"WTF is wrong with Americans? This guy nails it"

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As a Scandinavian, I can easily refute many of these arguments.

1. Not all education is free here; you either need good grades or you have to pay for your education

2. Students do not get a monthly tuition to cover their expenses. Rent here is about 1,000 dollars a month for a dorm room, compared to 400 dollars in the US

3. Free education in history, english, philosophy or anything else you can read in your leisure time, is indeed a waste of money

4. Norwegians are less likely to hold a degree than Americans

5. An average student in the US has a student loan of 29,400 dollars. An average student in Norway, has a student loan of more than 60,000 dollars

6. A person with a college degree in the US makes more money than a person with a degree in Norway. The law of Jante dictates that someone who works half as hard as an engineer, deserves 85% of the salary of the engineer here

7. Norway has the highest military spendings per capita in Europe

8. A degree in something easy (eg. history) is more likely to get you a relevant job eventually in the US than in Norway

9. Norway has an actual unemployment rate of around 10%, compared to a nominal rate of 3,4%

10. Engineers feed the entire Norway; without the oil, many blue collar workers (due to sheer laziness) would starve to death

11. High schools and elementary schools here are underfunded, and do not have a lot of the cool stuff (driving lessons, auditoriums, swimming pools, lockers, cafeterias etc.) that American schools have

Yes they are. The Norse side of my family was the side that I was closest to. If everyone were like them, I'd support every collectivist policy known to man. The problem is that it's not just about the culture or the laws; it's also about the people.

Being a 'we' culture is work. You're constantly dealing with other people's problems. Ricken Patel of Avaaz likes to say that 'people all want basically the same thing.' What he leaves out is that they all want to be thin and well-off, too, yet they can't bring themselves to go to the gym, or to study when they're in school.

That's the other thing: We actually have a lot of free education in the US, and the kids who have access to it usually spend their time getting drunk, stoned and laid. (Europe isn't uniformly better.)

If you accuse people of being evil every time you don't get what you want from them, then you've given a good example of why you'll never have a working 'we' state. People want different things. It's still possible to do most of what the left here wants to do, but not it you start with that much disinterest in other people's priorities.

Also, Silhouette Man obviously didn't have a very good education. We do not know that education is "the ultimate investment in the future." I've posted quite a few statistics showing how bad many of our colleges are. Even "good" colleges can't show a causal relationship between their product and the health of society. They can't even show that it improves earnings for their graduates, since the groups that go to colleges are demographically unlike those that don't. Even if that weren't the case, graduates and non-graduates aren't allowed to compete for the same jobs, so no statistical comparison is possible.

This post was very interesting.

I agree with your points.

Do American high schools really have all that stuff? I went to school in the Netherlands and all the food you got was the dry sandwich you brought from home. BLEH.

Again, you are in error.

It works THERE. Our politicians are so corrupted with cronyism that they couldn't boil a pot of water if you provided the chef do it for them.

Case in point...the ACA website. Google, Amazon or most any other dot.com business could have made the website within a month for a mere fraction of the cost. Instead, it was doled out to political allies who didn't know squat, nobody took responsibility to make sure it would work, and it was millions of dollars down the drain just to basically start all over again.

If they can't be competent in even creating a website (in a nation that leads the world in Internet commerce), why would you trust their health care to them?

Our postal system is another shining example of waste and incompetence. Americans don't want our health care in the hands of the same type of people who manage our postal system.

You mean the Republican Congressmen who drew up a pension plan they knew would destroy the USPS financially?

Some do,big schools.Rural schools don't,just a cafeteria which usually doubles as an auditorium, lockers and really bad food,you are better off bringing a lunch.Some of the older schools didnt have air conditioning when I was a kid,which is no fun in the South.

I dont see anything in that cartoon that most Americans dont already know. But then again I dont see the everybody using Nordic money as the world reserve currency either.

Or like how dems took all the money from the VA hospitals? Anyone who things that government corruption and looting is JUST a one sided problem in D.C. is the real problem. The people who are stupid enough to still be caught in the false right left paradigm are whats allowing all the looting to take place. For example, the Dems look like they are taking just as many bribes when it comes to the new internet taxation attempts from the brick and mortar retail giants. The two party system is the mechanism by witch the government manipulates people into letting things get as bad as they are now and if you ever start a sentence with "republican" or "democrat" then you are sentencing your self to a life of diligent stupidity.

But hey, it might not matter that the USPS lost their pensions in the end anyway. The D's and R's are both going to vote to start charging you a tax on every email pretty soon.

Last edited by RunningFox on 13 May 2014, 8:25 am, edited 2 times in total.

I gather that is increasingly the role of the Yen.

Ok you're right everyone on welfare is working the system and could easily just get up and go get a job with enough pay to support themselves and their families....the majority aren't people who need it therefore getting rid of welfare is the solution for this countries problems

That sounds like a lot of work for a relatively small amount of compensation.

Wouldn't it be less stressful to simply earn money the normal way... by working?

You would think. that is why I think its unlikely the majority of people on welfare are frauds....but yeah if I gave a wrong adress for food stamps for instance and they found out I would have them revoked....people who do con their way onto benefits are probably in a position where they are not depending on such things like people who need it and wouldn't want to risk fraud do to the risk of losing benefits.

America=everyone out for themselves where only the elites benefit while the poor masses are stuck with dreams practically unobtainable.

I visited Czechoslovakia when it was still Communist. I was a little kid, but I still remember the boarder crossing:

The checkpoint was on a bridge over a ditch, which was filled with barbed wire. On the Czechoslovak side was a wall, and on the other was a clear cut swath. I didn't know at the time, but the latter was probably mined. It would hardly have mattered to someone trying to escape: Ahead of us, on the other side of the bridge, there were two guard towers, each manned by machine gunners.

Why do so many people from outside the U.S. come to the U.S. for their graduate education?

ruveyn

Socialism is the government owning the means of production as a opposed to private enterprise. It is about state-run companies versus companies that are privately held. What do social welfare programs have to do with socialism, Limbaugh?