn't work, to run a modern society with opportunity for all on this ridiculous disneyesque simulacrum of frontier individualism and corporate unaccountability, with the occasional outburst of barnyard justice. The underlying belief that the American dream is still alive, that you can make something out of nothing here, is fundamentally bankrupt because the government is too busy protecting the big boys to give a damn about the individual; but people here by and large still buy into the platitudes and the slogans. So what we've ended up with is modern America, limping along like a second-world nation, with this enormous gap between rich and poor, white collar and blue collar, when we should be a settled, socialized democracy by now like the rest of the first world. It's the outcome of being what Hunter Thompson said we were... "America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable."