It's uncanny how the repubs can endlessly, and with such verve, repackage all of their drivel and rantings, into something so patently false and misrepresentation.
The fact is that mean workers wages have remained stagnant, considering inflation, since the 70's. To override the problem of stagnant consumer rates as a corollary of the former phenomenon, credit card debt was invented to the pitched degree it has become since then and foisted upon everyone to the great advantage, naturally, to the credit holders. In the meantime the year end bonus of the super managers have increased hundred fold, arriving in the millions. This is the system that the oligarchs and plutocrats of the American neo-liberal capitalist regime have invented and have also found much success in forcibly imposing it throughout the globe by virtue of the nation's superpower status. This has resulted in the delocalization of manufacturing and the consequent mass workers enslavement of the second and third world to feed the queen bee country with all the useless things its consumers buy. It has also caused endless wars to maintain this economic situation, in the Middle East, South America and South Asia, while it supports the worst dictatorial regimes in these areas and also Africa and the crimes against humanity they commit, the sectarian wars they spawn, just to maintain favorable business relations; so that the primary resources we rely upon continue to arrive in copious and cheap quantities. I know some are tired of hearing it said, though I never get tired of saying it.
It is a false and grotesque representation, furthermore, that socialized health care does not work in everybody’s favor. I have enjoyed it through my taxes in Italy for many years now. Sure, as with any mass social system, some bureaucratic annoyances can't be avoided. Whereas there have been many case for which someone with serious injury has had to wait in agony for hours in the emergency room of a US hospital, because they didn't have a health care provider! This intolerable act can never happen in a European hospital, and even if you aren't a citizen, but a vacationing tourist, if necessary you will get treatment with no other requirements than your unfortunate human condition without receiving a bill. That's because health and the unfettered access to treatment is considered a universal and unalienable human right from birth to death, like that of liberty, a fair trial and the so called pursuit of happiness. Placing health care within the private sector negates that right to the economically weak and so makes it a privilege of those of means. Ethically, of course, this is purely reprehensible. To be sure, however, bad episodes have happened in hospitals where socialized medicine prevails. But this is due to human error and not something wrong, least of all "evil" with the social set-up. However, to make a purely instrumental use of this as justification for placing everything in the hands of the private insurance companies, is a base casuistry, which only caters to the greed and anti-humanistic positions of, again, the corporate and political oligarchs and plutocrats. Moreover, it excludes everyone from the population without sufficient economic means to afford it. The very idea that the only real and acceptable option for health care in the US is through the private sector, merely demonstrates to what heinous and uncivilized degree the same private businesses have found the necessary pressure to bear and, therefore, beat and cower the unwlling citizenry into submission before its egotistical profit schemes, while convincing the willing of its propaganda. And it is the Republican Party, which, more than any other political force, ideologically (per force of nature) represents the paladins defending such a base and self-serving anti-social, anti-Enlightenment and anti-humanistic philosophy.
Unfettered individualism allows for the haves to reign over the have-nots with every increased prepotency. Nothing more. The privatization of everything within the public domain, such as health, the needs of the aged, education etc., is simply a revolting and ghastly ideology, because I shall not here debase the word philosophy, which has no ethical basis whatsoever. Unless one considers placing me always before the collective to have any moral currency. The idea that even one tax dollar should be spent on the interests of private finance and the corporate world, or that of the military, at the exclusion of anything with the word social in its agenda, demonastrates how barbarous my homeland has become and is merely a grotesque parody of democracy, justice and every Enlightenment principle upon which the modern democratic state has been based. The idea that the pursuit of happiness means exclusively not having any restrictions to obtaining wealth, is such a shallow and profane notion that it does not even merit further comment. The individual's right to self-realization is something programed within the hardware of any modern democratic constitution, but to take that right at face value and allow individuals a free reign over collective society to the negation of certain latter's rights, and needs, while making their fiscal contributions, results merely in a democratically approved form of neo-feudalism and an overlord-vassal-serf state. Which is antithetical to the struggle of the Enlightenment philosophers and republicans, not the US political party, but those who a few centuries ago fought and gave their lives in the American British colonies and European states against the tyranny, oppression and despotism of the monarchies and their aristocratic supporters. In the end, US republicans are really closet monarchists and the most dreadful thing about is that most, like those who listen to the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs of the US right-wing propaganda machine, are completely ignorant of this personal character flaw.
The other thing is that, sure, there is a lot of hypocrisy in the radical-chic, leftists in Hollywood, just as in the corporate world and in Washington. However this is an issue of wealth and society and not of the common leftist world-view of what the relationship between the two should be. Someone from the left, be they rich or poor, holds certain ideals, whether actually lived or not doesn't change them (and this is what the right wingers don't quite get), that hopes that the democratic institutions and the elected people who rule over them, would act with the most responsibility toward the needs of collective society and, when need arrises, to ensure that the alpha-class within it does not, with its legislative help, become a tyranny over it. And nowhere is it written that someone who, because from the left, needs in order to be not branded a hypocrite, live in some hovel and not enjoy anything material like some medieval mendicant friar. One would only hope that, if successful economically, he would pay all his taxes and keep certain extravagances within a decorous limit, without necessarily not having some (life is to be enjoyed after all). The right takes all to easy recourse to the hypocritical charge as the only real accusation it levies against this social political world view, without, of course, proposing any real reasons as to its morally perilous positions. That's because they are simply not immoral, and neither does the hypocrisy of some make them such, and are only perilous to the right's own unapoligetic self-serving egoism wrapped up, exclusively it would seem, in the pursuit of individual wealth and defending the interests of the few who enjoy it.
I have lived out of the US for many years and I have thus watched from afar for just as many. Certainly I have missed many things, though, at once, I have seen many more that only someone looking in from beyond can gain such a perspective. And it seems to me that the model that this neo-liberal capitalist America represents is neither the most desirable globally for the masses, nor the most socially sane. Yet this is exactly the one the US so called financial gurus its miltiary and political apparatus is defending and supporting. Not that mine is a unique case. Nor do I think I have any claims to a superior moral ground. However, I make no excuses for my life either, nor the perspective I have consciously tried to gain.
Hugh summed it up perfectly, mine are just some additional thoughts.
On my grave stone I shall have it writ: "He left the barbarians behind just in time."