The folks who think European countries do everything better than Americans don’t like to talk about illegal immigration issues.
Denmark and Sweden are roughly comparable though. The US does not have an issue with Canadian immigrants. Immigration controversy in the US centers around Mexico, a much poorer country whose citizens are ethnically and culturally different from the US plurality.
It was for the period of time just after WW2 when Churchill lost and the NHS etc was established.
In all history? In the last 100 years, yes. Incentives might have played an important role but infrastructure was far more important. If anyone had an idea anywhere in the world they had to go to USA to make it work. Western Europe was still recovering from WW2, Half of the world was hungover from Colonialism etc, No country had the support structures that USA could offer.
I think you will find a lot of people who innovate are driven by a need to change the world for good. Monetory benefits come second, After all the founder of Polio cure gave it to the world for free.
Even now, research for cure of some diseases in America is carried out in universities on taxpayers money before big pharma gets involved. Capitalism has it’s uses for sure but to say it’s the only system that promotes innovation is probably untrue.
At some point in US history, so were immigrants from
Italy
Ireland
China
I think the “US plurality” is robust enough to handle immigration even from “ethnically and culturally different” populations. I have seen the melting pot in action in first-generation immigrants, to whom US is “us” and the “old country”, whatever it may be, is “them”.
Maybe you are referring to mass-scale, illegal immigration, which is more problematic.
ED: I am pretty sure the Denmark comment was tongue-in-cheek.
Actually, many of the immigrants that come in from Mexico are actually from further south. So not only do we have to contend with Mexico, but with Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras.
Yes, I should not have generalized to Mexico. But the argument is the same.
I think that blaming the shortfalls of the American system on Latin Americans (as in North Americans) is a bit of a stretch.
I’m not trying to say that immigration is the main or only source of US problems. What I am trying to say is that Sweden, Denmark, Finland, etc., compared to the US, have situations that are conducive to socialist programs. All these countries are small and racially homogenous. They are isolated from major immigration problems and are not as politically diverse as the US. The programs that work well in these countries might not be suitable for the US.
- incentives 2) low taxes 3) invest in education 4) invest in infrastructure/technology
I’m pretty sure thats how 99.9% of countries/economies have grown over the last 1000 years. Republicans generally go 3/4 in this area while liberals are 0/4.
Liberals are big on welfare which create no incentives to work hard (people just sit on their porch and the kids hang out in front of gas stations), they raise taxes and allow unions which drive out business, their mandatory education program takes 2x as long as it should and leaves you with 4x as much debt as you should have and in the end 50% of the graduates have almost no marketable skills for a job. If corporations ran education systems then K-12 would be K-8 and “college” would be only be 2 years and 1 entire year would be spent learning microsoft excel and writing professional emails.
Our technological gains came from pure capitalism (for example - fracking) or from the minds of ivy league graduates who likely grew up going to a private school run by a business or came from another country.
Republicans may sound nutty when they blame everything on government and liberals–but their absoultely right, they ruin everything!
And I don’t disagree. These countries also don’t innovate like the Americans. And these countries are changing too. According to Wikipedia, Sweden is now 14% foreign born. That’s actually slightly MORE than the US. So we will see if their social programs can be sustained in those conditions long term. That said, the US also has the demographic advantage compared to most of the OECD in that they have natural population growth. Sweden does not and is forced to rely on immigration to sustain social spending. So that cuts both ways. Not that I think Sweden is an ideal. Far from it.
Sure, but if the system is designed properly how would illegal immigrants even be able to access it?
Finland is right across the border from Russia which is a far poorer and authoritarian country yet they don’t have any trouble with Russians accessing their social services.
That’s not true, how much do you actually know about these countries?
All of those countries have multiple political parties (i.e. more than two) and governments are typically formed by a coalition of more than one. For example, there are 8 political parties represented in Finnish government currently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_Finland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_Norway
Those countries also arent as ethically homogenous as you would think with ~20% of sweden’s population being born abroad
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden
These types of arguments centering around homogenity/political harmony are frequently bandied about by Americans when reffering to countries that are clearly better managed. All the really do is expose the ignorance of Americans, more troubling it reveals an unwillingness to accept that the political system in America is broken and that the myth of American exceptionalism is just that, a myth.
The Russian/Finnish border is less than 1,000km long, has a 7.5km wide no entry zone on the Russian side, and is electronically monitored it’s entire length on the Finnish side (which also has a no entry zone). The US/Mexican border is more than 3,000km long (2,000km of which is unmonitored) and you can literally walk up to it and piss from one side to the other in most places.