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Title: The astonishing weakness of Hillary Clinton
Source:
TheWeek
URL Source: http://theweek.com/articles/569184/ ... shing-weakness-hillary-clinton
Published: Jul 31, 2015
Author: Michael Brendan Dougherty
Post Date: 2015-07-31 10:43:17 by Tooconservative
Ping List: *2016 The Likely Suspects* Subscribe to *2016 The Likely Suspects*
Keywords: None
Views: 6669
Comments: 124
Hillary Clinton is as unpopular as she ever has been. Her favorability ratings have fallen to just 40 percent. Her campaign is already heading south, even though she has serious advantages over everyone else in the campaign, both Democratic and Republican. Her opponents in the Democratic field do not pose a plausible mathematical threat. Bernie Sanders can attract huge crowds in college towns, but he is going nowhere with the African-American voters who would be key to building an anti-Clinton Democratic primary coalition. Martin O'Malley's record, shaped by his transition from the Baltimore mayoralty to the Maryland statehouse, has made him radioactive to an activist Democratic base that wants criminal justice reform and that winces when a politician like him says, "All Lives Matter." Clinton is thus free to define her agenda apart from them. Because the Republican field is startlingly unanimous in its positions, Clinton has the opportunity of running against a coherent platform, while picking out its weakest spokesperson on every individual issue. She can run against Trump on immigration, against Huckabee on social issues, against Walker on foreign policy. But it's an opportunity that she has so far passed over. Perhaps she doesn't want to get bogged down in actual policy details, always unpopular with an electorate that grows fat on cliché but retches at details. Still, it means that the entirety of Clinton's campaign has alternated between distancing herself from the legacy of her family name, and stonewalling reporters investigating one scandal or another. In the first category, she has repudiated the tough-on-crime policies of her husband. She has strongly embraced gay marriage even though her previous support for traditional marriage was, according to Clinton, rooted in timeless religious principles. She has joined the new gender politics, despite her own history of slut-shaming her husband's mistresses. Calling Bill's pump-and-dump paramours "trailer trash" and "narcissistic loony tunes" is understandable in my own view, but considered impolitic today. Hillary Clinton has never won a competitive election. This can't be repeated enough. She beat Republican Rep. Rick Lazio for her Senate seat in 2000. And she defeated a mayor from Yonkers in 2006. In her first competitive race, the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, she began as a heavy favorite and she lost. What has she done to improve her chances in that time? She's aged well, I guess. And she served without distinction as secretary of state. The most notable addition to her CV was her strenuous support of military intervention in Libya, which has left that nation in ruins and vulnerable to ISIS. In turn, Libya has left Clinton with a new scandal about her home-brew email server and the deletion of thousands of emails that congressional oversight might have used against her. She has high name-recognition. Until she started campaigning she was polling well even with Republicans. She has the Obama coalition, and an electoral map where Republicans need significant pickups. But boy, it all seems underwhelming. What is the task for Democrats in the post-Obama era? Why is Clinton the one to take on this mission? After achieving a policy almost approximating universal health care, the dream of Democrats since Harry Truman, what are the Democrats to do? Are they pro-globalization? Do they have ideas for integrating the great wave of immigration to America that has occurred over the past 50 years? Do they have anything to offer the dying white working class? Are they for reforming any of America's major institutions? Clinton just seems like a mismatch for the party and the moment. The center-left darling of Wall Street talking up issues of inequality. The former Walmart board member posing as savior of American jobs. The "Smart Power" leader whose achievement at state was wrecking a nation and turning it over to Sunni terrorists faster than George W. Bush. A champion of women who pretended the leader of the free world was the victim of his intern. The wife of a man who flies on the "Lolita Express" with a porn star that was booked for "massages." The vanquisher of a Yonkers mayor. Is this really the best the Democrats can do? Yes, and that should worry them. Poster Comment: After a few weeks of Trumpsterism, the GOP has forgotten about Hitlery altogether. But she is self-destructing from her own scandals and repulsive public persona. Her name recognition and reputation are sky-high. And that is her biggest problem. The Dems know who and what she is. I think the writer overlooked just how repulsive her major Wall Street banking connections are with Goldman-Sachs, JP Morgan, Chase, the new UBS scandal, etc. That's pure poison to the Dem base voters, the bulwark of the Occupy Wall Street types. And the Xlintons are still loathed by the Obama Dem establishment.
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#85. To: Rufus T Firefly (#83)
The judges had the power to put them to death for breaking various commandments. The judges also had the power to enforce restitution for Israelites who did not fulfill their obligations. God's law was not optional in Israel. It was mandatory, and it's key provisions - against murder, enslavement of fellow Hebrews, idolatry, blasphemy and sabbath breaking were enforced by the death penalty. It's economic provisions were enforced by double, quadruple and quintuple restitution. Nothing about the law of Israel was optional. The judges were not there to give opinions. They were there to enforce the law, on pain of death, on the Israelites. The judges themselves became corrupt, however, and did not enforce the law. The Hebrews let themselves off the hook. The government itself - the judges - did not give honest judgments and the people went slack. So God sent prophets to exhort them to return to the law - or else. Those prophets were frequently killed. FInally God sent his Son, and they crucified him. Then God destroyed the sacramental state of Israel forever and threw open the Kingdom of God to those who followed his Son, only. There is no promise of eternal life in the Old Testament, only a promise of Israel, and only as long as there was good behavior. Jesus himself pronounced the death sentence on covenantal Israel, made a new covenant with each man anywhere who will follow him. Was killed, raised, ascended, and thirty years later God sent the Roman army to utterly obliterate the Temple and the priesthood, making it impossible to fulfill the Torah even if the Jews wanted to. So that's that. Christian heretics try to resurrected the corpse of dead covenantal Israel, whom God himself executed. It's a shame, but it's part and parcel with the same sort of tomfoolery that the ancient Israelites did - ignoring what God actually SAID in favor of what they preferred to believe. Too bad for them. To bad for the erring Christians. The text says what it says, and what it says is what I've said.
Yet he DOES NOT require us to obey Him - to follow Him. He (way back at Creation) gave us Free Will. An all powerful government, however; one that you envision with the resources to provide cradle-to-grave care; will NEVER allow free will. You follow and do what the government says, OR ELSE. God's law always was, and still is, "Obey me or die." In ancient Israel, he established justices to impose physical death on those who broke the divine laws,. and they did execute people, and impose fines on them, and other punishments, for breaking the law. The law was not optional in Israel, ever. Men had the free will to break it, and if they broke certain laws, they were put to death for it by God's judges. If they broke the economic laws, they had twice or four or five times taken from them as punishment and restitution. If they broke other laws, they were whipped and beaten. Free will means we're not automatons. It doesn't meant that there are no earthly enforcement mechanisms for breaking God's law. Jesus was not a secular king. He said that the Torah was the law until the end of the world., so it still is. Much of it does not apply - the rituals are gone with the wind. We're not Hebrews, so we don't get a farm in Israel if we follow the law (all that was ever promised; some Christians seem to think that the promise for obeying the law of Torah was Salvation. That's a silly belief. The Bible does not say that, ever. What it DOES say, to the Hebrews, is that if they follow all of the Law, they get to live ion their prosperous farm in Israel in peace. There is no promise of anything having to do with the afterlife anywhere in the law of God before Jesus. THAT promise, of being accepted into THAT Kingdom, comes with Jesus. It is just as necessary to obey Jesus' commandments to be part of his kingdom as it was to obey YHWH's if you wanted your prosperous farm in Israel. "What good does it do you to say you follow me if you don't obey my commandments?" Jesus asked that. I don't know how he could have been any clearer. But in case of any doubt, he said plenty of other stuff - that if you don't forgive, God will not forgive you. Note well: the Baptized, washed in the blood born again Christian will NOT BE FORGIVEN HIS SINS BY GOD, IF he refuses to forgive the sins of others against him. Jesus said that explicitly, directly, and unambiguously. And yet there are Christians who preach the opposite, in direct opposition to what God SAID. It's a debate of sort, but it's a debate between heretics and Jesus. I choose Jesus. What Jesus said, he meant literally. I take it literally. In some places, what jesus said appears to conflict with what Paul said. In those places, Paul is wrong because Jesus is God.
I do not favor an "all powerful government". Sweden doesn't have an all-powerful government. Neither does Denmark. Or Finland. In fact, those people are by and large left freer to choose to sin than Americans are. The American state imposes all sorts of criminal penalties against various personal sins that those states leave up to the choice of the individual. But Sweden, Denmark and Finland and Norway understand that men have basic needs, that these needs are part of the natural world, that they do not go away, and that philosophy does not bid them to disappear. The needs are material: to eat, to be clothed, to have shelter, to be educated, to have medicare care when ill. Those things are basic needs, they are very expensive in the aggregate, and they are the birthright of every man. To put it differently, all men profit from a country's rule of law. There are no billionaires, or millionaires, in lawless lands, because there is s state of savage war. For people to have peace and prosperity there must be law, and law by its nature must be imposed and enforced by the state. There never has existed, and never will exist, any other way to do it. God himself ruled Israel, a theocracy, through human judges and Levite tax collectors. The magistrate is appointed by God for good. So, Sweden and Finland, Dammark and Norway are states, as is the USA and every other country. Those states have laws, which they impose by force if necessary. They collect taxes to pay for the authorities. And they collect taxes to make sure that everybody eats, is clad, is housed, is educated, and has health insurance. Taxes are high, in the 40%. That's what it costs to make sure that the least in society have adequate food, clothing, housing, education and health care. This is not a crushing out of free will. And it's not an all-powerful state. It's a state facing a practical need, and using its power to harness the resources to fulfill that need. In the Soviet Union and China they went further, took AL the property, in order to concentrate all of the power to do everything in the hands of the leaders. That is not free, and it does not work - all human initiative is crushed, and you end up having starvation, at least in China. But that is not Scandinavia, or France, or Holland or Luxembourg, or Switzerland or Austria. In those places, there is the understanding of the basic needs of man, and the understanding that the state is the best-positioned to address them. The basic needs are addressed basically. There is plenty of margin of freedom - 60% of income is NOT taxed away - to break out and do as one pleases. Sweden is not the Soviet Union. Finland is not Red China. Denmark is not Cuba. They are countries like the US, but they fulfill their holy obligation to care for the poor, sick, orphan, young, old and frail, and they do it to a good standard. They're also all confessional states. They all have the original form of Protestantism as their established religion, and pay a church tax also. So apparently these devoted followers of Marin Luther never thought that it was not the obligation of kings and modern states to care for the poor. And they're right too: it is.
What you've described thus far is a Theocracy. It still requires an intermediary - that is, a person(s) in the middle, between the Ruler (God) and the ruled. In your examples, He's not there in physical form. Because it was a theocracy, there was no distance between the civil law and the Mosaic law - it was one and the same. My point with the Garden of Eden reference was that was the only time in Scripture (that I am aware of) that God was on the scene ruling in physical form. That was the point I was attempting to make. In any event, there are no Christian or Old Testament theocracies around today, so it's a moot point. I will possibly concede your point about the Law vis-a-vis eternal life. I always thought that in the Old Testament, keeping the Law was a prerequesite for eternal life. Like I said, I'm not a theologian, and we're running the risk of getting into the theological weeds. My only response to that is once again John 3:16-18. Simple and straightforward. Once again, you've described a Theocracy. It's interesting, but has no relevance to governments today (and certainly not the gov't in DC) Yes You're not advocating we become a Theocracy, are you? I - as a Christian - am I hope not unusual in my admiration of what the Founders tried to do when they decided not to have an official State religion. Perhaps I'm biased, but I truly believe that separation of Church and State (as they meant it, not necessarily how it's practiced today) is the best for the advancement of Christianity. We (as Christians) should believe that - Christianity is, after all, the Truth. Can we say otherwise and still consider ourselves Christian? Finally - In my previous post to you, I made the observation that an all-powerful government (which you seem to advocate) runs the risk of placing itself on a level above a Sovereign God. I made the statement that God will not bless anything (individual or group of individuals) that do so. In fact, God's wrath will come against them. One - had you thought of that angle? Two - if you had not thought of that angle, does it change at all your desire to see that all powerful government providing all those benefits because of some supposed God connection? I agree with much of what you say - your posts provoke thought. I share your concern about the poor, and my wife and I (without getting into specifics - only we, God, the IRS, and Turbo-tax know) go way above and beyond the Tithe. It's an individual - not a government - thing.
I was responding to a couple of posts previous - so you may have covered some of my points. Gonna go to bed now, I'll look these over tomorrow, and perhaps respond then. Ciao
Crony capitalism is crony socialism, the yin and yang. The Penn Central Railroad was the result of the 1968 merger of the Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads. The Pennsylvania Railroad was the one that bought up the Main Line of Public Works in 1857. This was primarily a canal system which used several railroad sections, mainly for portages, including one of the Alleghenies. Philadelphia was attempting to catch up with New York City following completion of the Erie Canal, but the latter had the advantage of crossing the summit between the Atlantic Seaboard and the west at a much lower elevation. The Pennsylvania Railroad was interested in the railroad sections, the canal was just part of the deal. Pennsylvania sank 58 million into the system, and the taxpayers were stuck with a lemon. The Johnstown flood resulted from the collapse of a reservoir originally built for the canal system. Really bad timing, they poured money into a canal system that would have been better spent on railroads. There was a credit bubble at this time, which led to speculation and infrastructure mania, with considerable malinvestment. The debts drove Pennsylvania and 7 other states into bankruptcy.
There you go. Yep, that's the way it's always been. The big projects are built by government. If they're profitable, cronies get the profits. If they fail, the public gets the losses. We just saw this on the grandest scale in human history with the Wall Street bailouts. Privatize the profits, socialize the losses. My preference is for government to operate what government builds, and for government to exploit the resources on government land. Have the profits from these enterprises and this exploitation go into the treasury, to pay the budget, rather than handing it over to private actors so they profit and the public only gets pennies on the dollar of the profits - but eats all of the losses. The more money government can extract from the ground, and by selling energy, the less money they have to take in taxes. And what's with privatizing prisons? It's an invitation to abuse and slave labor. Why don't we privatize the military while we're at it. Same logic. We've already privatized Congress: they're all bought and paid for. Truth is, we're a crony capitalist kleptocracy, and the only possible way to fix it is for people like you, me and the others on this board to hate that to come together as a movement to do it. And the further truth is that that's impossible, because individual men of little means have strange ideas in their heads and will fight each other rather than cooperate, and simply accept the rulership of the kleptocrats. Status quo has the enormous advantage to it that actual cooperation among men generally can only be compelled by force or induced by payment - and average men like us have neither force nor wealth at our command. So, without money or power, we would have to nevertheless find a way to cooperate with each other, to systematically move forward as a mass. It could not be violent, at least not for decades and decades, because the status quo has the army and the police. It would have to be peaceful. What do we have that could unite us? Certainly not religion. Christians are still fighting over the ideas of the 1500s. It's fair to say that many of the most motivated of all Christians well and truly hate Catholicism more than they hate crony capitalism. So no unity will come through Christ or faith. What then? Well, nothing. There is nothing that can unite us. And therefore, divided, we fall, and we will continue to be dominated. Demographic changes may change this. One need only look at Latin American history to realize that Latinos are explosive people with a habit of frequent rebellion and insurrection against their overlords. Americans have no tradition of that, but we are importing that tradition, and as we do, it will probably eventually take root here. But that's for the distant future. For most of our lifetimes, we're living in a kleptocracy that is more and more feudal, and we won't be able to shake it off, because we Americans can't cooperate even on a chat board, so how the hell are we EVER going to do it when property and power are involved? We won't.
Yes, Rufus, it was a theocracy, a direct theocracy, and yes, the intermediary was very much there in physical form. It's all there in Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers, and then repeated in Deuteronomy. Joshua shows it unfolding. Judges shows hundreds of years of it working as designed. But then with Samuel and forward through the Kings and Chronicles, we see it fall apart as men reject God and go for a human king. The kings are all terrible. Saul is terrible. David, the beloved, turns out to be a killer and an adulterer, and the product of his license is civil war. Solomon, "wisest man ever", falls utterly into sexual license, adopts and protects all sorts of pagan rituals, and leaves the country a financial mess which promptly falls apart at his death, never to be reunited. Then we get century after century of civil war, mostly terrible kings, a handful of kings who try to be good but who won't enforce the WHOLE law…and finally God throws Israel to the Assyrians, Judah to the Babylonians. Chastized, he brings them back and, under Persian overlordship, lets them have a little rump state again. They set the forms back up again, but go back to religious indifference. The Greeks come and try to impose Hellenism, the Jews revolt, gain a temporary independence, are acquired by the Romans and start to resist them. God sends his Son to open a new chapter - 90% of the Jews reject them, and Jesus pronounces the doom clauses of Deuteronomy - the part of the covenant that says that if the Hebrews DON'T obey the law, they will be utterly destroyed and driven out. He dies. And in that generation God sends the Romans to erase the Temple and the priesthood, making it no longer POSSIBLE for the Jews to obey the full law even if they wanted to. The law remains, with the promise of the land, BUT to get the land in peace the Jews had to follow the whole law, and God made it so they CAN'T - no priesthood, no Temple. Therefore, Israel can never be brought back. A western colony can be built by force in the land of Israel and call itself Israel, but it won't have the peace and prosperity God promised, because it's not the Israel of the covenant. There are no priests to perform the mandatory rites, they cannot just MAKE priests - the only priests acceptable to God are in one bloodline, and they died in 69 AD and cannot be found. Israel is over. The only thing that the old covenant ever promised the Hebrews was a peaceful and prosperous farm of their own in the land of Israel, IF (and ONLY if) they followed the whole law. If they didn't, the covenant promised them destruction and dispersion. Which is what they got, and what they will continue to have until the end of the world. The only covenant that God offered to allow men to enter the City of God in the afterlife is the covenant of Christ. But that's not what we're talking about here, so let's stay focused on ancient Israel. If we examine the government of ancient Israel, as God set it up, using Montesquieu's schematic of three branches of government: Legislative, Executive and Judicial, we find that there is PLENTY of physical, on-the-ground intermediary in God's system. God set up Israel to be the EXAMPLE to all other people, and one of the reasons that he kept saving it even though it was rebellious towards him was because of the very bad example that it would give to the world, that God "could not save" "his own" people. This is an argument that Moses first makes to him, and is repeated in the Old Testament. After the incident of the golden calf, God tells Moses he's going to exterminate the Hebrews and give Moses leadership somewhere else. Moses begs God not to, and argues with God that if God did that, the Egyptians and everybody else around would say that God just led the Israelites out into the desert to slaughter them. God accepted the logic of that argument, and many times thereafter you hear his tell a prophet that the people will be smitten but not completely cut off, for his name's sake. God had a stake in the survival of Israel - his own reputation depended on it. And in truth, Israel didn't work out. The people rejected God. But let's look at its government, as set up by God. First, the Legislature. There was none. At all. God gave all the law, the entirety of it, to Moses (and a little bit through Joshua). One feature of the Law as God gave it was that the Hebrews were not to take one word out of it, but also they were not to ADD any words either. God gave the law, the ENTIRE law. He made it a sin to break his law. He made it a sin to not enforce his law. AND - very importantly - he made it a sin for any man to add so much as a single additional law. God sat over Israel as legislator king. He made its laws perfect, foresaw and provided for everything, and specifically denied the Israelites ANY avenue for the making of so much as a single ordinance. There was no legislature, no city council. No tribal council. Nothing. No man in Israel, from the lowest peasant to the High Priest, had any power to make one single additional rule to bind men beyond what God gave in writing through Moses. To do so - to add one rule on any subject - was a defiance of God, a direct breach of the law that prohibited making any laws. God gave the WHOLE law, and he expressly denied the Israelites any power to make one single additional rule for themselves, in any situation, ever. This is what FAITH required: that God, being God, foresaw everything, and that every circumstance that the men of Israel would ever encounter, until the end of time, was already foreseen by God in his law, and already provided for in that law, and that if men follow that law EXACTLY, without subtracting anything and without adding anything, it will work out best for them. God wasn't just the SUPREME Legislator, he was the ONLY legislator. The Torah is a legal constitution, but it is one that contains every law or ordinance that Israel was ever permitted to have. It even told the Israelites how they were to make latrines. So, in this sense, the Theocracy was real and absolute. Picture America. Now have a 300 page Constitution that contains every law, covering everything that is to be legislated, and has a clause in it that says that it can not be changed or amended ever, that none of the laws can be suspended, and that none of the laws can be added to. This constitution establishes the structure of government, and it provides no Congress, no State legislature, no city council, no local meeting - and indeed that expressly forbids any such group from ever making one additional rule, law, ordinance or statute, or modifying anything. The physical presence of God as Legislator was that written book - the Torah - whose terms say that it is the ENTIRE law, ALL of the rules, from God, and that men never, until the end of time, have any right or power to ignore one single rule, or to add even a single rule, and that if they DO God will punish them. And then, within that book, we find no provision for so much as a representative town meeting. God never gave mankind the power to make law to govern other men. The making of law by men to dominate other men is ITSELF a sin, and the enforcement of that law by violent force, of police and armies, is murders. The Legislative power belongs to God alone. The entire law is contained in the Torah and in Jesus, and it can never be changed. Except that Jesus DID change that, for he said to Peter and the Apostles: I give you the power of the keys - what you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and what you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Jesus gave the Church a flexibility that YHWH never gave to the Hebrews. BUT, just as we saw with the Hebrews before them, the Church abused that power and killed people to enforce its laws. Now let's look at the second branch, the Executive. God provided no permanent executive for Israel. The heads of families were executives for each family clan. The commandment "Honor your Father and Mother" means just exactly that: your father and mother have status over you, and you owe them honor - your entire life. Jesus makes it clear that this also means you owe them financial support for their entire lives. But past the family and the clan, Israel had no executive. In time of danger, God promised to send a Prophet as a war leader. And he did. Samson, Gideon, and so many others. God did not let Israel be destroyed. BUT the Israelites, once again, just as with the written law, had to have FAITH. Faith means Trust. They had to TRUST God that he would come through. As the Israelites saw the enemies massing around their borders, they had to remember that God saw all, and that when the time was right - in God's eyes and not before - that God would send them a prophetic commander to save them. However, God did NOT give them a full-time King, or police force, or army. It was only to come together in crisis, and for victory, it had to wait on the prophetic supreme commander God would pick. Note that God's insistence that men TRUST him - for that is what the word "to have faith" MEANS - it means TRUST that God will do what he said - is pervasive in the Bible. Christians have divided over what "Faith Alone" means, but it is much clearer if one looks that history of Israel. God gave a law, and forbade them from making other "needful" laws. God's point was no, I've given the ENTIRE law, the things that are in it you don't think are needful will one day be, so you must keep it all even if it makes no sense to you. And the things you think are missing are not there for a reason, so you must not ADD any laws you think are "necessary", because if you do those laws you make will end up being a stumbling block that crushes you. I am God, and I see until the end of time. I have given you a complete, detailed law that governs everything about which there needs to a rule for your good. You must TRUST ME and follow all of those rules, even if you don't understand me. And when I tell you that you cannot make even ONE MORE RULE, that making additional rules is a sin, I mean that too. You may think that I have left something out, some rule you desperately NEED because of present circumstances. I am God, I foresaw all of your present circumstances, and I know that it is necessary for the times to come NEXT, that you cannot see, that you make no law governing that thing. I did not make a law, and you must discipline yourself to live WITHOUT additional laws. You cannot take any away, and you cannot add any. Only in this way can I promise that you will be able to peacefully and prosperously occupy your promised farms until the end of the world. If you change my law at all, you all be destroyed, because the very thing that I was protecting you against will come to be. You must put ABSOLUTE TRUST in God. When you see enemies beyond the borders, you can call the army, to be ready, but you cannot march to war, or appoint a supreme commander. You must wait on God. "But what if God doesn't send one?" You of little faith! I said I would not permit Israel to be destroyed, and I will not. But if you go ahead and appoint your commander without me, if you do not wait on me to send my prophet in the time that is right for you, you will destroy yourselves. That is what the Israelites did, too, by demanding a King. It is how Saul destroyed himself also. At the crucial moment, Samuel tarried. Saul went ahead without him, because he thought it militarily expedient, and took other decisions he considered good and expedient in light of the victory. And Samuel arrived and told Saul that in doing so he had alienated God. Saul, the King, was to SIT THERE, and let the opportunity pass, and WAIT FOR GOD. This requires FAITH - FAITH that God will provide a better result. When men add laws, or subtract laws, they end up destroying any possibility of their long-term happiness and peace. When men take up command and take up the sword and compel, without being appointed prophets of God, they end up bringing calamity on themselves. God did it regarding the Sabbaths too. Every 7th year was the year of rest. Nobody was to plant crops. Whatever grew in the field was to grow of its own. It could be taken to eat, but there would be no formal harvest. And of course the poor were always authorized, by God, to walk through the fields and eat of them. Crops and land were not the ABSOLUTE property of their owners - they were the conditional property only. The poor had a first right to EAT and cross, and what is more, if in the harvest something was dropped, the owners had no right to pick it back up: God reserved that for the poor. NOR did the owners have the right to go BACK and harvest the later crops. They had the right to plant and harvest ONE TIME in their fields. All the rest of the food produced there was NOT there. It belonged to the poor. In California once I was driving a back road past an immense grapefruit grove. It stretched on for miles and miles and miles. The trees were laden with fruit, and there were ripe fruits on the ground under the trees everywhere, stretching back as far as the eye could see into that forest of fruit trees. It smelled wonderful and was very appetizing. I wanted some, because I was hungry. I drove up and down that roadside for several miles, looking for a roadside vendor, a farmer's stand, somewhere to get one of those grapefruit. There was none. What there was, were large signs tacked up on posts every few hundred feet, with huge letters: "NO TRESSPASSING" and a stern warning not to take any fruit. This was an American commercial citrus farmer protecting his property. As far as he, and American law, are concerned, every single one of those grapefruit, including the tens of thousands falling off the tree onto the ground, are his, and his alone. For anyone to enter is trespassing, and for anyone to take as little as a single grapefruit lying on the ground, destined to rot, is, according to this farmer and American law, stealing. Before God, American law is wrong and that farmer is wrong. Those fallen fruits do not belong to him. The whole crop and the land itself all belong to God. The farmer did not make the tree grow nor bud, flower and fruit. God did. God permits the farmer to make a good living off the usufruct of His land and his trees, and that is well. But God authorized the sojourner, the passerby, the poor, to walk through those lands - the farmer had no right to keep them out - and, if hungry, to eat fallen fruit. However, God forbade the passerby from GATHERING fruit in a basket and carrying it away. THAT is stealing. Had I gotten out of the car and taken and eaten a fallen fruit, I would have been entirely within my rights, and had the farmer or the police interfered with me, they would have been spitting in the face of God. When Jesus and the Apostles walked through the field on the Sabbath, and some of the hungry Apostles took some grain and chewed on it, they were not stealing. God authorized that. They were not challenged for stealing either, merely for Sabbath-breaking, for "harvesting" on the Sabbath. But eating is not harvesting. The harvest is an economic gathering in. Picking something and eating it because you're hungry is a God-given right. Notice all of the human laws that have been added to God's law to say "No, you can't do that". Those laws are all evil and wrong. That's what happens when you add to God's law. You're wrong, and you do evil. But men don't even SEE that. And THAT is why, in Israel, God so explicitly left out any Legislature at all, and only sent an Executive in time of crisis. And it meant that the Israelites had to trust God - to have faith and WAIT on God. He who does not trust God enough to wait on him is a man of little faith. During the Exodus, God provided the manna. And he forbade them to gather manna on the 7th day, the rest day. No, they were to gather a double portion on the sixth day, and that would carry them through. Also, he forbade them from gathering extra on any day, from putting some away for tomorrow, "Just in case". Whenever the Israelites gathered extra, it turned to worms and rotted, and God was displeased. But that did not happen on the sixth day. The extra gathered then held over. God's whole message: you depend on me for your food. I will give you enough food to eat always. You must trust (have faith in) me. You not to set aside anything extra. I know what you need. And you are not to gather on the 7th day. You are to rest. God made the same rule later with the Sabbatical Year - Israel was to TRUST that in the 6 other years God would provide enough to tide over the 7th year, along with that which grows of its own in the fields. The real test came in the Jubilee, the 50th year. For the 49th year, being a multiple of 7, was a Sabbatical year, but the 50th year was ALSO a Sabbath year. Which meant that the Israelites did not have new grain and had to live off of their stores for two and a half ears: the 49th year, and the 50th year, and the 51st year too, until the time of the harvest that year. They had to TRUST GOD that he would provide the excess in the preceding years, and enough wild growth in the Sabbatical and Jubilee years, to tide them through. That was the faith required, and it was the same faith required regarding the executive. As to the third branch of government, the Judicial, this was very much the intermediary of which you speak. This was the permanent, heavy, government of Israel. There were two levels of this. First, there were the Levites. They were spread throughout the tribes. It was to them that the people were to bring the first fruits, and the tithes. This was in addition to what was brought to Jerusalem and the priests for the three festivals. The first fruits and tithes served two purposes: first, they fed the Levites themselves, who were a tribe granted no land other than the fields right around the Levitical cities. And then the bulk of the tithe (which was in the form of agricultural produce) was distributed by the Levites to the poor, the cripple, the infirm, the orphan - whoever needed it. So, God didn't give his state a Legislature or an Executive, but he DID give them a religious welfare agency. The Levites served as judges also. The other role of Levites, and others so appointed by them, was to be judges. There was a judge for every ten men, and for fifties and hundreds and thousands. And at the apex of it all was the High Priest, at the altar of the Tabernacle, and HE had in his possession the Urim and Thummim, oracles by which God could be consulted directly for an answer in a doubtful case. Part of the Torah is a whole set of ways that God directed judges to try and decide cases. For example, in a capital case, nobody could be put to death without the testimony of two or three witnesses. Also, witnesses had no choice but to testify - if they knew something, they had to say it. Each witness faced the same penalty as the accused for lying, be it by telling an untruth or by concealing an exonerative truth. This, in a murder or adultery case, the witnesses who perjured, and also those who knew the truth but refused to speak, were themselves to be put to death. God established a parallelism in his law, and established the canons of judgment to reflect that. All told, over 13% of the population of Israel was part of the judiciary, and in addition there was the Levitical welfare apparatus (tithes were for charity, but they were not at all optional). 131 of every 1000 were judges: 100 judges of 10s, 20 judges of 50s, 10 judges of hundreds, 1 judge of thousands, and above him, the High Priest (with the Urim and Thummim). And besides this (without considerable overlap), the Levites were on of the 12 Tribes of Israel, and they judged, and they also were the keepers of the treasury of the land, which was in the form of tithes, which were the only taxes, and their ENTIRE purpose was to feed the Levites and provide poverty relief. So yes, Israel was a theocracy in the truest sense of the word: it was ruled directly by God, as lawgiver. God had no intermediary in the giving of law. Moses was his scribe. The High Priests and Levites were his judges and administrator. Indeed, the word we like to translate as "priest" is a functional title that means, in essence, administrator. We have a tradition of "separation of Church and state". But Israel had no separation. There was no Church at all. The people were the people of God, and the administrators of God collected the taxes, distributed them as welfare, and served as judges to enforce God's law as given. There was no legislature sitting debating new laws, because there was no ability to make or change God's laws at all. There was no executive or police force. In time of danger, God made a prophet and the men formed the army and followed him. No other government has ever been a true theocracy, or CAN be, because there is only one God, and the only place he ever ruled directly was ancient Israel, and he destroyed it. So, a place like Iran we might call a "theocracy", because it's ruled by a religious organization, but it isn't, because it's not God who is ruling directly. We should call Iran a "mullahocracy" or some similar term. In any case, I don't advocate that we attempt to reconstitute the government of ancient Israel. That would be useless - because God would not really be ruling us that way - and impious - as if we could bind God to dance to our forms. What I DO urge is in keeping with what Jesus meant when he said that not a penstroke nor a dot would pass away from God's Law until the end of the world. But how can that be? Didn't Jesus make all foods clean, and forbid divorce, and didn't God destroy the temple and end the rites? And anyway, didn't we just say that the law God gave to Israel did not promise eternal life, or really say anything about the afterlife at all, and only promised a farm in Israel? Yes, all of that is true. It oftentimes seems that Christians are entirely too anxious to "get out from under" the Law without ever taking time to comprehend what the law said, and what it's POINT really was. You know it instantly: any Christian who thinks that the Law was about Salvation of the soul, passing final judgement and entering Heaven after death simply has not read the Old Testament. Perhaps he has skimmed through it, looking for points of reference to what he believes, but that's all the Old Testament serves for to Christians who are so in the dark as that: it's a mine for "gotcha" quotes to prove some point. In fact, though, what the Old Testament is, is a record of Creation, and then God's selection of a particular family and the people associated with that family over time, to establish a moral path for man through teaching by example and repetition. Covenantal Israel was the archetype of the state, governed according to the wisdom of God and under the laws of God, completely undiluted (in concept) by the opinions of man. All of the written law of Israel is God's opinion about everything, every single thing, that is - or ever will be, until the end of the world - of importance to the happiness and right living of mankind. God pulled a bunch of slaves, most of them unrelated, out of the strongest ancient Kingdom. He took the time to smash flat each and every major deity in that Kingdom's pagan pantheon, by making miracles that specifically assumed command of the natural element that the Egyptian god controlled, and then using that element to torment the Egyptians, thereby demonstrating God's mastery not just over the Egytpians and Pharaoh, but over each of their named gods in his her her own element. The pantheon of gods in whom the Egyptians believed in intensely enough to spend all of that time and energy building those colossal pyramids, were all defied to their face by the Lord God of Hosts, El Elyon, the Most High God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses. Pharaoh was actually persuaded pretty early to let the Israelites go, and would have several times. It was God Himself who kept sending his spirit to harden Pharaoh's heart, so that Pharaoh would not let them go, thus paving the way for God to directly smash down before all of Egypt another Egyptian god. Consider the plague of frogs. Frogs? Darkness, blood, gnats, scalls - these things are all painful or scary, real punishment of humans in a way that makes them fear. But FROGS? They don't bite. They're not poisonous (at least not in Egypt). All they did in the plague was just come out of the rivers and marshes annoying everybody, and then die and stink. That's annoying, but it's not even the first plague. Plagues before that inflicted pain and perhaps death and destruction - and yet suddenly God "goes soft" and send FROGS? Frogs. Why? The answer is not found by looking at the effects on humans. God knew that Pharaoh would let the Israelites go as soon as God stopped hardening Pharaoh's heart. Pharaoh himself relented early on. God kept intervening to change Pharaoh's mind and make him more obdurate. Why? So that God could make more plagues, like the frogs. Part of this was to be a symbol for all time, but the true symbology is mostly lost on us because we look at the people and God, and we don't see the rival spirits, the gods of Egypt. Egypt was THE great kingdom, the only one at the time, and it had a pantheon of powerful deities, deities who were real - they performed miracles also. The Egyptian wise men were not illusionists. Their gods turned their sticks into snakes. But the stick from El Elyon ate up the other snakes. Each of God's plagues of Egypt seized the element of an Egyptian god and ruled it to the disgrace of that lesser god. The river goddess was a frog goddess. The Greeks called her "Plataea". But the Most High God brought forth the frogs, and had them die in heaps: demonstrating to all of Egypt that the river goddess was powerful, even in her own element, against El Elyon, the most high God. Jesus did no less when he spoke with demons and cast them out, into pigs, or into the air, etc. Other spirits are real, and the gods of the ancients were often these spirits that accepted worship and divine service in exchange for favors. But when the Father, the Creator, the Most High God, steps onto the stage, the lesser spirits who have accepted worship tremble. In Egypt, he hurled one lesser god after another into the dirt and muck. Pharaoh, the ruler, was said to be descended of the sons of Ra, the god of the sun. And maybe he was. Recall that certain of the angels did descend both before and after the Flood and have offspring by human females: the Nephilim. The Great House of Egypt ("Paroh" in Hebrew means "Great House" - the Greek word "Pharaoh" is a transliteration of this; it doesn't mean "king") got its position somehow, and by its own legends this was because the people believed that the Great House, Paroh, were descended from the sun God. Maybe at some point they were Nephilim. And perhaps the way that the Egyptian astronomers determined the solar cycle to predict eclipses was through the aid of some of these spirits, these lesser gods. Who can say? What we can say is that when God imposed the darkness on Egypt, the penultimate plague, he was striking directly at the sun, at Ra, at the highest of the Egyptian deities, and demonstrating to all of Egypt that God Most High, El Elyon, was higher than the Sun, higher than Ra, that Ra could not resist or control him. The FINAL plague, the Passover, had a purpose also. In Egypt, the first born of every Egyptian house was consecrated to the service of the gods. The first born were the priests and priestesses of Egypt. By striking down the first born, specifically, El Elyon, God most high, stripped Egypt of its entire religious structure - all of its priests and priestesses - in one night. A modern equivalent would be that God comes and kills in one night every priest, minister, brother, nun, reverend and deacon in the world, completely annihilating the entire Christian clergy in one night, leaving none alive. What happens then? All that is left are lay people, and what do they know about deeper theology? So, God mastered the Egyptian gods, then he killed their whole clergy, and then he let Pharaoh relent and let the Hebrews go. All of this was intended to demonstrate a lot of things to everybody, for all time: that the Most High God is above their gods, EVEN THOUGH their gods can indeed perform miracles - they are subordinate. That God is the master of everything. Also, that God can choose a no-people - the slaves of Egypt were not all, or even mostly, descendants of Jacob, they were a polyglot of people from everywhere - and he can make them into a people by his own will. Also, that God can crush the mightiest human state in one night by directly reaching in and killing its entire ruling class: the Egyptian priesthood was the ruling class (they were not celibate). More subtly, Pharaoh actually DID get the message from God early on, and was ready to let the Hebrews go several times. It was God who hardened his heart in order to continue to make the example. By contrast, the Hebrews who came out of Egypt saw all of these miracles and more - "faith" was not a question of BELIEF to them, it was a matter of TRUSTING God, that we would see them through. He did them nothing but good, and yet THEY kept THEMSELVES hardening their hearts and stiffening their necks against him. He kept telling them not to, but they kept doing it, to their own destruction. There is a lesson in that, but we should note that the Exodus story shows TWO kinds of people - the kind that is prone to listen to God (Pharaoh, and his magicians who told him "This was the finger of God" when they saw it, and who told him "Egypt is being destroyed!"); God had to harden Pharaoh's heart several times. Left to his own free will, Pharaoh would have let the Israelites go after the first couple of plagues. And then there's the kind that, even in then face of miracle and blessing, are NOT willing to listen to God, or to trust God, who keep on rebelling. God intentionally CHOSE a people of the second type, indeed a no-people whom he made a people, and knowing from the beginning that they would fail, nevertheless established his exemplary state among THEM. Had he done it among the Egyptians, had he simply revealed himself as above Ra and cast out the Egyprian gods, HE would have been the God of Egypt, and you can bet that the Egyptians would have been very faithful in executing his laws too, not rebellious the way the Hebrews were. He picked a no people, a rabble of slaves, and made them a people, wreaking a miracle of statecraft out of the most rejected, downtrodden, ignorant, poor, lowly, stubborn and stupid people. Jesus also builds the Kingdom starting with individuals, and it is much easier for people who are at the bottom to see and follow God than for people who are rich and comfortable. Also, God did not hate the Egyptians, though the Hebrews might have been inclined to. Two of the laws in Torah, from the mouth of God, are 'You shall not oppress a foreigner, for you were once strangers in a strange land.' And 'You shall not oppress an Egyptian, for he gave you refuge in his land.' Note that while Americans are swift to dismiss worrying about the Indians because that was "long ago" and we don't want to think about it, God was still crediting the Egyptians saving the family of Jacob and Joseph and letting them settle there and treating them well, over four hundred years later. And remember, it was once again into Egypt that the Holy Family fled Herod, who sought to kill the baby Jesus. It was safe in Egypt that Jesus passed the first few years of his life. Egypt is not really the problem. The Egyptians were led astray by demons, and followed them. But Pharaoh was not stupid, and he was not unrelenting. God had to keep hardening his heart in order to perform all of the signs, throw down all of the gods, and teach all of these lessons I have been writing about for all ages. But those lessons are not taught if people do not read them. If they just look at what God said and did and put it in the simple framework of "Jews good/Egyptians bad" then they fail to see what God was teaching. This happens with the whole Torah. Jesus upheld the law, but what does that MEAN? He didn't uphold the food law - but God said that was to keep the Israelites healthy in Israel. It was not a spiritual issue. Remember, God gave Israel a defined land, and no mandate to go and take more anywhere else. God knows all, including biology. If you are sending a primitive people with no knowledge of germ theory into a hot land of deserts, swamps and stagnant rivers and seas, and you want them to be healthy, but you can only use their language, not modern language. What do you do? You give them a list of foods that are clean for them and unclean. How can you explain why. Why are fish with fins and scales "clean", but bottom-feeding catfish unclean? Why are birds that eat seeds clean, but birds that eat blood and carrion unclean? Why are the only clean mammals cud-chewing with cleft feet? (They don't eat blood, and therefore do not have blood-borne parasites). Had the Promised Land been in Norway, would got have forbidden eating oysters and crabs, which are in abundance in those cold clean waters? They are also abundant in the flat, hot, fetid, stagnant sewage- laden mud flats of Egypt and Israel. but they are certainly not good for you. God knew what he was doing. The Israelites didn't understand why they had to tear down a house that had recurring "leprosy", even after scrubbed and the infected part was pulled out. We know: the house has toxic mold growing within the walls, and local abatement will not get rid of it. God knew: he said 'tear it down and discard the unclean ruins outside of the town'. COULD anybody in 1500 BC have known about toxic mold, what it was and how it worked? Could that even be conveyed in ancient Hebrew? Or blood-born parasites? Or toxic amoebae? God knew, and he knew they wouldn't understand. He wanted them healthy in his kingdom, and so he told them what to do, and told them they must do it. They just had to trust him and do it, not knowing why. We can see why. But for the first 3250 years of the Torah, nobody could understand why. Was it just some strange ritual? It was strange, yes. It was a ritual, yes. But it always had a purpose. God always knew what he was doing, and he always said to just DO IT - DO what he said, follow the laws, TRUST ME that this is best - and don't take anything out of the law. And so it goes on through the whole law. God wanted the state he set up to be perfect, so he gave it a perfect set of laws. We cannot reproduce that state in its entirety: God has never promised us prophets or farms, or given us Urim and Thummim by which to consult him directly. But the wisdom and purpose of God's laws remain. So when we look into them and we see a detailed economic order, if we disregard it thinking "Well, thank God we don't have to follow THAT, because we're Christians!" We are being bone stupid. We're looking at God's wisdom, designed for the ages, designed by perfect intelligence to address all of the myriad overlapping problems, and we've decided that God is just not good enough for us - we know better - so we do what we want, and then everything turns into calamity, just as God warned the Israelites. And then we have a choice: we can RELENT and listen to God, like Pharaoh would have - God had to harden his heart to prevent that so he could make the lesson, but he's not going to harden OUR hearts. Or we can harden our hearts and stiffen our necks, like rebellious Hebrews, and continue to do it our way, and continue to fail catastrophically. Take a good look at how hard people abuse me here on this site for simply conveying God's law of money as written. And look how offended people get when I tell them truly that they are rejecting God and his revealed, detailed law - the only way that will ever WORK - in order to serve money. THEY DON'T CARE. Think of those Israelites, standing in the desert, seeing the pillar of fire, having walked through the ocean, and STILL grousing that God won't provide them water, or meat, or whatever, still refusing to obey him. What did that avail them in the end. If we continue this discourse, I'm going to focus on Jesus, just Jesus. It is Jesus who says that the Law is fully the law until the planet is destroyed, so all of those economic provisions of God's wisdom are STILL God's wisdom and still true. But if a Christian wants to assert his "free will" to blow off God and do it a different way, as we have, then we need to be warned of our death by Jesus, who has his own direct things to say about economics. On another thread, I intended to move forward from Genesis to Revelation, in order, discussing what God says about economics. The audience I am targeting, really, are the stiff-necked, hard-hearted "Christians" who have deluded themselves into believing that if it has to do with MONEY, then God's law is all voluntary. Jesus never said a thing about homosexual sodomy. Never did. To see the death penalty for that, you have to go back to the Torah. That's where that law is. That's the only place it is. Paul refers to it. He doesn't make a new law. Why is it that Christians will say that God hates homosexual sodomy, based on the Torah, but then are incapable of HEARING what God has to say about interest, debt forgiveness, poverty relief? It is because those "Christians' are stiff necked hard-hearted people who serve money. That's why. They need to open their eyes and stop it. Likewise, we've seen defenses of slavery - SLAVERY! - in the South. No Christian can defend slavery. But they have tried to. Hard-hearted, stiff necked, blind fools. And where do these beliefs that we can blow off God and just follow our own ideas come from? Satan. They come from Satan. If we continue this discussion, I'm going to let Jesus have the last word. On and on Jesus goes about the poor, about the duty to help them. And the Apostles actually follow the example too. In fact, two early Christians are struck dead by God right at the feet of Peter over a manner of insincere donations. But what do I hear Christians say? That none of this MATTERS, that all that matters is whether or not you believe that Jesus was the Son of God. Jesus himself totally rejected that very argument. "WHAT GOOD DOES IT DO YOU TO SAY THAT YOU FOLLOW ME IF YOU DON'T KEEP MY COMMANDMENTS?" - Jesus of Nazareth
Always a good plan. As I pointed out earlier, you have this at one end of the spectrum: ~John 3:16-18 NIV But then we have the book of James, and this - James 2:14-26 On the surface it appears to be a contradiction. How do I - as a Christian - reconcile this? By focusing on the word "believes" in the John passage. To me, believing is not just simply saying the words "I believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God." Yes, it starts there, but belief has to have shoe leather attached to it. That's where the James passage comes in. A Christian, guided by The Holy Spirit (2nd Person of the Trinity), will respond to His promptings when so guided to help the poor or less fortunate. To do otherwise is to deny one's faith. His or her belief is not genuine. This is going to have to serve as my final comment per this theological discussion - at least for now. I'm not as prolific a writer as you, and I simply cannot summarize my faith any clearer than that. I'd like to get back to a point you made in an earlier post, however. First off, the USA is much larger - population wise - than the countries you cited. A system designed to work there will not necessarily work here. Second, those countries do not have a massive illegal immigration problem. Their politicians to my knowledge are not saying to the rest of the world "come here, jump our fences, and we will provide you free health care". Finally, Norway does not play world policeman like the USA; Denmark does not have military bases in dozens of places. Sweden is not going around the world fighting in un-declared wars. Taking on those cradle-to-grave Socialistic programs WITHOUT a corresponding reduction in our other expenditures is not only foolish, it is suicidal. And it is dishonest. You cited these countries apparently because of their Protestant roots. That's fine, but it's irrelevant to today. As irrelevant as saying the USA is governed by a Constitution when in fact and in practice it is not. So those differences will - in my opinion - doom the USA's foray into Socialism to failure. One final observation - I don't intend it to be a criticism but it may come off that way. Frankly, I get weary of those who constantly point to other countries and say "we need to be more like THEM" Fact is - we are NOT them. People used to come here FROM those countries to WORK here - to better themselves and their families. Ask yourself - why did they do that? They were escaping in some cases those very Socialistic utopias that some (you?) seem to want us to become. I'm not a rah rah flag waving, USA love it or leave it type of guy. Certainly, I know and am honest about our faults and shortcomings as a nation. By the same token, however, there are some things RIGHT about the country. Perhaps it would be cool to remind ourselves of that once in a while.
Rufus, they didn't. Europeans did not come here to escape socialism. The English came here to escape various forms of religious oppression, and because the poor English were herded off their lands and hounded into debtors' prison by the arch-conservative aristocratic feudal right - the ORIGINAL "crony capitalists" par excellence. The Dutch came, in few numbers, to trade with the Indians. The French came (not to the US but to French territory) to trade with the Indians and to convert them to Christianity. The Germans came to America to escape the grinding poverty of monarchy, which was arch-traditional in its economic order. The economic order that the hard right proposes in America, with absolute ownership and essentially no government but the decisions of the land and factory owners - THAT was the system in monarchic Europe and in the pre-Civil War South. The Germans in the "out" groups religiously were out of jobs and property, and they left for religious freedom in the English colonies. Then came the Revolution. After that, next came the Irish. The Irish came because the English treated them like the Americans treated the Indians. It was the sheer opposite of "socialism" - it was genocidal tyranny. England was the world Empire, super rich. She let a million of her subjects die of starvation a day's sail away because they DIDN'T have any functional system of government poverty relief, and didn't believe in it. When the famine hit, the English government let the Irish die. And when the Irish agitated, the English rode them down as Catholic racially inferior scum. No Irishman or woman ever immigrated to America because of "socialism" - not one. Ever. Next came the more Germans, and Italians, and Scandinavians. They came because of massive overpopulation in Europe, oppressive governments holding down unrest, and the complete LACK of socialism in traditional, conservative Europe that REFUSED to set up systems to feed people. That's why the Russians had a revolution during World War I. They were already poor, they'd lost 10 million in an endless war with Germany, and there was no relief for them at all in that rigid aristocratic system. So they overthrew it. THAT is where socialism was born. Some Russians fled Russia to America at that time, but they were fleeing desperate poverty, not socialism. Before the USSR, socialism did not EXIST, in ANY European country. Almost all of the great waves of European immigration to America happened in the late 19th and pre-World War II 20th Century, and NONE of it was due to socialism, or social welfare programs. There were no social welfare programs in Europe to speak of. The Church handled it, and did so weakly, with overwhelmed resources. Social welfare really came into full force in most of Europe AFTER World War II…and with it, immigration to the US STOPPED, because the Europeans had what they needed at home. The LEAST immigration to the US from ANY European country of any size was France, and that was because, with their revolution in the 1780s, the French stripped the land and wealth of the aristocrats and made themselves middle class, and so they had no REASON to leave. Immigration to the United States from Europe came about because of right wing capitalist and aristocratic systems that did not believe in social welfare, and that left charity to the Church. THAT is what created burgeoning masses of desperate people who came to America as a SAFETY valve. And that is, by and large, the condition of Latin America too. Those are not socialist countries down there. They are capitalist. They have very threadbare social welfare systems. Charity is left to the Church. As always, the Church does not have the resources to do it, so the poverty is grinding and horrible. People immigrate to America to escape that. Europeans set up social welfare in their own countries and STOP emigrating to America in any numbers. Latinos haven't set it up well in theirs, and still pour into America. In other words, the reality is that socialism never had anything to do with people leaving Europe or Latin America to come to the USA. The come because of poverty in systems that are not and never were socialist. Once countries become "socialist" or at least erect social welfare, the mass emigration stops. People prefer to remain at home.
I don't. The only thing I do say is that we ought to emulate the French health insurance system, because that is the closest to ours, in terms of being insurance (as opposed to the direct provision of care), and because the doctors are independent, and because France has a very high quality medical treatment standard, on a par with ours. They have single payer. Essentially, the French have US Medicare, but it covers everybody. THAT is what we SHOULD do. Be done with Medicaid, and with private insurers and pools and that nonsense. Extend Medicare to cover everybody, just as it covers the over-65s now. Increase taxes to pay for it, and have done with it. What I say is that we should put the limits in our laws that are in the laws of God. Unpayable debts need to be dischargeable. We've done the opposite.
Especially those who think lazy non working people need to have the same kind of Healthcare that decent working people have. Sounds like they have bought into the crap taught in American schools nowadays, "You're special" even though they aren't... Health disasters can strike anybody and wipe them out, and make them unable to work. But yes, since you put it in precisely those terms, then the answer, precisely in those terms, is that lazy non-working people need to have the same health care coverage that decent working people have. Their kids also need an education. The economy will certainly apply all the judgment you like when it comes to where they live, what they have, whether they are able to drive at all, what their clothes look like, that they never get to go on vacations, that they have no entertainment - you can be sure not to subsidize any of that. But you cannot let them suffer and die for want of care. And you cannot let them starve for want of food, or freeze for want of basic shelter. And you cannot deprive their kids of an education in order to punish the parent. If you think we should, then there's nowhere to go but to have a battle over it, and it will be decided by power. Actually, it already has been decided by power. We have a social safety net, and we're not taking it away. The Christian logic of the social safety net means that we're going to strengthen it. So I guess you're going to pass the remainder of your life bitterly hating the system under which you live. Even as you enter your final illness, protected from hunger by Social Security and receiving you care through government payment (Medicare) you'll still hate the system. Hate away. You'll never change it. The majority of people understand what has to be done. The biggest waste in government is not in social safety net. It's in the overseas military empire. Want to focus on something worthless that should be ended? Focus on THAT.
You didn't respond to my point re: Denmark, Norway, Sweden being much smaller countries than the US and not having the world policeman obligations that the US has. Although France is larger (65 million), it is nowhere near the population of the 300 plus million in the US. Plus France does not have the US illegal immigration problem. (They import Muslims, but AFAIK they are doing so legally). So once again: How do you take a already financially underwater Medicare system and ADD clients to it - WITHOUT a corresponding reduction in other US expenditures. (Note: I'm not arguing whether we should or shouldn't reduce the US footprint around the world. I'm just saying it's not going to happen. Ahh, doctors. And nurses, PA's, etc. Professionals that are required to provide that "free" healthcare that everyone seems to want. Have you been to a waiting room recently? Wait long? And that's with our current system. My wife is in the medical field - will probably be retiring next year. People are GETTING OUT of the field. Without anything else changing, wait times are only going to get worse. What's going to happen when the system is flooded with NEW clients? It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce a doctor (Med school expenses, etc.) Who is going to pay that? If you say "private", will a doctor come out of school that deep in debt and be willing to work for government wages? Will he/she be willing to be a gov't slave (after all, if it's my "right" to have free healthcare, someone has to be forced to provide my "right.") Right? If you say public funding, that's just going to add to an already unfathomable debt. I don't know anything about the French standard, so all I'll say is the US is probably near or at the top in the world (as to medical breakthroughs, technology, R&D, etc.) I can personally attest to that, having had a quadruple bypass 10 years ago and still being here to tell about it. Again all that sounds very nice - but refer to the counter-points I made earlier. As much as Socialists and Statists wish it were otherwise, there is still this thing called "supply and demand". They cannot pass a law to repeal it. Yes, the gov't can provide "free" healthcare to everyone - just as it could provide free Cadillacs to everyone. But what good is it if I go down to the Cadillac store, find a line ten miles long (everyone wants their free Cadillac, doncha know), and am told I have to wait 10 years for mine? I want it NOW! That's a silly example - here's a better one. In April of 2005, I was experiencing shortness of breath. No pains or anything, just that. That was on a Friday. On Monday, I had an angiogram; on Tuesday I had open heart surgery. Argue all day long about the pros and cons of Zero Care, single payer, yada yada yada. All I can say is - if we had one of those systems in place then instead of the system that WAS in place, I probably wouldn't be here. We've discussed Theocracies ad infinitum. The only thing our corrupt (and yes, evil) current government is going to do about "the laws of God" is laugh at them.
I did, but I did so in my own way. Now I will respond directly and clearly, so that it isn't left vague. The Nordic countries physically comprise vast territory, much of it quite difficult. They have a smaller population than the US as a whole, but each of the Nordic countries has the same population as major US states. There Scandinavian system is scalable. The second part of what you said is indeed a key difference, but I need to correct your language. The US does not have world policeman obligations. We are not obligated to be the world's policeman. We have arrogated that role unto ourselves, we do it badly, at enormous expense to ourselves, and the money we waste on those inappropriate activities does indeed go missing where we need it to invest in our own people. Empire has never worked well in the long run for any country. You get to be "great" - whatever that means - but "great" doesn't matter. And the price of the "greatness" is to hollow out and ultimately be worse off for it. England ended up impoverished by her empire. Spain fell from number one nation to a 300-year also-ran because she ate up her seed corn trying to maintain an empire. The USSR imploded because of an obsession for spending prodigious sums on a vast, unusable military. And the US has spent trillions to establish and try to maintain an empire that is a pure drain on American lives, limbs and resources. We have no "world policeman obligation". The obligation does not exist. We have operated under the fantasy that it does, and that we "must", but it doesn't, and we cannot afford it. Sooner or later, we will give up the empire. If we were intelligent, we would give it up willingly, and rather quickly. The sooner we stanch the bleeding, the quicker our finances will improve. But if we're stubborn and persuade ourselves that we "must" maintain our imperial role, then we will continue to do as we've done since 1946: go into debt to maintain an oversized military deployed all over the world, and then lose wars because we cannot politically bring our forces to bear. The string of defeats since World War II is stunning - China in 1949, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Somalia, and now Afghanistan and Iraq. I do not speak of defeat as a boardgamer might, looking at some rulebook - I speak in real terms: when you are the sole nuclear power and you lose most of an army and get driven halfway out of a country (Korea), you have been defeated. When you invade a country, overthrow its government, lose control of the political situation, and end up with a new government that is aligned with your worst enemy in the region, and that cannot control its own borders against the worst sorts of threats (I speak of Iraq), you have been defeated. When you invade and sit, at enormous expense, and know you have to be there forever because as soon as you leave the place will revert to the same people you drove out (Afghanistan), you have opened a permanent bleeding abscess on your body politic, out of which your money will drain forever, until you admit defeat and withdraw. And the more stubborn you are about refusing to admit defeat, the worse damage you inflict on yourself. So right here, in this military empire, this role as world policeman, we have identified THE key area where the money is, was, and has been, to fund the social safety net. You ask where we would get the money to do what we ought to do, and there is your answer: we will fund a proper social safety net by ending the US world empire, bringing home the armed forces, deeply cutting the now unnecessary excess forces (and placing the remainder on the Mexican Border to stop the illegal flow of aliens and drugs), and using all of that cost savings to quickly balance the budget. With a balanced budget, and a tax code that is properly structured, the money that formerly went to the twin drains of empire and debt interest will be freed to more rapidly retire debt, and then ultimately to improve the social safety net.
The US illegal immigration "problem" is in fact US government POLICY. The Democrats have a policy of ignoring the Border because their future permanent electoral majority is immigrating across it. The Republicans ignore the border because their crony capitalist alphas love that cheap exploitable labor. So, yes, we have "illegal" immigration, but in truth that is the result of the intentional policy decisions of both political parties. The de jure policy of the US is controlled immigration. The de facto policy of the US is open immigration, and that is by design, not by accident.
I repeat: you reduce the US footprint, or the United States destroys itself. We are insolvent. We will go bankrupt. Rather, we will print money to pay, and the dollar will turn into the lira. We will have less and less real purchasing power, and even the things we do now will turn to dung. We will become what Spain became when they went broke, and then proceed to become what Greece is. So, you are saying (probably correctly) that it's not going to happen: the US is not going to give up on Empire. Given that, then the discussion of everything is moot. That means that the United States will suffer the fate of Greece and the Soviet Union. We will economically collapse from the weight of empire, in time, and enter into a period of severe decline, poverty and desperation that, if history is a guide, will last for a century or more. Given that, the thing to be doing is looking around the world for a place to emigrate to, and learning the language. Fact is, if we will not change our course as a nation and give up the drug of empire, we're a dead nation walking anyway, so there's no point in talking about internal policies, because it's just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
When I wrote obligations I should have put it in quotes (" "). I actually agree with what you wrote.
My wife is in the medical field - will probably be retiring next year. People are GETTING OUT of the field. Without anything else changing, wait times are only going to get worse. What's going to happen when the system is flooded with NEW clients? It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce a doctor (Med school expenses, etc.) Who is going to pay that? If you say "private", will a doctor come out of school that deep in debt and be willing to work for government wages? Will he/she be willing to be a gov't slave (after all, if it's my "right" to have free healthcare, someone has to be forced to provide my "right.") Right? If you say public funding, that's just going to add to an already unfathomable debt. ... I don't know anything about the French standard, so all I'll say is the US is probably near or at the top in the world (as to medical breakthroughs, technology, R&D, etc.) I can personally attest to that, having had a quadruple bypass 10 years ago and still being here to tell about it. Let me tell you about the way the French do it, then, because it is instructive, and because it is the ONE model that was NOT discussed in all of the hoo-hah over Obamacare. Our pundits and pols discussed the Canadian model and the British model, the German model and even the Cuban model, but not the French. This is not odd. There are two very good reasons to not discuss the French model if you're a US pol: #1 It has a comparable rate of invention, long term survival from serious disease and quality of care as our own. It is in truth the only overall advanced research and care comparable to the USA. All of the other systems provide basic care to the masses, but when people need sophisticated procedures, they go to the US or France. France and the US are the only two "top tier" research countries for medicine that actually APPLY their discoveries to patient care. So, when comparing quality at the top end , where things are really difficult and invention is required, every other system in the world is an also-ran compared to the United States and France. They're the only two on the top tier of the pyramid. So, why don't politicians mention that, then? Because it's FRANCE. Think about what it would mean, politically, to focus on FRANCE as a model for the US. Americans will tolerate hearing about Germany, and Britain, maybe Canada, maybe Scandinavia or Japan. But the notion of focusing on FRANCE - that specific country - as having something to teach us - THAT would be politically unpopular. Really unpopular. Americans really hate France. They hate the French. They resent them. American politicians are Americans, and the notion of putting FRANCE up as the prime example of something to be emulated is a political no-go, even though they are the only other country in the world with a health care system equal to the US in quality, and a much better financing system. #2 French health insurance, and education, and research, is socialist. The best structured health care system in the world is a case study in the success of socialist principles carefully and intelligently applied in a moderate free country. French health care is as good as American, and better than anywhere else in the world, and French health care finance is better than the American system, and it's socialist. Which means that for health care, socialism is demonstrably, real-word superior to free market capitalism. Which is why no American politician ever uses France as the model EVEN THOUGH France is the only country that is at the top tier of research and treatment, alongside America. The French success at this proves too much. The American insurance interests driving the structure of the American health insurance debate want the financing to remain private so they can skim massive profits from it. But the very REASON that French health care is of equal quality (and SPEED) as American, is because all of the profiteering of middlemen: health insurers, medical schools, malpractice insurers, lawyers, billing agencies - is all cut out of it, which frees up all of those wasted resources for health care itself, as opposed to administering the payment of health care. It's a huge advantage. Also, the French system is really expensive. It's twice as expensive per capita as the British system. It's more expensive than all of the others except the American. Quality health care delivered fast, when you need it, is expensive. Research is expensive. It's still only about 2/3rds as expensive as the American system, but the titanic savings that can be projected from going to a more centrally controlled, rigid system with rationing such as other countries have are not there with the French system. You get what you pay for, and the French pay a lot, in taxes, for health care. But they pay a lot less than Americans, because Americans also pay profit margins to everybody ELSE in the US system. So, let's get granular and look at the differences between the US and French system. Let's start with the doctors. Just as in the US, French doctors have to go through medical school. It's grueling and competitive. The comparison ends there. For in France, medical school is socialized. There are medical schools at various universities around the country. The French who want to become doctors take a national exam that specifically tests their knowledge of the various sciences necessary for medical school. There are a certain number of seats in the medical schools across the country. Let's say there are 2000 seats. The top 2000 finishers on the exam get the first choice at those seats. Unfilled seats move down the chart. Nobody cares what your race is. Nobody cares that you do charitable work. Nobody cares about your extracurriculars. Nobody cares about you. Where you finished on an objective, competitive exam that tests the specific scientific knowledge required for medical school determines whether or not you go to medical school. How well you finish determines where in the pecking order you get your pick. The number one finisher can go anywhere. The number 2000th (in our example) gets the last seat and moves there. Medical school is free. University in France is free, and medical school is university. (The same is true of veterinary school.) Sure, you have to pay for your room and board, but if you stay in the dorms that's really cheap, and if you come from a poor family or are alone and CAN'T pay it, then you are eligible for welfare and you get welfare money to pay it. Nobody graduates from French medical school with a student loan debt. This makes a huge difference in the career of doctors. American doctors start out with a terrible debt burden which they must pay, which restricts what they can reasonably decide to do. The best place to learn most medicine is in active hospitals, but hospital internships and staff positions don't pay. Second difference: in France, a very large number of the hospitals are state- owned and operated. These are not for-profit institutions. More socialism. Also, in France, the key research institutions, such as the Louis Pasteur institute, were founded by and are operated by the government. Contrast with the US. Medical schools at places like Yale and Harvard and Johns Hopkins are private, and students incur heavy debt to go. Hospitals are largely private. Research institutions are private. So, young American doctors are crippled with debt, and many need to go into private practice as soon as possible to clear that off. But private practice carries with it additional burdens: the necessity of running the BUSINESS of a private practice (which is not taught in medical school), and the huge cost of malpractice insurance. In France, the legal system is very standardized. Civil trials do not have juries. They have panels of expert judges. This means that French medical liability trials are very predictable. Doctors who err have to pay restitution and damages, but they are in reasonable amounts, and comparable between cases. Net result: French doctors carry malpractice insurance, but it is a fraction of the cost of the US. Also, young doctors in France tend to like to start their careers in the public hospitals, as public doctors, earning reasonable (not extravagant) salaries and getting tremendous experience. Many stay for whole careers. Others with a research bent migrate into the research institutions. Still others, when they are older and more experienced, go into private practice, either established practices or their own. Walk into a US doctor's office, and you will be struck by the large staff, most of which is devoted to billing. Walk into a French doctor's office, and you will be struck with the fact that there's usually a secretary or two, and medical personnel. Why? Because in the US, the DOCTOR has to struggle with health insurers, etc. But in France, the patients pay the doctors cash and then submit the bill to the Social Security medical insurance for reimbursement. It all goes to a single payer, and the SECU pays the patient directly. This is a more efficient system for doctors, who do not have massive staffs and payrolls to get paid. For really expensive things, like cancer treatments, there is a pre-payment system from the state, and really poor people also can get pre-payment. But most people pay the doctors and then are reimbursed. When you put these overlapping pieces together, you find that socialized medical education, socialized hospitals, socialized research institutions, a rational legal system that produces consistent, predictable results, and a single payer health insurance structure (with patient co-pay) produces the same quality of care in France for about 2/3rds of the cost as in America. In France, there is no greater wait for medical care than in the US. From a patient insurance perspective, everybody in the US over 65 already has a sort of French-style health insurance. Medicare is government insurance, and it pays about 80%. But the French socialized manner of training doctors, operating hospitals and research facilities, operating the single payer, and maintaining a severe, regular, predictable legal system provides the same level of care as in the US, with similar waits (no rationing) for 1/3 less cost. So, why don't we ever look at THAT model? Because it vindicates socialism. That's why.
Assuming your facts are correct (not saying they're not, mind you) you present a good case for the French system, I'll have to admit. But it IS French (just kidding). Perhaps there is a bias however against anything French. I'm also going to quote one of your paragraphs as to why (besides being French) it would have a difficult (perhaps impossible) chance of getting traction here in the US. Hint: Has to do with the fact 99.9 percent of law MAKERS are LAWYERS. And the American Bar Association lobby is one of the biggest contributors to democrats. In other words, don't look for anything to change that would negatively affect the pocketbooks of lawyers. BTW, I'm pinging a few others whose opinions I respect (I'm probably leaving some out - sorry). Let's see what others think.
You're right about the lawyers. I'm a US lawyer and a French lawyer - got my US law degree from Columbia and my French degree from the Sorbonne. I always tell people that if I were innocent of a crime, I would want to be tried in France, because the chance of ever even being tried for it is so remote. Before they bring a case, they have to have already proven it on the facts before a judge. The whole notion of "let the trier of fact decide", make an accusation and throw shit against the wall to see if the jury buys it - not there in France. So if I were innocent, that is the place I'd rather be. If I were guilty, I'd rather be tried here. Here, a strong legal team can suppress the most condemning of evidence. Here, the old "razzle-dazzle" works charms. You're right that the American Bar will never permit meaningful legal reform, just as you're right that the US isn't going to give up the Empire. And given those two things, coupled with crony capitalism, there is no real hope for this land. We mass murder babies and won't stop. Doomed and damned. You should be looking back at the lands of your origins. Your ancestors left because they were bad, then. But they are probably better now.
Why not? If they don't care why should the rest of us "be forced" to care about them?? Oh wait never mind I just remembered it's all about destroying this country and pandering for votes for loser politicians.. Just remember the politicians don't care about anybody but themselves, and yes that means YOU too!!! I hate what it has become not what it used to be. Which meant if you weren't responsible and didn't pay into it you weren't able to use it. Now I realize there are some people who were never able to work because of physical or mental issues and I don't have a problem with those people being part of the system, there numbers are small. It the ones that are useless on purpose that I have an issue with and if you don't too then you're just as bad as they are!!! Oh by the way I'll probably never see a single cent from any of those programs I'm 95% sure they will tell me I make too much on my retirement(s). Nice try though... I think those that died rescuing the French from themselves might disagree with that... It's about doing our duty.
Those who died don't have an opinion: they're dead. Those still alive are all on Medicare and Social Security, so they already live on the "French System", and none of them would part with it.
Seems the French figured out tort reform. Like you said, we are ruled and robbed by lawyers. Won't happen here. Medical malpractice suits here in the US reaps big bucks. Most don't see the inside of a court room. Most hospitals today are large corporate structures. For example, here in central Texas there used to be 4 independent hospitals. Now all 4 are under the same umbrella and part of the Baylor health care system. Almost makes getting a second opinion pointless. And they have to consolidate into these big "medical corporations" because of medical malpractice insurance sky rocketing costs. So now under these larger medical corporations, most malpractice suits are settled out of court. They figure that is most cost effective. For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.---John 1:17
So you don't believe in heaven huh??? I've been there before and saw nothing special about the place, just another European country where a whole lot of the people have no hope except for the handouts they get... I'd bet some of the victims would disagree and would rather have a chance to better themselves instead of living on handouts all their lives!!! It wasn't really tort reform. It was a product of history. Before the Revolution, France was an absolute monarchy. The judges were appointed by the King (and removable by the King also). They had broad powers of discretion like American judges, to decide cases both "at law", meaning according to the written statutes and decrees, and also "at equity" meaning "to do justice". The US legal system, coming from England, had (and still has) the same division between the concept of "law", which is to say, statutes ratified by parliament or administrative decrees, and "equity", which is to say judicial opinions and judge-made law, Indeed, historically in England, and in the USA, and in France before the Revolution, the "Common Law" WAS mostly judge-made law. In America, the power of judge made law is reflected in everything: Roe v Wade, Kelo, Marbury v. Madison - all of the great Supreme Court decisions that establish what the Constitution MEANS - that is judge made law. Traditional tort law is almost entirely judge made. As the Revolution broke out in France, the power of the King was severely repressed, but the judges, appointed by the King, continued to issue judicial opinions that sought to moderate the decrees of the revolutionary councils. For example, the property seizures, by revolutionary decree, of the aristocracy who fled the country were reversed by judges on equitable grounds. The revolutionaries roared that these nobles fleeing the country were going abroad to organize royalist forces to invade France and destroy the Revolution (which was true for the most part), and that therefore the fact of being an aristocrat emigre was itself proof of treason, and warranted the complete seizure of all property and assets. The judges said no, not without a trial. Things came to a head during the Reign of Terror, when the King himself attempted to flee, was executed instead, and those émigrés all around invaded France from every side. Robespierre was head of the government, a lawyer (the first, and last, lawyer in French history until Sarkozy to be a lawyer. The French have never trusted lawyers with politics, and the Terror, and what happened to the judicial system as a result, is one of the key historical reasons why. The Revolutionary Councils concluded, and the Assemblee decreed, by written statute, that in France, all equitable power was stripped from the judges. All judges were removed from office as royalists (and many were executed). Thereafter the judge was a civil servant, hired and moving up ranks. The Judiciary has no independent power of equity. Specifically, there is no power of what we call "judicial review" (this is also true, in principle, in England when it comes to acts of Parliament). The famous French legal phrase is "The judge is nothing more than the mouth that pronounces the words of the law." And the law originates exclusively in the legislature. The judiciary is an administrative branch to faithfully, and to the letter, execute the will of the legislature. It has no will of its own. It was (and still is) a crucial offense for a judge in France to cite to a judicial opinion as the basis for his decision, for that is "equity" and judges have no power to have opinions. It is a criminal offense for a French judge to exercise, or attempt to exercise, direct equitable powers. They may cite exclusively to the statutes themselves. Thus, French legal decisions (never "opinions", only "decisions" or "decrees") are very short. Usually they read like this: GIVEN Article III section 2 of the Civil Code, which reads thus, ______, and GIVEN Article IV, Section 5(B)(3) of the Code of judicial procedure, which reads thus _____,, The facts being that Mme. Pinel sought dental services from Dentist Jambres for an abscessed tooth, Dentist Jambres treated the abscessed tooth, the abscess continued and the tooth was ultimately lost, that experts Jacques and Timbrel determined that the tooth was lost due to improper medical treatment, now therefore Dentist Jambres is liable for the loss of the tooth, and is directed to pay Mme Pinel the price of the tooth replacement, 1000 Euros, as well as the lost wages for Mne. Pinel's absence from work, and [fixed ant] for her pain and suffering. The bailiff will impose this order. Signatures. That's it. Judges have no power at all to review the law itself. They have no power to strike down any law, or any act of government. The role of the judge is to pronounce the law, which is exclusively handed down by the Legislature. Judges are not entitled to their own opinions about the law, it is illegal for them to impose their opinions in judicial opinions. During the Revoltution, judges who attempted to insert equity in their decisions were arrested, tried and imprisoned. The judiciary exists to execute the will of the Legistlature. There is a Constitutional Council which can give advisory opinions regarding the constitutionality of laws. It has no power to review laws. Rather, the Legislature or the President may, before the law is put into force, ask that the law be reviewed. if thee Constitutional Council finds the law unconstitutional, the Legislature will take that into consideration as it pleases. It may, if it decides, impose the law anyway. So, the French "tort reform' was really a product of the struggles of the Revolution. And the real "reform" in truth, is that the Judiciary is not an independent branch of government in the sense that it is in America. It is as administrative agency charged with enfacing the laws passed by the Legislature as written. Also, cases are decided by panels of three judges, which means that no single judge can slip in his idea of equity. The result is a system that is very predictable. The result is also a system in which there is no recluse in court against laws of the government itself. In fact, in France, there IS no recourse against the government at all, other than the ballot box Iformally) or to go into the streets (informally). The French do both, readily. It's not our system. From the perspective of tort law and malpractice, it makes France a reliable place to do business, and in particular to practice medicine. Of course French justice has its shortcomings, just as ours does. They just don't come to bear much in medical tort.
In the afterlife people have a different perspective, and are not engaged in the transient politics of our world. You say there is nothing special about France? Well, that is true of anyplace. But the French are not living on handouts. They're working people, as are most people in the world. They work, they pay taxes, they derive benefits from those taxes. There is not a difference in kind between France and here, only in terms of degree and quality of what one is gotten. Had you become ill when you are there, you would have been impressed by the quality of care, and by the fact that it did not cost you a lot of money. The things we have spoken of here are the reasons why that is. I myself find France to be a particularly nice place to live. The food is good, the services are good, and the people are well educated, and enjoy discussion and debate. Ethnically, the French and the Irish are the same basic Celtic stock, but the French live in a much richer country with a long heritage of glory and development. So those Irish traits of musicality, argumentativeness, and generally being gold folks largely inhere in the French, but with a lot of sophistication. An Irishman's prickliness is expressed as a brawl. The French drink more than the Irish, and their prickliness, that same Celtic hot head, expresses itself in haughtiness. But the same love of music and company and good time and food for which the Irish are famous is what makes France France. The French have that Celtic madness for music and culture and food and fun, they just have a much bigger country with a lot more money and much better weather to do it in. France is what happens when the Irish win the lottery. Now you're going to tell me you were to Ireland too and didn't like it either. A chaqu'un, ses gouts.
Lets see unemployment rate there is over 10% and has been for quite sometime. So I wonder how those who are chronically unemployed feel about the lack of chances for them to better themselves??? If they are that educated they why do they vote for their own demise??? Last President they elected decided he was going to double down on stupid with his tax policies... (Which causes more people to be unemployed). I admit the countryside is very nice and a fun place to run around in/visit but not a place to make a "good living"... And no I didn't make it to Ireland or Wales for that matter even though I lived in England. Most of the places I went stretched from England all the way over to Eastern Turkey and as far south as Sudan, altogether about 20 countries. If they are that educated they why do they vote for their own demise??? Last President they elected decided he was going to double down on stupid with his tax policies... (Which causes more people to be unemployed). I admit the countryside is very nice and a fun place to run around in/visit but not a place to make a "good living"... And no I didn't make it to Ireland or Wales for that matter even though I lived in England. Most of the places I went stretched from England all the way over to Eastern Turkey and as far south as Sudan, altogether about 20 countries. Unemployment statistics are apples to oranges. The definitions of the labor force are different. This matters because it's the denominator of the unemployment rate. The bigger the labor force, the smaller the measures unemployment rate for the same number of people out of work. Example: 10 people are out of work in a town. If the town has a labor force of 100, that's a 10% unemployment rate. If it has a labor force of 200, that's a 5% rate. In both cases, there are 10 people unemployed, but the bigger the denominator, the lower the rate. In the US, the labor force is composed of people 16 years old and up. In France, the labor force is composed of people 15 years old and up. What's the difference? Well, in the US, there are about 4.2 million 15 year olds, about 1.3% of the population. And of course teenagers everywhere have a high unemployment rate. So, in the US, the number of unemployed is reduced by ignoring the the large number of teenagers who are unemployed. In France, 15 year-olds are in the workforce, and mostly unemployed, which raises the unemployment figure by that number. In the US, the military is included in the labor force: its numbers go into the denominator. In France, the draft military was not included in the work force, reducing the size of the denominator. When France went away from the draft, the work force increased, but the number of unemployed also increased, as the military was no longer employing people. Critically in terms of both the numerator and the denominator, in France, adults who are unemployed and only passively looking for work are considered unemployed. But in the US, "discouraged workers" are neither considered employed nor part of the work force. This makes American unemployment look smaller than it is, because the long term unemployed cease to be considered unemployed. Also, in the US, if you worked one day during the past two weeks, you are "employed". In France, small part time jobs are not considered employment. The US does publish an official unemployment statistic that partially offsets these differences because it includes so-called "discouraged workers" in the work force. This is the "U-6" unemployment figure. This is the closest approximation of the regular unemployment statistics published by France. Of course, there are still the differences between the age of inclusion in the US work force versus the French. Using the U-6 number, the current unemployment rate in the US is 10.8%. The unemployment rate in France is 10.3%. The "official" US Unemployment Rate is the U-3, but that ignores discouraged workers. It is a deceptive number. To compare US to French unemployment, you have to use the US U-6 rate, as that is much closer to the French official definition of unemployment (and even then, the French definition of unemployment and labor force is more inclusive - this is because politically in the US the government has a strong incentive to underestimate the unemployment rate, but in France, there is quite a bit of incentive to include all of it, as that then justifies the sort of state action that the French government loves to do). If we look back over the past several years, we find this: January 2010, French Unemployment: 9.4%/ US U-6 unemployment: 16.7% January 2102. French: 9.3% US: 15.1% January 2013: French: 10.1% US: 14.1% Jan 2014: France 9.4% US: 12.2% Today: France 10.3% US: 10.8%. In other words, your government has handed you a bill of goods, year after year. They have told you that unemployment in America is much lower than it really is. And then, when making the comparisons with foreign countries, they have told you that the US is much better off, because the politicians are comparing the US U-3 rate with the foreign rates, which are roughly the equivalent of the U-6 rate. Truth is, American unemployment has been consistently higher than French unemployment for a long time. Another truth: French employment is stable. Labor protections make layoffs very difficult. The net result is that in economic hard times, French shareholders take a serious cut in dividends, because the French companies cannot cut their work forces. That, in turn, means that French unemployment does not balloon up much, except among the young, who have greater difficulty finding first jobs. In France, unemployment is a phenomenon of teenagers and young people out of college. In the US, it is a phenomenon of middle aged people laid off because they became "too expensive", in a downturn. Of course, in the US, that means that the unemployment and welfare rolls expand dramatically, and that increases the budget deficit and the social unrest. In France, people stay employed, generally, during downturns. Young people have difficulty getting the first permanent job, and the budget does not balloon out of control due to huge unemployment and welfare payments. France and the US have each made a choice. There is no question at all that shareholders, the propertied class, earn a lot more money in the US than in France, for when the French economy contracts, the dividends are cut because workers cannot be. In the US, the workers are cut - and thrown upon the backs of the taxpayers - but the shareholders still get their dividends at a higher level. It's a choice. I personally think the French have made a more moral choice, that is less disruptive of lives: when middle aged people with children lose their job it is a calamity. When already-rich people get fewer dividends in a downturn, it is not a calamity - it's simply the risk of investment. In point of fact, the chronically unemployed are COUNTED in France, and they are the young. Eventually they do all find work. In the US, they are the older workers, and they don't even continue to get counted in the statistics. Truth is, unemployment in France is lower than in the US, and has been for a long time, and the French have much more stable lives because their employment is stable. Truth also is that your US government has so utterly manipulated the statistics, and used the differences between US and foreign unemployment to "prove" a point, that it is very difficult to get Americans to look at the actual composition of the numbers to realize they've been lied to for a very long time. So, you see, when you say that the French vote for their own demise, in point of fact, it is the Americans who vote for their own demise. The French are educated enough - and practical enough - and belligerent enough - to know that the bottom line is that middle class people with families must have work, and they must have steady work during those long critical years of raising families and moving towards retirement, and that in order to have that stability, and not have people on the welfare rolls, the employers' liberty to easily fire people must be curtailed. So that's what they've done. Truth is, because Americans are not as well educated, they do not discern the degree to which their government has defrauded them and lied to them, given them half-truths about their unemployment and economic circumstances. As far as a "good living" goes, more hard truths. In France, education, medical care and retirement are all government benefits. Taxes are over 50% of income. "Outrageous!" so many Americans will say. But now look very hard at the American situation. The American pays about 35% of his income in taxes - income tax, social security, state taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, etc. The French, about 53%. But again, that is apples to oranges. To correctly compare, you must ALSO take the money the American spends on student loans and college savings, AND the total that the American spends on health insurance and health care, AND the amount that the American spends on 401(k) and IRA and other retirement accounts. Then add that to the 35% the American spends on taxes. You will discover that you spend about 67% of your income to get the services that the French get from their government for 55% of their income. And, worse for you, YOUR medical benefits and retirement accounts are provided by your employer, which makes you dependent on your employer for them. Middle aged people in America lose their jobs far more than in France. In France, these are government-provided services, which means that you get them regardless of your employer or employment status. The American is far less secure, and he pays far more money for the "privilege". The difficulty in discussing these things with Americans is that Americans are like Muslims. They are just so absolutely CERTAIN of their belief systems regarding their economy and their "way", that they really can't seem to open their eyes to SEE, and to realize that the things they are told about the outside world are often false. France has its problems, as do all lands. It is far from perfect. But for middle class people, in particular, France is a better place to live, economically speaking, than in the United States. This is also true for very poor people. Very poor people in France have health care and access to education (everywhere in the civilized world has basic poverty relief). The people who are way ahead in America are the super-rich. They pay remarkably lower taxes in America, and have concentrated in their own hands a remarkably high percentage of the national wealth. And whereas in France the government moves through taxation to redistrubte excessive wealth concentration, in the US the super-rich buy the politicians to ensure that never happens, and then teach nonsense about how places like France and Scandinavia are spilling over with the unemployed, the systems are falling apart, etc. Truth is, American unemployment has been higher than French unemployment for years. And French health care has better results than US health care (the French live longer and lose fewer babies), for 45% of the cost. And French people are far less likely to be murdered than Americans. And the French are better educated, because university is free. And the French have less debt, because they don't have student loans. The greatest proof of the relative state of affairs? White French women have more babies, per capita, than White American women now. In France, the support networks are in place for people to feel secure enough to have babies. In the US that is systematically being lost. More truths: So, France has a better economic system for the middle class than America. That's great, for the French, but even if acknowledged, so what? Americans can't just move there. What can we do, in our own country, to make things better for us? We can't just copy the French, they have a a very different history than we do. What can WE do? That's another discussion, for another time.
And voting for handouts... So we've caught up to the chronic unemployment problems of the socialist/fascist/communist countries around the world by adopting the same type of government they have, imagine that!! I just can't imagine how people are just so happy not being able to better themselves cause their government wishes otherwise... It's a lot easier (takes less education and work ethic from politicians/rulers/dictators) to take from those that try than it is to enable the whole population of the country to better itself... Same stupid system that's been prevalent throughout the globe for centuries that only benefits the ruling class. Wouldn't it just be easier for you to admit you're alright with that instead of writing a book??? No, because it isn't true at all. It's a fable that folks like you make up. America has had higher unemployment and worse lives for its people for a long, long time, and it isn't because we're "socialist". It' because we have allowed a nobility to run away with the government and use the legal system to take all of the wealth for themselves. And folks with your mindset have been supine in front of it, fighting against ghosts that don't exist and daggers of the mind. Things don't suck because people like are realistic and want to build insurance into the social fabric. They suck because people like you have no discernment whatever, call insurance "communism", call suffering "laziness", and then reflexively oppose everything EXCEPT that which scrapes away your wealth into the pockets of fewer and fewer. You won't open your eyes, and you won't learn anything. So you're designed to crash. I would avoid that, but you would rather crash and burn than change you mind. And there are more of you than me.
When you see it on a daily basis what else would you call it??? Isn't that what you're pushing?? A system where you can't escape from the ruling class, they tell you how/when and with what dirty rag you get to wipe your ass with?? So in essence you are saying the ruling class of France (and other schitthole countries) has learned giving back some crumbs is better than keeping it all for themselves, fewer of "their subjects" will want to rise up and whack them!! Guess that's also why they can't defend themselves anymore the people don't really care... How's that for social fabric?? America has not won a war since 1945. American was attacked directly in its capital and in its major city. It has been at war for 14 years and has not won. In fact, the US looks quite a bit like the USSR in Afghanistan. America failed to defend itself on 9/11, and has failed to defeat the enemy that attacked it, and is in fact being defeated by the Muslim radicals all over the world. We've lost Libya. We've effectively lost Egypt. We've lost Iraq. We hold the bases on which we sit in Afghanistan, and nothing else. We've lost Yemen. We lost in Somalia. The Chinese are overrunning the China seas. The Castros beat us: we're normalizing relations and Fidel is still alive, his family still in power. The Russians won in the Crimea, and the Russians won in Syria: Obama drew his red line, Assad didn't really cross it but US intelligence pretended he did, and the USA backed down before the Russians - we did not dare take on their puppet. The Ukraine turned into a fiasco for us. And America is being overrun by illegal aliens from within. So yeah, tell me again how great America is at defending itself. Your history book seems to have had "The End" written in it on VJ Day. Since then, we've lost everything and everywhere, and the losses are accelerating and the enemy getting bolder. You think there's a difference between us and Europe? Well, there is. We've faded faster and farther. In places like Scandinavia and most of France, thanks to the social safety net, WHITE people are actually having babies again. In America? Nope. That's "handouts". So you just hand the country and the culture over to the Hispanics. Yeah, you're REALLY "defending" the US. Not. Demography is destiny. The people who are on the ground are the people who will BE the future, and right now, the only white people anywhere who are actually increasing in number, or at least stopping the decline, are Swedes and Danes and the French. That's it. These "handouts" and "socialism" and all of the other clown words you use to describe economic structures that allow for the cooperation and survival of the race itself exist in Scandinavia and in France, and so those populations, alone in the white world, seem to have broken out of the demographic tailspin. In 30 years the French will outnumber the Germans and be the dominant power in Western Europe, again. And this PRECISELY BECAUSE OF the "socialst" "handout" policies that, actually, in the REAL WORLD, make it possible for white middle class women to have babies in reasonable conditions and raise them, so they do. In America, you reject any notion of a social structure that covers the cost of having children. So you don't have them. And you are handing your country over to Mexicans instead. Real good strategy there, ace. How's that going to be working out for you when you're in your old age. Social insurance and understanding that all people - especially people with children - have fundamental needs that are expensive at that government of, by and for the people exists to SERVE the people by subdizing those things that are to expensive in the aggregate for individual families to bear, but that MUST BE PRESENT for middle class people to be willing to have babies at all. THAT is what certain European countries are doing - and they're the only ones who have reversed the white birth rate death spiral. Know why France lost World War II? Because they were outnumbered and divided among themselves. Your hatred for your fellow Americans is the norm. Americans hate each other. And so they refuse to provide the social supports that ALL families need. And so American whites don't breed, and the country is being conquered by Mexicans. Divided, you fall. 100 years from now, France and Scandinavia will be the dominant regions of the white world. Because they are the only places where people like their fellow citizens enough to be able to cooperate with them to make it possible for white middle class people to have babies. You hate the whole idea of supports for that. And so your country and culture are doomed to die. You've chosen a poisonous political model that is failing before your eyes, and you will defend it to the death. So do so, and die. And where you stand in 100 years will be Spanish speaking, because your culture was too stubborn and selfish to be able to sustain itself. Demography is destiny. Your system cuts off reproduction. Therefore, it is doomed. The future of the white world belongs to France, Scandinavia and maybe Russia. In America, it belongs to the Catholics, of whatever race, because white Catholics and Hispanic Catholics and Filipino Catholics and Black Catholics get along just fine. The other groups don't have anything that unifies them, they all hate each other, and they're dying out. So, I'd say the future is pretty bright for people who think like the French, the Scandinavians and Pope Francis. And the Russians may be coming around. America is sunk, because it's filled with people like you: people who have lived long enough to know better, but who keep on engaging in fantasy history, fantasy economics, and base their politics on myths. And who are in fact really dying out, and really belng replaced in the land…and who, seeing this, blame phantoms that don't exist, like "socialism". Rage away in your fever swamp. I'm done with it. Your cause is doomed, because it is dumb. Your numbers are dwindling, you've lost every war you've fought since 1946. You vaunt people who are incompetent, you throw a fortune at a military that always loses, but you give the finger to your neighbor when it comes to basic needs. You're screwed, you've screwed yourself, and in your weakness, people who think like me are taking over your country. You cannot stop up, because it's all about demographics. Who has the babies determines the future. Your color and class and religion are not having babies, because you hate people but love money too much to redistribute the wealth so that white middle class people like you can feel safe having a lot of babies, because the state provides the secure support structure. You won't let your state do that. So your whites don't have babies. So the Mexicans win. You lose either way. Money does not reproduce, and the excessive love of it, and refusal to be realistic about human needs, have caused it to be rat poison for the white formerly-mainstream Protestant middle class. It's a shame, because that culture had something to offer. But it made its offering to the past. It cannot adjust itself to face the challenges of the present. And therefore in the future it will be in the history books. It's greatest moment will be seen as VJ Day. It's a shame, but look in the mirror. Your economic beliefs are stupid. You belief about what moves the world is wrong. You are stubborn and refuse to listen or learn anything from people who have actually succeeded at things since VJ Day. And because of the way you think, you are incapable of changing, or learning, or seeing, or listening. So your race, your culture and your religion are going to die. And it's your fault. Take you and multiply yourself by 100 million, and that is the struggling middle class that knows it is struggling, and still stupidly fixes its eyes DOWNWARD, on the people below, and pretends that it's THEIR fault. Or looks upward and sees corruption, which is there, but refuses to see that within yourselves YOU have the power to take those people down several notches and make them behave. But then you look around at people like yourselves, and you cannot cooperate with them, you pretty much hate them. It's "every man for himself", in your world. And that's why your world is being conquered by people who cooperate better. you could learn to cooperate. you could decide that making sure that your race and culture and creed deserve a chance, but that that means redistributing wealth from older, wealthier people to younger white middle class people who want to have babies but don't feel secure enough to have enough of them to change the tailspin that your culture and race have put themselves in. But this you are incapable of doing. NO! You have loved and served money all your life! You love the IDEA of complete individualism and people becoming rich capitalists unfettered by the need to spend heavily to bring everybody else along and up. They're all LEECHES, MOOCHES, according to you. And so, like a drug addict, you keep taking hits on this poisonous and evil belief system, and even as you see it kill your civilization, you will not change. Therefore, you will die. And there will be fewer and fewer of your kind to replace you. The American belief system does not work. It is dying because it does not work. There are structures that work better. Not perfectly, Nothing human is perfect. The best measure is this: Do your young middle class white people feel secure enough to have large families? In Sweden and Denmark and France the answer to that is "Yes", more and more. In America, the answer is "No fucking way". And so your system is inferior and dying out, and you had better change, because demography is destiny, and what you're doing merely ensures that your land and wealth will pass into the hands of others, because you're not sustaining yourselves. You're losing, and this is WHY. But you can't fix it, because you choose instead to stupidly point at other people and say that it's all THEIR fault. No, it's yours. Do you support universal education, from early childhood through college? Do you support universal health insurance? Do you support universal pensions? No? Then you don't support the structures necessary for people to feel secure enough to have babies. Guess what! Neither do the English, and relative to the French and Scandinavians, they're dying out too. It's not an accident. Look in the mirror, face the truth, and change your mind. Or die. What you are experiencing now is defeat. You're going to experience a lot more of it unless you change.
You don't have to write a book to say you've fallen in love with mediocrity. Which seems kinda strange for someone who spent all that time getting an education to be a lawyer. A job that you would think would pull you out from the depths of mediocrity, for some reason this picture just doesn't fit... I have no doubt I live better than 90% of those living under the system you so desire be implemented here. But I'd bet I'm not in the top 30% in my country. Unless I miss my guess all of those 90% would love to have what I have but they are being held back by the system they live under. They are being "educated" (dumbed down) to accept their plight in life for the "good of others". Little do they realize the "good of others" means the only ones making out are the oligarchy/plutocracy. Oh by the way how bad is the Muzzy problem getting in your beloved Europe?? Once they take over you get to live under a Theocracy which wouldn't be bad for you if it was Catholic, you love their brand. But instead it will be Islam and people like you will be exterminated/enslaved... ENJOY!!! In the Old Testament, God DID have representatives (spokesmen, if you will) who made His will known to the people. The people could listen to these Judges and later, prophets. (or not).
#86. To: Rufus T Firefly (#83)
God is absolutely the HIGHEST AUTHORITY there is.
#87. To: Rufus T Firefly (#83)
#88. To: Vicomte13 (#84)
Rufus, go back and read Exodus through Deuteronomy. They are a divine constitution for Israel, which God established as his people. Now read Joshua and see how it is directed. Then read how, when the people clamored for a king in the time of Samuel, that God told Samuel that they were not rejecting him (Samuel), but rather, were rejecting Him (God) as their king.
So you need to adjust your understanding of Scripture. God established and ruled a full on kingdom, with people and territory. He gave it all of its laws, and established how everything was to be. He promised them that as long as they did it all, that he would be with them and they would have that land. He also promised them that if they refused to do what he told them, he would destroy them, drive them out and give the land over to others.
The enter Old Testament is an account of how God established a state and ran it, and how the Israelites kept breaking his laws, and how he kept calling them back. The Mosaic covenant does not have one thing to do with eternal life or final judgment. There is nothing anywhere in it about any of those things. It's all about Israel and the laws of the people in Israel.
To get to the promise of eternal life for obeying a law, you have to come forward to Jesus.
In the Old Testament, the state that God set up had a very heavy charitable component written into the laws. That was what the tithe of the Levites was FOR: poverty relief. It was why interest on loans was prohibited to Israelites, why Israelites had to loan each otter money, why debts were forgiven after 6 years, why Israelites could not be sold as slaves, why children had the obligation to care for their parents, and vice versa. and why there was a skein of complicated laws regarding slaves that essentially gave each slave the "out" of becoming an Israelite and worshiping God, transmuting his slavery into indentured servitude.
That's what it actually says.
When we come to Jesus, who calls the whole world, not just the Jews of Israel,
there is a great deal regarding poverty relief, including the stern warning that when the poor cry out, as you treat them, you treat Him, and will be judged accordingly.
The entire Scripture drips with concern for fellow men, and warns not to make idols, and not to break the law over money.
A heresy has arisen among Christians that exalts the charging of interest and pretends - contrary to what Jesus SAID - that treating the poor right is optional, a matter of personal choice. Well, sure it is. Just like killing somebody is a personal choice. But if you make the wrong choice, you get thrown into the flames.
#89. To: Vicomte13 (#88)
#90. To: Vicomte13 (#70)
Not socialism, crony capitalism.
#91. To: nativist nationalist (#90)
#92. To: Rufus T Firefly (#88)
What you've described thus far is a Theocracy. It still requires an intermediary - that is, a person(s) in the middle, between the Ruler (God) and the ruled. In your examples, He's not there in physical form.
#93. To: Vicomte13 (#92)
If we continue this discussion, I'm going to let Jesus have the last word.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God's one and only Son.
14 What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? 15 If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, 16 and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good[a] is that? 17 So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.
18 But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. 19 You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder! 20 Do you want to be shown, you foolish person, that faith apart from works is useless? 21 Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered up his son Isaac on the altar? 22 You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by his works; 23 and the Scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”—and he was called a friend of God. 24 You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. 25 And in the same way was not also Rahab the prostitute justified by works when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way? 26 For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead.
I do not favor an "all powerful government".
Sweden doesn't have an all-powerful government. Neither does Denmark. Or Finland.
#94. To: Rufus T Firefly (#93)
People used to come here FROM those countries to WORK here - to better themselves and their families. Ask yourself - why did they do that? They were escaping in some cases those very Socialistic utopias that some (you?) seem to want us to become.
#95. To: Rufus T Firefly (#93)
Frankly, I get weary of those who constantly point to other countries and say "we need to be more like THEM"
#96. To: Rufus T Firefly (#93)
Frankly, I get weary of those who constantly point to other countries and say "we need to be more like THEM"
“Let me see which pig "DON'T" I want to vote for, the one with or without lipstick??" Hmmmmm...
#97. To: CZ82 (#96)
Especially those who think lazy non working people need to have the same kind of Healthcare that decent working people have. Sounds like they have bought into the crap taught in American schools nowadays, "You're special" even though they aren't...
#98. To: Vicomte13 (#95)
The only thing I do say is that we ought to emulate the French health insurance system, because that is the closest to ours, in terms of being insurance (as opposed to the direct provision of care),
and because the doctors are independent,
and because France has a very high quality medical treatment standard, on a par with ours.
They have single payer. Essentially, the French have US Medicare, but it covers everybody.
THAT is what we SHOULD do. Be done with Medicaid, and with private insurers and pools and that nonsense. Extend Medicare to cover everybody, just as it covers the over-65s now. Increase taxes to pay for it, and have done with it.
What I say is that we should put the limits in our laws that are in the laws of God. Unpayable debts need to be dischargeable. We've done the opposite.
#99. To: Rufus T Firefly (#98)
You didn't respond to my point re: Denmark, Norway, Sweden being much smaller countries than the US and not having the world policeman obligations that the US has.
#100. To: Rufus T Firefly (#98)
Although France is larger (65 million), it is nowhere near the population of the 300 plus million in the US. Plus France does not have the US illegal immigration problem. (They import Muslims, but AFAIK they are doing so legally).
#101. To: Rufus T Firefly (#98)
So once again: How do you take a already financially underwater Medicare system and ADD clients to it - WITHOUT a corresponding reduction in other US expenditures. (Note: I'm not arguing whether we should or shouldn't reduce the US footprint around the world. I'm just saying it's not going to happen.
#102. To: Vicomte13 (#99)
but I need to correct your language.
#103. To: Rufus T Firefly (#98)
Ahh, doctors. And nurses, PA's, etc. Professionals that are required to provide that "free" healthcare that everyone seems to want. Have you been to a waiting room recently? Wait long? And that's with our current system.
#104. To: Vicomte13, Liberator, CZ82, redleghunter, sneakypete, all (#103)
In France, the legal system is very standardized. Civil trials do not have juries. They have panels of expert judges. This means that French medical liability trials are very predictable. Doctors who err have to pay restitution and damages, but they are in reasonable amounts, and comparable between cases. Net result: French doctors carry malpractice insurance, but it is a fraction of the cost of the US.
#105. To: Rufus T Firefly (#104)
#106. To: Vicomte13 (#97)
But you cannot let them suffer and die for want of care. And you cannot let them starve for want of food, or freeze for want of basic shelter.
“Let me see which pig "DON'T" I want to vote for, the one with or without lipstick??" Hmmmmm...
#107. To: Vicomte13 (#97)
So I guess you're going to pass the remainder of your life bitterly hating the system under which you live. Even as you enter your final illness, protected from hunger by Social Security and receiving you care through government payment (Medicare) you'll still hate the system.
“Let me see which pig "DON'T" I want to vote for, the one with or without lipstick??" Hmmmmm...
#108. To: Rufus T Firefly (#104)
you present a good case for the French system
“Let me see which pig "DON'T" I want to vote for, the one with or without lipstick??" Hmmmmm...
#109. To: CZ82 (#106)
Oh wait never mind I just remembered it's all about destroying this country and pandering for votes for loser politicians.
#110. To: CZ82 (#108)
I think those that died rescuing the French from themselves might disagree with that...
#111. To: Rufus T Firefly (#104)
In France, the legal system is very standardized. Civil trials do not have juries. They have panels of expert judges. This means that French medical liability trials are very predictable. Doctors who err have to pay restitution and damages, but they are in reasonable amounts, and comparable between cases. Net result: French doctors carry malpractice insurance, but it is a fraction of the cost of the US.
#112. To: Vicomte13 (#110)
Those who died don't have an opinion: they're dead.
“Let me see which pig "DON'T" I want to vote for, the one with or without lipstick??" Hmmmmm...
#113. To: Vicomte13 (#109)
It's about doing our duty.
“Let me see which pig "DON'T" I want to vote for, the one with or without lipstick??" Hmmmmm...
#114. To: redleghunter (#111)
Seems the French figured out tort reform. Like you said, we are ruled and robbed by lawyers. Won't happen here.
#115. To: CZ82 (#112)
#116. To: Vicomte13 (#115)
“Let me see which pig "DON'T" I want to vote for, the one with or without lipstick??" Hmmmmm...
#117. To: CZ82 (#116)
Lets see unemployment rate there is over 10% and has been for quite sometime. So I wonder how those who are chronically unemployed feel about the lack of chances for them to better themselves???
#118. To: Vicomte13 (#117)
And the French are better educated, because university is free.
“Let me see which pig "DON'T" I want to vote for, the one with or without lipstick??" Hmmmmm...
#119. To: Vicomte13, Liberator, redleghunter (#117)
(Edited)
Truth is, American unemployment has been higher than French unemployment for years.
“Let me see which pig "DON'T" I want to vote for, the one with or without lipstick??" Hmmmmm...
#120. To: CZ82 (#119)
It's a lot easier (takes less education and work ethic from politicians/rulers/dictators) to take from those that try than it is to enable the whole population of the country to better itself... Same stupid system that's been prevalent throughout the globe for centuries that only benefits the ruling class. Wouldn't it just be easier for you to admit you're alright with that instead of writing a book???
#121. To: Vicomte13 (#120)
call suffering "laziness"
“Let me see which pig "DON'T" I want to vote for, the one with or without lipstick??" Hmmmmm...
#122. To: Vicomte13 (#120)
then reflexively oppose everything EXCEPT that which scrapes away your wealth into the pockets of fewer and fewer.
“Let me see which pig "DON'T" I want to vote for, the one with or without lipstick??" Hmmmmm...
#123. To: CZ82 (#122)
Guess that's also why they can't defend themselves anymore the people don't really care... How's that for social fabric??
#124. To: Vicomte13 (#123)
“Let me see which pig "DON'T" I want to vote for, the one with or without lipstick??" Hmmmmm...
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