🚀 go-pugleaf

darrow@oneillaw.com (O'Neill) writes:

> 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.

 In fact, it does matter. I think that the facts prove that totalt
absence of capitalism is not significantly worse that total
capitalism. There is a golden average somewhere inbetween those
extremes. 
 
> 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

 "Means tested"? Could you please elaborate a bit on that. The phrase
doesn't mean any more to me than "ankestyrelse" does to you.

> 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.

 That depends on how you define poor. I have effectively gotten my CS
education, while receiving unemployment compensation. Does that make
me poor? 
 
> 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.

 That's still a question of definition. I suppose that some Albanians
are rich compared to the rest of the country, even if they aren't by
western standards. 

> 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

 I wouldn't. Sure, I'm biased, but I still haven't seen people
living in the streets around here, even though I live in the seconds 
largest city of the country.

> prosperous countries, but I understand that situation is changing as
> these countries deal with increasing ethnic minorities.

 Not really. 

> >> 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.  

 No. The Soviet Union started out in a transitional phase, where the
workers and the peasants supposedly were to receive proper political
education. However, far to soon the basic greed took over.


-- 
/Wegge