Why can't the US adopt European-Style Social Systems?

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pocaracas said:
When did you leave Europe, again?
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I am referring to all of our ancestors who came to America the first time. They did not come to America, the land of the free and home of the brave, to be like the Europeans. They came to forge their own identity which all Americans share to this day.
 
Did Europeans have " social systems" back then?

The way I heard it, it was the Land of Opportunity - Land given for free, they had so much of it.
Overpopulation and scarcity of jobs were driving people to the States… not social systems.
 
Europeans have always had social systems. But not necessarily as we know them today.
 
Precisely.
So why your earlier comment “If we wanted to do that, we as a people would have stayed in Europe”?
Leaving Europe for the States had nothing to do with the social systems as they are implemented now… did it?
 
Horrible by our standards now. They couldn’t have been too bad for the time because flocked to the cities to go work in them.

I’m not saying it was perfect, but to argue that big government is needed for economic growth is false.
 
Making healthcare Catholic based isn’t the magic answer either. The hospital in town is Catholic, the hospital in the next significant city is Catholic. The one 120 miles away has a “mental health” unit, but it’s less treatment and more sort of throw them out the back door. Have sent folks with $200+/day meth habits over there and the official result is that they’re good and don’t have any reason to be there. The rest of the care is rather dreadful. At least if it’s really, really serious, they fly people to the privately run hospital 200+ miles away. I don’t see the Church stepping up to the plate and helping to pay for all of the “mental health” transports (i.e. a lot of people who won’t put the drug pipe down) that the municipality does because the Catholic hospital no longer has a mental health unit.

But, seriously, there is no such thing as “free” and unlimited healthcare. It is rationed one way or the other. The allocation of limited resources dictates that you use those resources where they are most useful. If somebody is a krokodil user for example, spending large sums of money on advanced medical procedures makes little sense. Yes, taxpayers can pay for amputations and expensive courses of antibiotics and all that stuff. However, at the end of the day, the user is still dead within a couple of years due to how krokodil acts. Those funds could have been better used for numerous other things. Perhaps, even to provide medical care to an infant who was born addicted to multiple drugs because the parents used a variety of substances.
 
Given that in a lot of other stuff at the time, the other option in the south was “effectively slavery”, that’s really not saying much.
 
European-style social systems are based on what evolved from their former monarchies.

The United States formed a totally different system based on voluntary associations of private individuals.

TOTALLY different.

People who prefer the U.S. system emigrate to the United States.
 
I was referring more to the immigrants who came after the civil war from all over Europe.
 
Seeksadvice said:
But, seriously, there is no such thing as “free” and unlimited healthcare. It is rationed one way or the other. The allocation of limited resources dictates that you use those resources where they are most useful. If somebody is a krokodil user for example, spending large sums of money on advanced medical procedures makes little sense. Yes, taxpayers can pay for amputations and expensive courses of antibiotics and all that stuff. However, at the end of the day, the user is still dead within a couple of years due to how krokodil acts. Those funds could have been better used for numerous other things. Perhaps, even to provide medical care to an infant who was born addicted to multiple drugs because the parents used a variety of substances.
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I find it somewhat uncharitable that your examples of people who use a lot of resources tend to be drug addicts.

What about people like me who were simply born with more issues, or had them come up through events that were not their fault? We also suffer under free market systems for not being able to afford our own care - and I’m skeptical of private charity because I’ve gotten too much of the attitude that “if you really wanted to you’d figure out a way to be healthy.”
 
Get a good education.

People are not hopeless to resist drug addiction.
 
At least in my case, “get an education” wasn’t exactly useful advice, because there was absolutely no way I would be getting any sort of education, or making any use of it, until I had some way of obtaining reliable medical care.

I’m working on it now, but it’s much slower because I have to spend most of my time, you know, working to pay my own bills and take care of my own apartment, and I certainly don’t have the spare money to take classes so I pretty much have to do it with what I can find online (which includes not really having much help if something isn’t working).
 
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It’s not easy.

Takes smarts AND a lot of hard work AND living on a friend’s sofa for a few years AND luck.

Fellow named Charles Payne grew up in a broken home in Harlem; joined the Air Force; went to college; got a civilian job at a stock brokerage. Made a lot of money. Has a television program.


And there are no guarantees.
 
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I think that’s where a lot of these issues come in.

For example, living on a friend’s sofa takes being the kind of person who has friends with spare sofas to live on. That’s not everyone, and it’s going to skew towards people who have friends who are making more than the bare minimum themselves (especially since almost all rental contracts I’ve seen have rules prohibiting doing just that).

Joining the military of course takes being in good physical shape - I’m pretty sure if I’d applied they’d just have laughed. Even otherwise fairly inconsequential physical problems can be an issue there.

I think I’ve said this before, but this is where we have to remember that 50% of the population is below the mean. Not everyone is going to have the aptitude for an in-demand skill. Not everyone can put in 80h weeks on a regular basis between work and training. I worry that sometimes we take exceptional success stories as proof that everyone can succeed that way.
 
That’s a strange thing for you to think, considering the 19th century in the US was absolutely dominated by war, which represents the single biggest government swelling in our history. Nothing grows the federal government like war.

That’s also strange considering the third worst economic depression in US history started in 1873 and leased for seven years. Long Depression - Wikipedia
 
Comparing the growth of government from 19th to 20th centuries due to war, it was pretty much non existent until WWII. That depression is kind of irrelevant. There was growth, then there was global issues regarding silver, small government was a non factor.
 
Simply not true. You have poor access because there simply isn’t anyone in the UK that doesn’t have access. The fact you have anyone without healthcare insurance means you can’t claim grear access. Affordability is generally measured by the proportion of GDP spent on healthcare, US is not “ok” it’s just expensive. There is no independent ranking that even puts America in the top 20 countries worldwide. The WHO ranks america 37th which is pathetic and only slightly better than Cuba for goodness sake.
 
That’s strange that you should think that, considering in the 1800s the US partook in the…
(
play the first minute or so as you read the list)

First Barbary War
Tecumseh’s War
War of 1812
Creek War
Second Barbary War
First Seminole War
Texas-Indian Wars
Arikara War
Winnebago War
Black Hawk War
Second Seminole War
Aroostook War
Mexican-American War
Cayuse War
Apache Wars
Puget Sound War
Rogue River Wars
Third Seminole War
Yakima War
Second Opium War
Utah War
Navajo Wars
First and Second Cortina War
Paiute War
The Civil War
Yavapai Wars
Dakota War of 1862
Colorado war
Shimonoseki War
Snake War
Powder River War
Red Cloud’s War
Comanche War
Modoc War
Red River War
Las Cuevas War
Great Sioux War
Buffalo Hunters’ War
Naz Perce War
Bannock War
Cheyenne War
Sheepeater Indian War
Victorio’s War
White River War
Pine Ridge War
Garza Revolution
Yaqui Wars
Second Samoan Civil War
Spanish-American War
Philippine-American War
and the Moro Rebellion
Not to mention the numerous expeditions and excursions taken to places like the Mediterranean, China, the South Pacific, and Korea.

It’s also strange that you think that the Long Depression is irrelevant, especially when it was the worst global economic crisis until 1929. The Long Depression was formerly called the Great Depression until the 30s. Also that you can disregard the size of government as a cause (even though unregulated railroad investment is certainly one of the major factors in the US for the depression) but you seem to say with certainty that small government can cause a boom without the disastrous results when bubbles burst. Especially when there are a whole host of reasons for the economy to uptick during those years. It sounds like you’re cherry-picking. Or not taking into account the whole “bubble burst” thing.
 
Most of those “wars” didn’t amount to much more than skirmishes. I don’t know a whole lot about some of the Indian wars, but I’m reasonably familiar with the “Comanche War”. There was never a truly major engagement, and there never a whole lot of Comanches to begin with. It was like a slow-motion guerilla war of small cavalry contacts, mostly fought by Texas Rangers, which were more like a police force than an army.

All of the Indian wars put together never involved large numbers or “war” in the early European or modern sense. And I doubt any of them had any significant impact on the economy because they were too small.
 
Tha’ts true, the Comanche War was labeled a “campaign”. But the Civil War, the Spanish American War and the Philippine War were not small conflicts.

But the sheer size of length of the combined Indian Wars, compiled with the infrastructure, expansion, logistics, and etc. leads to something very significant.
 
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