Re: the future long term financial apocalypse of the USA

D  <nospam@example.net> wrote:

Come to Stockholm and I can show you plenty of homeless people. There's an
invasion of gypsies who earn their living by begging, selling drugs,
stealing and prostitution. There's also the odd mentally ill person and
drug addict in the subway walking from subway car to subway car.

That's fine.  Those folks will always be with us.  I am talking about people
who have jobs but live in their car or in a tent city because making minimum
wage even as a hard worker is not enough for them to be able to afford a
studio apartment.

>

street or in the grocery store, I think I saw only one or two with obvious
untreated major medical conditions.  I have friends who have fairly

>
This is tricky. I've been to the US more times than I can imagine, and
when I see crazy people on the street I don't know if they have untreated
medical conditions or not. Is that what you mean? Mental illness?

No, although that is a thing that is more of a problem in the US than in
most European countries.  I am thinking about people with physical issues.
Take a trip on the city bus here, and you'll see people with goiters,
contagious pink eye, untreated skin infections, etc.  Often things that
would not be difficult or expensive to cure.  How the hell do people get
goiters in the 21st century anyway?

Is there any place in the world that isn't that way?  But I'd rather be a
secure wage slave than an insecure one.

>
Being a secure wage slave is a short step away from being a secure slave.
It is so far away from my core values to build my life around safety, that
it is difficult to describe.

I've been unsafe enough that I do tend to value safety.  Not to the
exclusion of everything else, but I'd like for other people not to have to
go through some of what I went through.  And I am okay paying a little more
taxes for that.

I am okay paying my share of taxes, as long as everyone else is paying their
share too, and I used to think most people are like that.  It's definitely
different from place to place.

I'd much rather be free than safe. But, this is a matter of taste, and to
a certain amount, of economics. Science has shown that economically free
societies are better off in the long run, than socialist planned
economies.

You're saying one extreme is better than the other.  But there are a huge,
huge number of possibilities between those two extremes and most of them
are better than either one.  Exactly where in that range is optimal is
something that can be argued about because people differ.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."