I'm not putting down a serious revision of how we do health-care here. After all, our aggressively capitalistic attitudes don't get in the way of a government-backed promise that nobody will starve to death.
But the US has always had a strong streak of "I've got mine!" A typical quote is
America, [the immigrant peasant] learned, was not the land of the good peasant. It was the first of many sad disillusionments to observe that in this new homeland the ruthless fellow, the mean, tight-fisted man who grabbed what he could and shared nothing, made out best. Much of the sense of status was lost. The ex-peasant could not keep his place because he could not find it. He had to go out and fight to find whatever place he could. -- William V. Shannon, The American Irish And we've always attracted people who are comfortable with that, so the national personality continues in that vein. (I'm not surprised that one of our most egalitarian and socialist-leaning eras was precisely the period of very restricted immigration, about 1920 to 1965
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Hmmm... I'm not trying to be jingoistic there. But societies do make choices, and the US leans particularly hard toward supporting "opportunity" (which reduces "security"), and it emphasizes giving people full measure in their roles as consumers, which undermines getting treated well as producers.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/16/nhs-us-healthcare
I wanna move to England now....
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But the US has always had a strong streak of "I've got mine!" A typical quote is
America, [the immigrant peasant] learned, was not the land of the good peasant. It was the first of many sad disillusionments to observe that in this new homeland the ruthless fellow, the mean, tight-fisted man who grabbed what he could and shared nothing, made out best. Much of the sense of status was lost. The ex-peasant could not keep his place because he could not find it. He had to go out and fight to find whatever place he could. -- William V. Shannon, The American Irish
And we've always attracted people who are comfortable with that, so the national personality continues in that vein. (I'm not surprised that one of our most egalitarian and socialist-leaning eras was precisely the period of very restricted immigration, about 1920 to 1965 ( ... )
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