RE: why are many american obsessed over maintainign the illusion of choice in healthcare?
October 1, 2019 at 2:08 pm
(October 1, 2019 at 1:27 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote:(October 1, 2019 at 5:52 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: I think you nailed it - it's largely a question of indoctrination, a Cold War holdover. For decades, USians were taught that social programmes = socialism = communism = totalitarianism. Therefore, using general revenue to make sure that sick people get healthcare leads more or less directly to jack-booted thugs, gulags and purges.
Opponents of universal health care aren't stupid, they're cruelly calculating. They've done an outstanding job of pointing up the failures of UHC (and there have been some) while ignoring or misrepresenting the successes and benefits.
Boru
I don’t think it is a cold war holdover. Rather, it is reversion to a more nature state that would have existed without cold war.
Communism from even before WWII was born out of and focused a light on the consequences of the excesses of capitalism. It's presence in Soviet Russia made revolutionary changes elsewhere seem both a plausible and potentially desirable alternative to the excess of capitalism. The fear of such an outcome made American political and establishment more accepting of such public and social programs as would take some wind out of the sails of communist Propaganda.
The weakness of Soviet Union in the late 1980s and the fall of communism in the Soviet Block at the end of the decade gave American capitalism renewed confidence and reduced ots willingness to compromise in order to keep abreast and ahead of the appeal of communism. What you are seeing is a process of reversion of American capitalism to what it would have evolve towards when unconstrainted by the need to use both carrot as well as stick to tamp down the social appeals of socialism or communism.
social programs =/= socialism =/= communism =/= totalitarianism were the view capitalist elite were willing to accommodate in order to stave off the credible threat of radical left wing revolution.
social programs = socialism = communism = totalitarianism is the view natural to capitalist elite who fear no existential danger from credible threat of radical left revolution.
I find the Soviet point interesting because when the revolution happened and the king was overthrown, the new govt decided to take the land oft he rich and distribute it to the poor,in fact a lot of what they did was radically different than is depicted in the media
the problem was that after the revolution a certain group nations to the west including the US decided to attack the new Russian state. They barely succeeded in stopping the west but because of it they were forced to prioritize spending resources on national defense and state control over their previous goals of spending no consumer good and products that the masses needed which led to the rise of those like Stalin who turned the young state towards authoritarianism, militarism with the view that the state is supreme and citizens were only resources for the state which is quite the opposite of what Karl Marx had in mind.
now that I think about it almost all the enemies the US has has been created in some part due to the US sticking its ugly nose where it doesn't belong. When the great depression hit the US took back the money they loan to the defeated Germany which caused their already devastated economy to collapse making it easier for extremist to gain popular support.
I've read about the totalitarianism argument made for Social security, medicare and medicaid when they were first proposed yet all that happened was that people saw improvements in their standard of living
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