The argument from the right has been that the
It is no secret why this is happening. Check out the likes of The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Stiglitz, Barlett and Steele's The Betrayal of the American Dream, and the classic albeit oddly named The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier by Wilkinson and Pickett. The dysfunctional American sociopolitical system is allowing the oligarchs to establish a plutonomy, in which the top percent is rigging the system by using a bloated financial sector to redistribute much of the wealth of the middle and lower class up the economic ladder. The mechanism for the upward transfer of monies is "rent seeking" that includes massive interest payments on enormous personal debt loads.
It is the so-called entitlement societies that have become the real world opportunity cultures. The nations that score the highest -- around 6 to over 7 -- on the Successful Societies Scale are, well let's see here; Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Switzerland, Canada and Japan. Note that all the countries ranked higher than the
Nor do most Scandinavian countries suffer from exceptional levels of suicide (Danes are well below American levels, the Finns are high) and alcohol consumption. All the Nordic nations score high in life satisfaction and top Americans in long term happiness.
At the end of the last World War the
It is no wonder that the rest of the world is moving away from looking to exceptionally libertarian
It comes down to massive misinformation. I got into the business of finding out what is really going down regarding modern societies because not enough was being done to answer the question. It is particularly vexing that the right has been going on, and on and on about how the American Way is the one and only best way, and that the rest of the west is being run into the socioeconomic ground by leftist fools. There is a host of right wing think tanks and scholars who could produce studies demonstrating the real world superiority of libertarian policies via a comprehensive data set if they could do so. I have repeatedly challenged the right to document their claims. But they cannot. The data is coming in and there is no objective doubt that progressive capitalist/socialist hybrid economies produce the best overall results. The refusal of the right to acknowledge this scientific truth is not surprising in that it is in accord with the rejection of many conservatives of biological evolution, the adverse climatic and oceanic effects of extracting fossil carbon from sediments, the medical safety of abortion and the risk of raped women of becoming pregnant, the efficacy of comprehensive sex education and condoms, and the President being an American born nonMuslim. Conservatism involves a high degree of delusional rejection of reality and science. Some of this is self-aggrandizement, as when many of wealth promote the libertarianism that enhances their fortunes, or those who wish to run pother people's lives promote myths about human reproduction. In other cases it is dysfunctional ideology promoted by elements of wealth to mislead the masses into working against their best interests, exemplified by Murdoch's FoxNews.
Fortunately the west has run a decades long experiment that leaves no doubt that for all its flaws, prudent collective progressivism outperforms hyperindividualistic libertarianism. It is the responsibility of those who are objective to know the facts and get them out there to the public.
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