Northern European Socialists: The Happiest People On Earth

[Chicken Little]

The happiest taxes on earth

The headline speaks for itself.  I was so pulling for you conservatives and your "screw everybody" ideology...  Color me verklempt.

[Red Arrow]

We should get them to send us some of whatever they are taking.  Then we could be happy too and still remain (mostly) capitalists.

[mr.jaynes]

The happiest taxes on earth

The headline speaks for itself.  I was so pulling for you conservatives and your "screw everybody" ideology...  Color me verklempt.

Another apparent fan of SNL! I don't feel so alone here anymore, lol!

[Conan71]

What's the author smoking is more like it:

"Healthcare and other such social services aren't built into our system."  Bullsmile, the productive ones pay for the unproductive to have housing, food, and medical care.  Anyone who needs medical care can walk into OSU Medical Center and others like it around the country and won't be turned away.  I've been hearing ads all weekend on the radio for the Access Card (food stamps).  Sorry the benefits we give the less fortunate won't pay for a new Mercedes and a nice 4000 sq. ft. condo with a great view of downtown, but that's the way it works.

"Maybe it's time that we looked at taxes differently. We have to pay them anyway. So they might as well make us happy. If Northern Europe is any benchmark, the more we'd pay the happier we just may be."

I think I just threw up in my mouth.

[nathanm]

What's the author smoking is more like it:

"Healthcare and other such social services aren't built into our system."  Bullsmile, the productive ones pay for the unproductive to have housing, food, and medical care.  Anyone who needs medical care can walk into OSU Medical Center and others like it around the country and won't be turned away.  I've been hearing ads all weekend on the radio for the Access Card (food stamps).  Sorry the benefits we give the less fortunate won't pay for a new Mercedes and a nice 4000 sq. ft. condo with a great view of downtown, but that's the way it works.

You won't be turned away if you're literally about to die. Otherwise no soup for you. And with some of the finest medical care available in the entire world (presuming you go to the right hospital..one that is willing to deploy all the expensive toys on your broke donkey) comes ruined credit, continual harassment by debt collectors, and possibly a couple grand spent on bankruptcy to get them to go away. There's no system at all.

Food Stamps? Well, if you're a kid or you have a kid, no problem, you get 'em. If not, I hope you don't find yourself out of work for more than 3 months. Or worse, employed in a job that pays so little you can hardly afford to eat, pay modest rent, and keep the electricity on, yet make too much for food stamps.

You're thinking of the social safety net we had before Reagan and Bill Clinton dismantled it for political gain. During good times, some states have both the funds and the will to skirt the rules and keep people on the programs for longer than they are technically supposed to (on the flip side, there are those who skirt the rules in the other direction no matter how flush with cash they are). These days, not so much.

[USRufnex]

What's the author smoking is more like it:

"Healthcare and other such social services aren't built into our system."  Bullsmile, the productive ones pay for the unproductive to have housing, food, and medical care.  Anyone who needs medical care can walk into OSU Medical Center and others like it around the country and won't be turned away.  I've been hearing ads all weekend on the radio for the Access Card (food stamps).  Sorry the benefits we give the less fortunate won't pay for a new Mercedes and a nice 4000 sq. ft. condo with a great view of downtown, but that's the way it works.

"Maybe it's time that we looked at taxes differently. We have to pay them anyway. So they might as well make us happy. If Northern Europe is any benchmark, the more we'd pay the happier we just may be."

I think I just threw up in my mouth.

So, the 47 million uninsured are LAZY???
Are you kidding?  Do you live in an alternate universe?

"...the productive ones pay for the unproductive to have housing, food, and medical care.  Anyone who needs medical care can walk into OSU Medical Center and others like it around the country and won't be turned away."[/i]

Yeah, I think I just threw up in my mouth.

When I had to go to the emergency room back in the 90s and didn't have health insurance, I got treated, alright... treated to a huge barrage of paperwork... and charged up the wazoo... and I paid alright, which likely subidized someone else's healthcare.... maybe it was a lazy person.... maybe it was a homeless person.... maybe it was an unemployed mother of four.... or maybe it was YOU.... you ever lose your job and get that twisted letter from COBRA?

If you don't work, you don't eat.  Understood.
If you don't work, you can't get sick.... not so understood.
Emergency Room = Bankruptcy?
That's not the way it was portrayed on "Little House on the Prairie".....

If I had the same pre-cancer symptoms a few years back when I didn't have health insurance, I would have died.

Why? 

Because the only place I could have gone to at the time was the emergency room..... and I knew how much that place would cost if I didn't have insurance.  I would have waited for months and months thinking (hoping) it was just hemerrhoids.....

Some people succeed, some people fail.  Some people are more hardworking than others........... yet all of us have succeeded and been productive, and all of us have failed and not succeeded....

Why should people have to play Russian Roulette with their health?.... I did... I did it for years.  At that very same time, I was working my butt off.... working many more hours than I work today.

For a country that spends more per capita on healthcare than any other country in the industrialized world, the number of uninsured Americans in this country is a national disgrace.

But hey, who ever got a job from a poor person?... and why provide universal healthcare to the nation when the profits are in Viagra, baby?........ Privatize the profits, and rely on the government to socialize the risk.  It's the American Way.... happy happy, joy joy...  /sarcasm.

[joiei]

My sister, who is married to a complete right wing rush quoting Fox news watching person.  I had to be nice.  Anyway, she had to take early social security just to have an income coming into their house, plus she now gets food stamps.   The next time my idiot brother in law starts whining about the government, I have ammunition.  He is such a dirk head. 

[TheArtist]

On the news tonight were some stats,,, about 70% of US students graduate high school, in places like Denmark, its 96%. Without even looking, I dare say our murder rates are higher, mortality rates worse, etc.

Whats likely going on here is a difference in societal habits, attitudes, and focus,,, our ideologies. I would say that socialism in and of itself may not be good or bad per say, but I would say that too much of our society may not be at a point where it could handle it. Our priorities,ideologies and morality even, are not at a place in which a lot of socialism could work. We dont have the proper healthy, intelligent habits, we would probably kill ourselves off even faster.

How many of you remember your Hegelian Dialectics?  2 opposites fighting it out, a synthesis emerges which ideally contains the better parts of both and having the systems in place, the habits to OVERCOME THE LIMITATIONS. From wikipedia..... (...the activity of overcoming the negative, Hegel also often used the term Aufhebung, variously translated into English as "sublation" or "overcoming," to conceive of the working of the dialectic. Roughly, the term indicates PRESERVING THE USEFUL PORTION OF AN IDEA,THING,SOCIETY, ETC, WHILE MOVING BEYOND ITS LIMITATIONS.

As in the Socratic dialectic, Hegel claimed to proceed by making implicit contradictions explicit: each stage of the process is the product of contradictions inherent or implicit in the preceding stage. For Hegel, the whole of history is one tremendous dialectic, major stages of which chart a progression from self-alienation as slavery to self-unification and realization as the rational, constitutional state of free and equal citizens.... )

We tend to put capitalism and socialism up as complete polar opposites in which one must win completely over the other, when it may be that both contain useful parts. Or I would posit, that one is a stage leading to the other, the evolution of which must take time, during which multiple dialectics on many matters must be resolved.  

Now lets look at some ideas from Karl Marx (dont want to get into an argument about Marx, he had some good ideas, and some bad lol, but want to take some over arching general/fundamentals and put those out)  .... again from wikipedia... my bold

(Historical materialism started from a fundamental underlying reality of human existence: that in order for human beings to survive and continue existence from generation to generation, it is necessary for them to produce and reproduce the material requirements of life. While this may seem obvious it was only with Marx that this was seen as foundation for understanding human society and historical development. Marx then extended this premise by asserting the importance of the fact that, in order to carry out production and exchange, people have to enter into VERY DEFINITE SOCIAL RELATIONS, most fundamentally production relations.

However, production does not get carried out in the abstract, or by entering into arbitrary or random relations chosen at will. Human beings collectively work on nature but do not do the same work; there is a division of labor in which people not only do different jobs, but some people live from the work of others by owning the means of production. How this is accomplished DEPENDS ON THE TYPE OF SOCIETY. Production is carried out through very definite relations between people. And, in turn, these production relations are determined by the level and character of the productive forces that are present at any given time in history. For Marx, productive forces refer to the means of production such as the tools, instruments, technology, land, raw materials, and human knowledge and abilities in terms of using these means of production.....

Marx identified generally include primitive communism or tribal society (a prehistoric stage), ancient society, feudalism and then capitalism. In each of these social stages, people interact with nature and produce their living in different ways. Any surplus from that production is allotted in different ways.

He also explained that ON THE FOUNDATION OF THE ECONOMIC BASE ARISE CERTAIN POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS, LAWS, CUSTOMS, CULTURE, ETC, AND IDEAS, WAYS OF THINKING, MORALITY, ETC. and ideas, ways of thinking, morality, etc. These constituted the political/ideological superstructure of society.) Oklahomas conservative values, customs, habits, etc. create institutions which reflect them. If you yank out one set of "motivations" from under people and do not have the models in place to support another set,,, well you end up spending a lot on sick people, welfare people doing nothing, kids dropping out, etc. Just like you cant plop down rail in a city of sprawl and expect that to work. Its going to take a gradual evolution and a holistic approach. Not just rail, but zoning, parking requirements, lifestyle habits, bike lanes, etc.   

You cant plop one societies way of doing things onto another and expect it to work. We cant just adopt Northern European Socialist tax models onto our own society model, habits, ideologies, moralities, etc. and expect it to work. Societies evolve in holistic manners from education to health-care and a hundred other things and each persons views and habits about those things. One of my history professors once said that the Soviet Union looked at Hegels Dialectica, saw how societies would evolve and the "ultimate Utopian" ideal at the end of history, but tried to skip capitalism and go straight to socialism. Or as Marx put it ( If Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation after the example of the Western European countries, and during the last years she has been taking a lot of trouble in this direction - she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; ) There are other reasons why trying to skip the proper evolution through capitalism to socialism, wont work.

Have you ever noticed how we scorn socialism yet our ultimate imaginings of a great society are very socialist? Isn't Heaven socialist? Any Trekkie can tell you that in that wonderful future there is no need for money, people work to improve and better themselves and society.

Through capitalism we have created great wealth and very importantly, technological advancements. Most of us have our basic needs met already. At a whim I can have light, a symphony play for me, speak to someone on the other side of the world, many diseases are curable or preventable, stay cool in summer, warm in winter, eat foods "out of season" from exotic locals. I, a working class person, can have much that once only the wealthiest Kings could, or better. As technology advances through the push of capitalism, more and more needs and desires will become ever more easily met. Just as in our own country there are still laborers who value "pick yourself up by your bootstraps" conservative ideals, farmers, etc. alongside highly paid creative class/technology workers in urban environments with more liberal leanings, you can imagine that even with countries there are "work/ideological/moral" differences. I would say that those Northern European countries aren't socialist because they have fully evolved enough to become that way, though they are different, a lot of their ability to be more socialist comes from great wealth like north sea oil wealth. Though they do also have a great deal of societal differences which also make their more socialist model work relatively well for them. Poorer countries do the labor producing goods for them that technology will do in the future as another, for instance, as why they cant be truly socialist. Its a "faux" socialism the result of artificial circumstances. (kind of like Oklahomas wealth last year lol, it wasnt purely because our society was better, it was the luck of oil)  

But, again, to try and graft their model onto ours without recognizing that we have to change a lot of other attitudes, ideas, habits, etc. on things like education which influences health which influences medical care and how much that is needed and costs, education which influences what jobs people take, education which influences crime rates, etc, etc, etc. All these things synergistically relate to each other and our society is still fighting over Hegels opposite ideas. Trying to find the "synthesis", reconcile the battling ideologies and working to combine the best parts of each. As Marx suggests, economic structure (taxes government) and means are intimately related to our ideologies, habits and morals, and vice-verse.  Its not that socialism is inherently evil or something, but it would be a mess if the society trying to adopt more of it, is not ready for more of it.

You cant just say, lets pay more taxes and we will be better like such and such a country,,, and not have the society in place that could make that system work without ruining itself. Societal changes/ideologies/habits/morals, have to happen.

[we vs us]

-- snip --

Impressive scholarship, Artist.  If you can toss around terms like the "Hegelian dialectic" I think you more than qualify for an honorary degree from ASU.