Okay so folks are quite happy to live in a socilalist state with free healthcare, free education, free benefits, free job training, free career advancement opportunities, months of free vacation, enjoying fitness, awash in rich culture and deep history.
What I still don’t get is why, with all their idle time, socialists can’t come up with a film like “Cars”. Germans love their cars, beer, and women topless. So thats what they concentrate on most of the time. Germany also calls itself the “Country of Poets and Thinkers”. So whens the last time anyone was blown away by German prose, much less written in this century? Wheres the art, innovation.
In those commercials for arithritis medicine theres always some biddy gobbing on the lotion and then doing some neat pottery, meeting her grandkids, creating wonderful floral arrangements. Surely socialism must have the same effect on mankind?
Okay so folks are quite happy to live in a socilalist state with free healthcare, free education, free benefits, free job training, free career advancement opportunities, months of free vacation, enjoying fitness, awash in rich culture and deep history.
What I still don’t get is why, with all their idle time, socialists can’t come up with a film like “Cars”. Germans love their cars, beer, and women topless. So thats what they concentrate on most of the time. Germany also calls itself the “Country of Poets and Thinkers”. So whens the last time anyone was blown away by German prose, much less written in this century? Wheres the art, innovation.
In those commercials for arithritis medicine theres always some biddy gobbing on the lotion and then doing some neat pottery, meeting her grandkids, creating wonderful floral arrangements. Surely socialism must have the same effect on mankind?
Umm because Poetry and Art are individualistic concerns… and as to innovation, high taxes / socialism remove the financial incentive while socialism’s hand maiden, nanny statism, removes the get up and go drive of self reliance at the heart of innovation… Like you say, everything is scripted cradle to grave by the state… this rubs off on the personality… and if you do invent something, anyway, they’ll take all the rewards… why bother (with one last non socialism point, Euros seem more afraid of ridicule than Americans… they may not want to put forward a new idea or invention for fear of being criticised that it is a dumb idea or invention… Its one reason Americans seem dumb… they’ll ask dumb questions because they want to know… whereas a Euro keeps quite and acts like they know… but doesn’t learn since they’re afraid to ask....).
Okay so folks are quite happy to live in a socilalist state with free healthcare, free education, free benefits, free job training, free career advancement opportunities, months of free vacation, enjoying fitness, awash in rich culture and deep history.
What I still don’t get is why, with all their idle time, socialists can’t come up with a film like “Cars”. Germans love their cars, beer, and women topless. So thats what they concentrate on most of the time. Germany also calls itself the “Country of Poets and Thinkers”. So whens the last time anyone was blown away by German prose, much less written in this century? Wheres the art, innovation.
In those commercials for arithritis medicine theres always some biddy gobbing on the lotion and then doing some neat pottery, meeting her grandkids, creating wonderful floral arrangements. Surely socialism must have the same effect on mankind?
Umm because Poetry and Art are individualistic concerns… and as to innovation, high taxes / socialism remove the financial incentive while socialism’s hand maiden, nanny statism, removes the get up and go drive of self reliance at the heart of innovation… Like you say, everything is scripted cradle to grave by the state… this rubs off on the personality… and if you do invent something, anyway, they’ll take all the rewards… why bother (with one last non socialism point, Euros seem more afraid of ridicule than Americans… they may not want to put forward a new idea or invention for fear of being criticised that it is a dumb idea or invention… Its one reason Americans seem dumb… they’ll ask dumb questions because they want to know… whereas a Euro keeps quite and acts like they know… but doesn’t learn since they’re afraid to ask....).
How does that explain something like Cuban innovation in medicine?
I’d be interested to see how much ‘innovation’ (e.g in R&D;) in the US is actually via tax money.
What you’ve written sounds like hard theory, and doesn’t actually reflect reality.
If how you explain it was true, then surely most artists (musicians, actors particularly) would be disproportionately right-wing, as opposed to left-wing?
Okay so folks are quite happy to live in a socilalist state with free healthcare, free education, free benefits, free job training, free career advancement opportunities, months of free vacation, enjoying fitness, awash in rich culture and deep history.
What I still don’t get is why, with all their idle time, socialists can’t come up with a film like “Cars”. Germans love their cars, beer, and women topless. So thats what they concentrate on most of the time. Germany also calls itself the “Country of Poets and Thinkers”. So whens the last time anyone was blown away by German prose, much less written in this century? Wheres the art, innovation.
In those commercials for arithritis medicine theres always some biddy gobbing on the lotion and then doing some neat pottery, meeting her grandkids, creating wonderful floral arrangements. Surely socialism must have the same effect on mankind?
Umm because Poetry and Art are individualistic concerns… and as to innovation, high taxes / socialism remove the financial incentive while socialism’s hand maiden, nanny statism, removes the get up and go drive of self reliance at the heart of innovation… Like you say, everything is scripted cradle to grave by the state… this rubs off on the personality… and if you do invent something, anyway, they’ll take all the rewards… why bother (with one last non socialism point, Euro seem more afraid of ridicule than Americans… they may not want to put forward a new idea or invention for fear of being criticised that it is a dumb idea or invention… Its one reason Americans seem dumb… they’ll ask dumb questions because they want to know… whereas a Euro keeps quite and acts like they know… but doesn’t learn since they’re afraid to ask....).
How does that explain something like Cuban innovation in medicine?
I’d be interested to see how much ‘innovation’ (e.g in R&D;) in the US is actually via tax money.
What you’ve written sounds like hard theory, and doesn’t actually reflect reality.
If how you explain it was true, then surely most artists (musicians, actors particularly) would be disproportionately right-wing, as opposed to left-wing?
what innovations?
And the issue with artists are that ‘the left’ has absorbed the ‘old right’. Plenty of artists were ‘right wing’ in the 20s and 30s. Others were / are libertarian / classical liberal. But you can be a elitist cultural snob egotist these days and ‘a leftist’. All you have to be to be accepted as a leftist (these days) is be anti western (which the old right was) and/or anti free market (ditto). At which point you can believe in just about anything…
I know the source is suspect, and therefore the contents will be easily disassembled, but I’m fine with that because I’m just putting it out there.
Q: Could you tell us in detail how the corporation became so powerful?
How it became so powerful? Well, we know it very well. There were enormous market failures, market disasters in the late 19th century. There was a brief experiment, a very brief experiment, with something more or less like capitalism, not really but partially, really free markets, and it was such a total catastrophe that business called it off because it couldn’t survive, and there were moves in the late 19th century to overcome these radical market failures and they led to various forms of concentration of capital: trusts, cartels, and others, and the one that emerged was the corporation in its modern form.
And the corporations were granted rights by the courts. I mean, I know the Anglo-American history fairly well - but I think it’s pretty much the same elsewhere, so I’ll keep to that one - in the Anglo-American system the courts, not the legislators, gave the corporate entities extraordinary rights. They gave them the rights of persons, meaning they have the right of freedom of speech, they can propagandize freely, advertise, they run elections and so on, and they have the protection from inspection by the state authorities which means that just as the police technically can’t go into your apartment and read your papers, the public can’t find out what’s going on inside these totalitarian entities. They’re mostly unaccountable to the public. Of course they are not real persons, they are immortal, they are collectivist legal entities. In fact they are very similar to other organizational forms we know and are one of the forms of totalitarianism that developed in the 20th century. The others were destroyed, these still exist, and later they were required by law to be what we would call pathological in the case of real human beings.
So they are required legally to maximize power and profit no matter what effect that has on anyone else. They are required to externalize costs, so if they can get the public or future generations to pay their costs, they are required to do that. It would be illegal for corporate executives to do anything else.
By now, in what are called trade agreements, which have nothing much to do with trade, corporations are granted rights that go way beyond the rights of persons. They are granted the right of what’s called “national treatment.” Persons don’t have that right. Like if a Mexican comes to New York, he can’t claim national treatment, but if General Motors goes to Mexico, it can claim national treatment. In fact corporations can even sue states, which you and I can’t do.
So they’re granted rights way beyond persons. They are immortal, they are extraordinarily powerful, they are pathological by legal requirement, and that’s the contemporary form of totalitarianism. They are not truly competitive, they are linked to one another. So Siemens and IBM and Toshiba carry out joint projects. They rely heavily on state power; the dynamism of the modern economy comes mostly out of the state sector, inot the private sector. Almost every aspect of what’s called the “New Economy” is developed and designed at public cost and public risk: computers, electronics generally, telecommunications, the internet, lasers, whatever…
Take radio. Radio was designed by the US Navy. Mass production, modern mass production was developed in armories. If you go back to a century ago, the major problems of electrical and mechanical engineering had to do with how to place a huge gun on a moving platform, namely a ship, designing it to be able to hit a moving object, another ship, so naval gunnery. That was the most advanced problem in metallurgy, electrical and mechanical engineering, and so on. England and Germany put huge efforts into it, the United States less so. Out of associated innovations comes the automotive industry, and so on and so forth. In fact, it’s very hard to find anything in the economy that doesn’t rely critically on the state sector.
After the Second World War this took a qualitative leap upward, particularly in the United States, and while Alan Greenspan and others make speeches about “entrepreneurial initiative” and “consumer choice,” and things you learn about in graduate school, and so on, this has almost no resemblance to the actual working economy. In fact a striking example of all this which we see very clearly at MIT, a main technological scientific university, is a recent shift in funding. When I got to MIT 50 years ago, it was Pentagon funded, almost one hundred percent. That stayed true until about 1970. Since then, however, Pentagon funding has been declining and funding from the National Institute of Health and the other so called health-related national institutes has gone up.
The reason is obvious to everybody except maybe some highly theoretical economists. The reason is that the cutting edge of the economy in the fifties and the sixties was electronics-based, so therefore it made sense for the public to pay for it under the pretext of defense. By now the cutting edge of the economy is becoming biology-based. Biotechnology, genetic engineering and so on, and pharmaceuticals, so it makes sense for the public to pay for that and to take the risks for it under the pretext of, you know, finding a cure for cancer or something. Actually what’s happening is just developing the infrastructure and insights for the biological-based private industries of the future. They are happy to let the public pay the costs and take the risks, and then transfer the results to private corporations to make the profits. From the point of view of corporate elites it is a perfect system, this interaction between state and private power.
There’s plenty of other interactions as well. For example, the Pentagon isn’t just for developing the economy, it’s also for making sure that the world follows corporate friendly rules. So the linkages are quite complex.
Point is, it probably isn’t accurate to suggest that innovation and government involvement are necessarily at opposite ends of the spectrum. Or, if that’s overstating it, that government involvement stifles innovation. In a lot of cases, and including in the US, they’ve always gone hand in hand.
About the current state of Norwegian healthcare; It’s managing OK, but yes, some of the administrative regions are threatening to close down smaller hospitals, which I, as a matter of course, find appalling.
The best thing to do is to protest. Candle-lit vigils, chanting, wearing a Che pullover, maybe roll around nude in the snow, just like you would at your sauna for your health drawing attention to your case, and heck, even highlight the effects of global warming.
That was a fantastic reply. Very much to the point.
I particularly enjoy the statements in this thread concerning the apparent dangers of what seems to be the Communism that permeates Norwegian society. It seems like we’re all just Stalinist drones over here, ruled by the unseen hand from cradle to grave, never wanting to work, just waiting for a hand-out. Apparently we all have our Che t-shirts pulled over our eyes and our Mao-hats stuck up our asses.
I find it really hard to understand the apparent animosity all of you have against social democracy, or are you all wilfully misinterpreting it? Before you go on a rant about the dangers of socialism, please try to understand what ‘social democracy’ means. I’m probably not the first one trying to get this message across, but I sort of feel obliged to try.
Barekim, you have presented some excellent replies, but the facts indicate all your countrymen do not feel like you do. I am also wondering if you think American health care is bad, or at least as bad as Sicko implies, because you would be wrong. The true answer, as usual, probably is somewhere in the middle. I am sure there are people here who wouldn’t mind a system like yours, and people who would be pissed off about paying that much in taxes. Anyways, thank you for your input and Welcome to Moorewatch. It’s always nice to hear what folks from other countries think, without hearing our media’s interpretation of it.
I find it really hard to understand the apparent animosity all of you have against social democracy, or are you all wilfully misinterpreting it?
Because we believe the best person to determine how you live your life and spend your money is you, and not some government bureaucrat who thinks he knows what is best.
Before you go on a rant about the dangers of socialism, please try to understand what ‘social democracy’ means. I’m probably not the first one trying to get this message across, but I sort of feel obliged to try.
Social Democracy - freely electing socialist to govern you who then proceed to make you 100% reliant on the government so you keep electing them so you don’t lose any of your “free” programs. All while they close the free programs in remote locations and make you wait 6 months for a simple procedure that you are now going to die because of the wait.
We really don’t give two shits about your socialist garbage in your nation. The problem is that there are a bunch of morons in America that want us to be like you and talk about how great it will be. Guess what the best way to counter them is? Point out all the crap that goes on where you live, demonstrating we would still have the same (or worse) problems than we do now. So excuse me if I don’t feel sorry that you are so upset at the mocking of your glorious system.
Barekim, you have presented some excellent replies, but the facts indicate all your countrymen do not feel like you do. I am also wondering if you think American health care is bad, or at least as bad as Sicko implies, because you would be wrong. The true answer, as usual, probably is somewhere in the middle. I am sure there are people here who wouldn’t mind a system like yours, and people who would be pissed off about paying that much in taxes. Anyways, thank you for your input and Welcome to Moorewatch. It’s always nice to hear what folks from other countries think, without hearing our media’s interpretation of it.
First and foremost; I really don’t mind what system you have in your own country, if it works for you, you are welcome to have any system you feel like. I’m not here to tell the American people how to run their business, I just want to state my own view on Norwegian health care, and to address some of the things that I feel are misconceptions. I’m not saying I’m right, but this thread was started as a rant against Norwegian health care, and thus I would like to let my thoughts be heard, seeing as I am both a Norwegian and a health care worker. Yes, I’ve seen ‘Sicko’, but I won’t take it at face value, it’s not a testament of unquestionable truth, and I know that ‘Sicko’ is far from the complete picture. On the other hand; I’m somewhat surprised over that people won’t take into account Michael Moore’s quite apparent bias. He has his own agenda, and it seems to me that a lot of people are unable to understand that, both on the right and the left side of the political spectrum. He has a bias, as has Fox News. It’s not much more complicated than that, in my opinion.
Of course not all our countrymen support the current system, and they are entitled too, but suggesting that our healthtcare-system is under any threat, is to stretch the truth. Even our liberals, meaning those on the far right of the political scale, believes in universal healthcare, though they would like to open that sector to more private enterprise. In any civilised democracy, one is allowed to dissent, and one should have dissenters, it leads to political progress through discussion. No society can please everyone.
