Scott SoCal said:
gregod said:
Show me. And for the love of all that is holy don't cite the WHO unless you know a little about how their survey was conducted.
The problem with Americans like yourself, Scott, and I say this not in the interest of making broad platitudes, but only because it's true: is that you can't fathom that there are certain aspects of existence, if not to utter the word
life, which in most other places around the world aren't merely approached or conceptualized in purely economic terms as a way to resolve a problem, in accordance with the business logic and all the market forces which dictate it: which means profit.
It literally holds court over them, has gotten hold of their minds and taken possession of them, so that they're brains really can't see, or even
imagine, the world in any other terms besides through business and profit. As if the sum total of all existence, reality and human history itself, were and have always been composed of none other than these things and exclusively made by them. It is their one and permanent life's cerebral world image, surveyed and imprinted upon them from years of constant and radical mind discipline to shut all else out; so that they have even convinced themselves that nothing else actually has, nor has it ever existed without them and hence never will . And what ghastly thought it is when it is the only thinking they know how to do! I have actually met many such people myself. But it isn't as if they had ever tried to see the world differently, but just failed miserably. It's that they actually despise and disdain all other possibilities, which they view as thoroughly dangerous and upsetting.
One of these facets, however, for which such thinking is not the most desirable, is human health: which should in a modern democracy be the birth-right of each citizen and not merely the privilege of only a wealthy class that can afford it. For this reason, and I know I have said this many times before, making a private option the first and only one seems not only an effrontery to the poor, but philosophically, and a above all
democratically, barbarous - and even historically backwards. The only way to satisfactorily provide this to society, with all its faults and imperfections (no system is perfect), is through a public healthcare system paid for by tax payers. For those that want and can afford private insurance, then that becomes their prerogative after the general population is provided for. But in America, precisely the opposite holds true. I don't disagree that some things need to remain private, however others have to be public, otherwise our civilization becomes deficient in moral principle, a Far West of incivility and callousness, where the strong take as much as the system permits, while the weak just have to fend for themselves as they are increasingly marginalized. This is, though, exactly what is happening. And only one blinded by ideology either can't or chooses not to see it.
And this is what makes me irate about such fellow countryman: namely, that they really have no other way of looking at it, that their worldview essentially amounts to a market culture, nothing else. Everything is business, its all about profit and managing the funds and making capital gains to keep the share holders happy. This is the same America, the one that says that liberty means exclusively the right to pursue profit and wealth, but essentially nothing else, which also believes that it has the moral prerogative to shape the world after its own image and to its own liking, even by force when opportunity arises. While it matters little if all the designs, so they erroneously believe, can make it better, more efficient, eminently progressive, modern, when the basic driving force and principle behind them is purely egoism and greed. How callous, base, and unenlightened, as well as eminently hypocritical when preached by the unsupportably bigoted among the conservative Christian right-wing, who are in fact morally wretched.
This is also their approach to education, for which the schools have become places not to form the mind on learning and study for learning and study sake alone; but to become indoctrinated in all the business madness, which is basically to have allowed the market forces to completely take over how young people are brought up in them. But we really shouldn't call it bringing them up, for all that's really being done there is
bringing them down. The public schools have been systematically ruined, their learning environments eviscerated and debased, all in the name of privatization and budget cuts. Places that used to be respectable didactic environments, have now been transformed into the most vulgar and dreadful educational institutions imaginable. And the good learning models that were once adhered to in our schools have been overturned, discarded and have given way to the most reckless and lamentable experimental forms of teaching, by educators who are as incompetent as they are unprepared. The preparation kids get in today's public schools, compared to the educational standards received by their fore-bearers before the market took them over; is like the difference between a child who has grown up happy in a nurturing and loving home compared to one who has been beaten and cowered by his elders into submission. And all in the name of an ideological war that has been waged against society by the ruling business class and their political cronies over the past several decades. While most of the private schools are no better and even though some are, I can not applaud the fact that they are accessible to only those who can afford it, apart from a few less-fortunates
fortunate enough to receive a scholarship. It's the same in-egalitarian and economically elitist mentality behind private health care, which amounts to a form of market totalitarianism that determines who has access to good health care and a good education and who does not under the aegis of government.
The fear of a communist led world during the Cold War is what allowed the conservative faction in American led Western democracy to find little obstacle in the way of realizing its mission and its obsession of transforming first America and then the entire world into one colossal, private business enterprise, for which the only role of the state is to protect the economic predators and to wage war against anybody at home or abroad who dares to challenge their ideology of market fundamentalism, or to prevent it from achieving total global hegemony, which it already practically has.
However in the wake of the he Soviet demise, triumphant liberal market capitalism and the fanatical individualism which it breeds, one that sees no need of a system that intrinsically works toward any social well-being, because this was made anathema and because, quite frankly, it is blind to collective society, is now rearing its ugly head. The disastrous results for America's society are already becoming noticeable and is leading to a precipitous decline in the nation's global status, which even the wars that it has fought recently in the name of maintaining and increasing its power ironically have only secured its further descent. The financial strain to the state and the debt this places upon its citizens will ensure insignificant economic growth for some time to come. The ideological worldview that its liberal and deregulated market capitalism has promoted and foremost represented, that
only sees individual profit but not society, is thus becoming increasingly noxious for America's own national health and global position, which is evident to all but its own home bread class of market fundamentalists. Society is getting poorer, while the banks and corporations are getting richer and hoarding all the profits.
The new American century may last only a decade.