That Really Scary S Word
Bernie Sanders, that known socialist in the US Senate, tried to corrupt the more weak-minded and impressionable readers of the Boston Globe today with his seductive socialist propaganda:
Finland is a country that provides high-quality healthcare to all its people with virtually no out-of-pocket expense; where parents and their young children receive free excellent childcare and/or parental leave benefits that dwarf what our nation provides; where college and graduate education is free and where children in the public school system often record the highest results in international tests. Eighty percent of workers belong to unions, all employees enjoy at least 30 days paid vacation, and the gap between rich and poor is far more equitable than in the United States.
Bah. As if those things mattered. God bless America:
Despite all the rhetoric about "family values," US employees now work the longest hours of any people in a major country. Our healthcare system is disintegrating. At last count, 47 million Americans had no health insurance.
We have the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world. Our childcare system is inadequate. Too many children drop out of school, and college is increasingly unaffordable. We have more people in jails and prisons than any other country in the world.
Maybe so, but Americans are no S-word wimps. We're free baby...
Comments
Funny thing is I have been meaning to post on this issue. Bloody hell! Americans think Liberal is socialist! Canadians think a fair go is socialist.
Socialism and liberalism are very well defined as isms.
The north American usages rarely come close to the real meanings.
I reject both socialism and conservatism as centrist concepts. Liberalism is not the idea, but it least it accepts a more decentralised approach to governance.
Posted by: Dennis Cartledge | April 22, 2009 11:02 PM
Cart, the right in the US has so successfully distorted the meaning of "socialism" that the mere mention of the word is enough to end an argument favorably for them.
It's not "socialism" that progressives in the US left are advocating. It's "a fair go," as you put it. I like that term.
Posted by: abi | April 23, 2009 07:27 AM
The right have distorted "socialism" to the point where now they're substituting the term fascism. It's all about scaring and misleading people.
Good for Bernie Sanders for speaking up, and also for pointing out that we need to get beyond the nonsense and have "a good debate about what goes on here compared with places with a long social-democratic tradition like Sweden, Norway, and Finland, where, by and large, the middle class has a far higher standard of living."
Posted by: Kathy | April 23, 2009 01:52 PM
Kathy, it's amazing that people can be so easily scared away from having a serious debate about policies that could improve their lives, just because of a word.
Posted by: abi | April 23, 2009 06:02 PM