The case for Social Democracy.

I agree.

 

Yes, it took time but my dad paid all his med bills. It was around 1990. Something not brought up is priorities and money management. People today want to make poor decisions their whole life with no consequences.

 

People should study the kinds of policies that were put in place during the New Deal when there were actual radical parties in the US that put the ruling class on notice when the economy tanked in the great depression. Roosevelt was quoted as saying that his greatest achievement was not defeating fascism but saving capitalism.

Henry Wallace whatever his faults came to represent the kind of measures introduced to rescue capitalism from it's inherent contradictions; contradiction that still exists today though we largely live in a political climate where it is sacrilege to criticize capitalism in any way. Yet if we really study what Marx, Engels and others were really saying there is much to offer even though modern economies are much different than in their day.

People should also realize that there were many movements and modes of thought involved in the ideology of socialism as it evolved from Marx's day to the kind of ideas that represent democratic socialism today. It was never the monolithic, static, heresy that neo-liberal and libertarian thinkers have tried to make it into as they demonize any critique of laissez faire domination of economic policy today.

Democratic socialism can exist alongside capitalism as kind of a critique that allows radical, unfettered capitalism a method to mitigate it's wilder excesses and contradictions such as the concentration of wealth and political power, in order to create system that is more flexible to changing economic conditions and unforeseen social and ecological disasters that humanity is prone to living on a volatile planet with scarcity and austerity the dominant economic constructs.

 

If you give me and other people the basic necessities of life which include universal healthcare and education and don't leave people dying on the streets because they can't afford the care, then by all means take my money. Not many people in Scandinavia are complaining about these policies. Guarantee you if Sweden or any other Nordic nation privatized healthcare and education there would be rioting on the streets. Turns out when you give people opportunity they are the happiest people. And businesses are not stifling as a result.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report

 

We are not seeing massive economic growth as a result of the tax cuts. But massive corporate buybacks. Wages are actually falling. 40 percent of American's can't afford basic needs. Half of workers make 30,000 or less. The economy is not doing well. This is all a lie. I don't want government to control every cradle of our lives. But I want to make sure government ensures the necessities of life, called healthcare and education and doesn't leave those who can't afford care, dead. Upwards of 45,000 a year in a America die because they can't afford care. This doesn't exist in countries with Universal healthcare, and if we privatized our healthcare system even more, it would not fix that. If those countries privatized these services, guarantee you there would be rioting in the streets. I understand that you can't actually debate against these policies. But that's fine. The facts speak for themselves.

 

Here was what private healthcare was like in America. By stating that it's up to individuals to improve there lives is only half true. But if individuals are still finding themselves working two, three jobs and still unable to afford care or education, they will not get care and can die as a result. Your complete private model doesn't work. It still leaves those who can't afford care, dying on the streets. The closest to pure unadulterated capitalism was right here in the US and it lead to the biggest economic collapse in history.

Here is what private healthcare was like in US history. Pre-govt intervention.

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2012/jan/20/was-early-1960s-golden-age-health-care/

As for the broader picture of pre-1965 health care in America, Rosemary Stevens, a historian and sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote that "in the early 1960s, the choices for uninsured elderly patients needing hospital service were to spend their savings, rely on funding from their children, seek welfare (and the social stigma this carried), hope for charity from the hospitals or avoid care altogether."



To double-check this assertion, we turned to a study by the Social Security Administration known as the Survey of the Aged.



The survey was taken in 1963, and its findings were published in 1964 -- the "early '60s" Paul is talking about. One downside of the data is that it only looks at Americans 65 and older. So it doesn't give a full picture of how the health care system functioned in the early 1960s. However, as we’ll discuss later, senior citizens are a key to analyzing the state of American health care, since their health needs were, and remain, more acute than the overall population's.



Overall, the study found that "the complex task of paying for necessary health services and providing adequate insurance for non-budgetable expenses remains beyond the economic capabilities of most aged persons."



In all, slightly more than half of Americans 65 and older had health insurance at the end of 1962. That works out to 64 percent of couples, 49 percent of un-married women and 37 percent of un-married men.



"And what they had was terrible insurance -- it didn’t do much to cover them," said

Dorothy Pechman Rice, a retired professor at the University of California at San Francisco who served as director of the National Center for Health Statistics from 1976 to 1982.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4193636/

More than 70 percent of the population had some form of hospital insurance by 1965 (though less than one-half of the elderly population did), 67 percent had surgical insurance, and there was a growing market for major medical insurance (Health Insurance Institute, 1980). But few were insured for primary or out-of-hospital care. Of the members of the general population who reported they had “pains in the heart,” 25 percent did not see a physician (Andersen and Anderson, 1967).


The elderly were particularly hard hit. The classic example of the proposed Medicare beneficiary was the elderly school-teacher, blameless after a career of work. “I am one of your old retired teachers that has been forgotten,” went one story in congressional hearings in 1959:


I am 80 years old and for 10 years I have been living on a bare nothing, two meals a day, one egg, a soup, because I want to be independent.


I am of Scotch ancestry, my father fought in the Civil War to the end of the war, therefore, I have it in my blood to be independent and my dignity would not let me go down and be on welfare.


And I worked so hard that I have pernicious anemia, $9.95 for a little bottle of liquid for shots, wholesale, I couldn't pay for it (Subcommittee on Problems of the Aged and Aging of the Committee of Labor and Public Welfare, 1959; Corning, 1969).

Yet, as sociologist Michael Harrington (1962) demonstrated eloquently in his own best-seller in 1962, the highest mass standard of living in the world was definitely not shared by all. There was “another America”: 40 to 50 million citizens who were poor, who lacked adequate medical care, and who were “socially invisible” to the majority of the population. Within this poverty-stricken group were more than 8 million of the 18 million Americans who were 65 years of age and over, suffering from a “downward spiral” of sickness and isolation. And although there were half a million Americans in nursing homes, less than 60 percent of the homes were considered acceptable (Harrington, 1962). Medicare was formed in a society with idealistic expectations of wealth for all—at least for all of those who “deserved” it—yet increasingly isolated its minorities and its poor.

 

Like I said, you have the government the majority wanted. IF you were unified enough to make it happen, you would have made it happen.

And yes you do have a huge number 'mooching off the system'. Anyone who consistently takes out of the public purse without putting into it, is a moocher. Welfare is for emergency use only. No collective can survive under such conditions. Further, anyone who does abuse the system, is NOT a socialist or communist of any kind. Not even a leftist, really.

 

That's ALL you need. The rest is up to you. You can use those two boons to launch yourself into a lifetime of financial security, or you can waste them.

 

So your just going to ignore the cost of living index. Ok.

I noted one major factor in your post...


"If you GIVE ME and others..."

That is NOT what this country is about.

And no, people are not dying in the streets. Anybody that walks into a hospital, without a dime in their pocket, is served.

If your happiness depends on other people being forced to give you things, what you are really saying is that your happiness is guaranteed at the cost of others.

Why does everybody else owe you their happiness?

 

well said

 

That's it. That's all us advocating for social democracy want. Thanks for acknowledging.

 

Others give you things every day of your life

 

I told you that there cost of living is balanced and not that bad considering they are paid high wages and have a higher social mobility than the US. It has nothing to do with give me, when I say give me, I was just making a counter point to your high taxes point,.. I am just advocating for a policy, because I see the negative externalities that comes with capitalism in terms of healthcare and education, where people can be shunned of care and spend most of the time in ER because they can't afford care. I am looking at this from the aspect of solving critical issues. Universal healthcare and education solve these issues and lift economic burden off so many and level the playing field. Do you really think these policies haven't contributed to Scandinavian happiness? And also, ..I just gave you studies and information of pre-govt control of healthcare in the US, and almost half of seniors were uninsured and you completely ignored it. Your free market paradise doesn't work in healthcare. It drives up cost, and leaves large swaths of people uninsured. Hek total privatization has never worked.

 

Yes. No. A significant percentage of Progressives want far more than that. They talk about things like housing as a right (which it totally bloody isn't!), and much much more.

They are the least 'communist' of anyone, since that kind of system depends entirely upon the output of someone other than themselves. There is nothing communal about it.

 

There are extremists on both sides like conservatives that think all taxes are theft

 

Sure. But I'm talking about easily the vast majority of Progressives. Put another way, I've yet to meet a Progressive who doesn't think housing is a right.

 

You just met one.

 

You are indeed, a smarter than average Prog

 

I should clarify:

I've yet to meet a Progressive who doesn't think AFFORDABLE housing (whatever that means) is a right.

 

Well you just met one again. I think your personal survey is not very scientific

 

perhaps not. but I live in an uber prog area, and am heavily outnumbered.

 

don't even know what affordable housing means. We just bought a new house at 400,000 and it was affordable to me

 

Exactly. Try asking a Prog and you'll get no answer. They use the term often, but apparently don't know what it is.

Hold their feet to the fire (always a worthwhile exercise in Progland) for a bit, and they'll eventually admit "people shouldn't have to work for a house of their choice, in an area of their choice". IOW, "I think like a 7 year old".

 

I am a progressive and I don't think like a 7 year old. You should listen to the conservatives that say all income tax is theft and every single social program should be eliminated

 

But yes, it's all relative. The house I'm sitting in now is worth approx $1.5mil, and we own it outright so it's basically 'free' at this point. Very affordable. I have a friend who struggles to pay the $200k mortgage on her family home, so for her, the house is not affordable. But, she and her husband spend almost every cent they earn on good times and holidays. So is it really not affordable?

It's not something which can be quantified, because we all make different choices.