🚀 go-pugleaf

On 12 Oct 1998 08:46:27 +0200, Anders Wegge Jakobsen <wegge@wegge.dk>
wrote:

>darrow@oneillaw.com (M O'Neill) writes:
>
>> On 11 Oct 1998 11:40:11 -0600, moore.louis@childrens.tchden.org
>> (Louis B. Moore) wrote:
>
> ...
>> Hey fella, I agree with your comments as well.  Be careful with your
>> attributions.  Don't you think it's possible for a free society to
>> meet its humanitarian obligations?  What country takes better care
>> of its poor than the US?  China?  Iraq?  N. Korea (ha haha,starving
>> its people in order to build nuclear weapons)?
>
> Just about every european country, with the *possible* exception of
>Albania.
>

I received a similar comment via email.  I think it's debatable, but
it doesn't really matter.  The point is that it's generally the
"capitalistic" countries that provide the best relief for their poor
and the like.

My understand is that the european countries provide a lot of services
that aren't means tested, i.e., health, education, etc.  I don't know
whether payments to the poor (i.e., welfare benefits) as such are more
generous than those provided in the US, which benefits of course vary
from state to state.

Albania is abysmally poor, and I doubt it has any real safety net for
its citizens.  I wonder about other countries in the Balkans as well.
Serbia doesn't seem to be doing much for its ethnic Albanians at the
present apart from trying to kill them.  Maybe they aren't poor, I
don't know.

I think I would rather be poor in the U.S. than in most European
countries.  Perhaps the situation is better in some of the more
prosperous countries, but I understand that situation is changing as
these countries deal with increasing ethnic minorities.

>> We hardly know what poverty is in this country.  I'm not a right
>> winger, I'm not a republican or anything close to it.  I have real
>> problems with the accumulation of excess wealth, but those are moral
>> problems.  I haven't seen any political system which can deal with
>> those problems.  THey can only be dealt with by an educated public.
>> You can't save people from themselves.  Educate them, and they might
>> be able to make the right decisions though.
>
> Unfortunately not. If that were the case, then the Soviet Union would
>have fared much, much better. The public is what the public is, and is
>impossible to change.

The Soviet Union might have fared better if it did not attempt to
impose an artificial economic system and had granted its citizens a
few basic civil liberties.