Quote:
Originally Posted by Boasun
Socialism is only good for the Bureaucrats who are in charge of those socialist programs that were enacted by the socialist democrats in congress.
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Boasun, this may come as a shock to you, but I am as against huge bureaucracy as anybody, and USA has some of the most outrageous. The reasons are – am I swearing in church now? precisely because you are so afraid of appearing to “govern” people. For every new law you include the ifs and buts of every lobby group in sight so as not to tamper with “individual freedom” or “free market” or “the right to defend oneself” and what have you.
The result is a maze of complex and contradictory clauses to micro-manage and run gauntlet between special interests, leaving a law riddled with loopholes. Someone here mentioned the number of taxation laws, a figure too astronomical for simpler minds like me to fathom. In Norway, a couple of hours’ read would get you through the entire tax act, the idea being that adding more paragraphs only creates more loopholes and feeds more tax lawyers. And the cumulative tax load in each country? Roughly the same.
Every time I shop in US, I smile at the knee jerk acknowledgement of “taxes” in the shop window: Prices are shown excluding sales tax, as if to emphasize that the shopkeeper is not the greedy part. So you enter and buy the “$2,99” item knowing that the checkout chick will push another button and come out with three-dollars-and-and-a-silly-cents-figure. In much of Europe, goods must by law be advertised at full price including VAT, so that What You See is What You Get. I’m being petty, but it’s just one of the small examples of illogical, unnecessary complication of simple transactions. So, Boasun, when you mention “bureaucracy” it is US practices I think of first. After that comes the hotel porter who opens a door for me and holds his hand out to be paid for his gargantuan effort. Can’t be on a decent salary, that wouldn’t be “incentive” and “free enterprise”, would it? What age do we live in, Uncle Tom’s cabin?
I recall a controversy from a very different field long ago: The psychologist B.F. Skinner (he with the programmed dogs and pigeons) also had some ideas on how to rehabilitate criminals. A cry went out from the usual corner, condemning his ideas as “inhumane” and “demeaning” because he had the cheek to propose that one work to stop the bad behavior instead of, as everyone else insisted, “understanding” the criminal and making him see the light. Skinner responded by saying his critics are merely defending “
weak practices” because they are so blinded by the wish to please everyone.
I think the would-be “free market” US politicians engage in
weak practices. Instead of daring to say “This is what we want done” they nudge and beg with a little pork-barreling here, a few token concessions there. They are slaves to their own illusion, that they run a free market economy. Of course they don’t.
I’ll claim, no doubt to loud holler from some, that we in Scandinavia run a tougher free enterprise system than USA. Government here is not afraid to handle essential services, but when something is reserved for business, it has to compete without favor in the world market. Look only to the GM debacle: in its home country, GM has no shame and crawls for handouts. In Sweden, where GM has turned Saab into a lame duck, they made the same overtures. Within the day, the government came back with “No”, point blank. “If Saab is not a viable business, it is not a taxpayer concern.”
Now, who runs the free market economy?
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