Trump Thread

[rory_20_uk]

I see compulsory insurance and government healthcare as very similar. Usually the argument is made that the private sector can do it cheaper, but consider that they need the same administration either way and dividing it over several different corporations can lead to overhead such as each of them having a CEO and a board of directors with enormous salaries whereas the government could do with one department head who probably gets paid less. Surely the corporations would save costs by paying the line employees less, but how low wages are good for the country is another topic worthy of discussion.

It is possible to get a decent healthcare system without having the government as a single payer, we happen to have that in Germany. It keeps getting changed though and the whole system seems to be run in some weird government/insurance cooperation. For people who make a lot of money or are self-employed we also have a seperate private insurance industry, which apparently amounts to making one a first-class patient since they pay the doctors more or something like that. However, health insurance is compulsory for most things here and the big standard insurance companies can't just take it away, even if one does not pay repeatedly AFAIK. During employment the payments are deduced before the wage is paid out though, just like income taxes and other things.

The point is, it does not really matter, as long as everyone is covered. The Republican plan is terrible because it does not cover everyone, drives up the cost, benefits the ones who have no problems with healthcare anyway and basically turns the US even more into a class society where the amount of wealth determines the worth of a human life. And it is only made worse by their claims to be the moral party that stands for family values etc. Lies, lies, lies, I say...

Germany so often does things... better. And because so much is ingrained other countries can not just copy it - families who care for their workers and most people who do mainly follow the rules as that is the right thing to do and help others as that is also right. Family owned Mittelstand who take the long view, not selling out at the first opportunity.

The UK / USA has a winner-takes-all mentality at all levels from those at the bottom who are out to get whatever they can to those at the top who act in exactly the same way. An all-pervading sense of both envy and entitlement with little concept of duty or responsibility. Unions who don't want to work with employers but would rather have adversarial relationships.

We have a bunch of politicians who are either insane, incompetent or sociopaths. I'm not sure which is worse. You have a leader who in a relatively considered and quiet way does a good, glamorous job.

Yes, I am a Germanophile (my last holiday was to Berlin - and is my choice for my next) and probably things are not as rosy as they seem.

But grafting the mentality of how the German system works onto the UK or USA just wouldn't work until the psyche changes. And of course the irony is that the UK and USA have some of the highest percentages of German ancestors of most countries.

[Husar]

Germany so often does things... better. And because so much is ingrained other countries can not just copy it - families who care for their workers and most people who do mainly follow the rules as that is the right thing to do and help others as that is also right. Family owned Mittelstand who take the long view, not selling out at the first opportunity.

The UK / USA has a winner-takes-all mentality at all levels from those at the bottom who are out to get whatever they can to those at the top who act in exactly the same way. An all-pervading sense of both envy and entitlement with little concept of duty or responsibility. Unions who don't want to work with employers but would rather have adversarial relationships.

We have a bunch of politicians who are either insane, incompetent or sociopaths. I'm not sure which is worse. You have a leader who in a relatively considered and quiet way does a good, glamorous job.

Yes, I am a Germanophile (my last holiday was to Berlin - and is my choice for my next) and probably things are not as rosy as they seem.

But grafting the mentality of how the German system works onto the UK or USA just wouldn't work until the psyche changes. And of course the irony is that the UK and USA have some of the highest percentages of German ancestors of most countries.

Well, I'm trying to do my part for the required cultural changes. I often check out the youtube comments under videos and how some people there defend the private sector economy stuff or even go full anarchy makes me think they just adopt arguments and never think them through. That is probably also an education issue and having more private schools would seem unlikely to fix that. Here we are often a jealous of how schools in the US or Canada are often shown to have the latest technologies, but I'm quite convinced that a good teacher is worth a thousand times more than having a beamer with touch capabilities. We may forget a lot of the information that we learn during our education, but the thought patterns, the correct application of logic and so on, these are things that can last us for a long time. And these are things the teachers need to teach. Given how people often get through school by memorizing what they think the teachers want to hear without really understanding it, it shouldn't be surprising that they might do the same later in life.
And I'd say the same happens in Germany as well, I'm not saying our education system is a lot better.

I wouldn't even say capitalism is bad per se, but its use depends heavily on your goals circumstances and to some degree the type of capitalism you apply. When you have long-term goals,. infrastructure technologies and serious environmental concerns, the kind of capitalism we often see today, you're just maneuvering yourself into a lot of trouble. One could even say the irony of our society is that we have such good healthcare overall that our society became dominated by old people who look for short-term profit as they may not live to see the long-term ones. They're also so drunk on the short-term gains of the past, using a relative abundance of resources, that they refuse to see that this can't go on forever in the future. And they focus entirely on the economic consequences and call everything else a "fake science" (see people saying liberal arts should disappear etc.). And this was a segway to the following article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/17/u...conomists.html
Especially interesting:

For starters, while economists tend to view a job as a straightforward exchange of labor for money, a wide body of sociological research shows how tied up work is with a sense of purpose and identity.

This is another segway to the following German article, which basically argues that another communist revolution is a pipe dream because Neo-liberalism has tied our self-worth to our financial success and therefore we lose all self-esteem if we are not rich and if we are rich we have no desire for revolution. Basically a form of self-enslavement of the poor masses who blame themselves for their lot in life rather than the system that is designed to perpetuate their situation.
As one example for a worrying development it takes the sharing economy, which basically turns communism into a product that corporations can sell us and at the same time removes more ownership from the consumer who has to pay for more and more things every day that his parents used to own after a one-time payment. The ownership of the rich and dependency of the poor and middle classes sold under the disguise of convenience and instant satisfaction. In the long term it commercializes every aspect of life and makes capitalism take over our entire lives.
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/n...-ist-1.2110256