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Hardheaded Socialism Makes Canada Richer Than U.S.
On July 1, Canada Day, Canadians awoke to a startling, if pleasant, piece of news: For the first time in recent history, the average Canadian is richer than the average American.
According to data from Environics Analytics WealthScapes published in the Globe and Mail, the net worth of the average Canadian household in 2011 was $363,202, while the average American household’s net worth was $319,970.
A few days later, Canada and the U.S. both released the latest job figures. Canada’s unemployment rate fell, again, to 7.2 percent, and America’s was a stagnant 8.2 percent. Canada continues to thrive while the U.S. struggles to find its way out of an intractable economic crisis and a political sine curve of hope and despair.
The difference grows starker by the month: The Canadian system is working; the American system is not. And it’s not just Canadians who are noticing. As Iceland considers switching to a currency other than the krona, its leaders’ primary focus of interest is the loonie -- the Canadian dollar.
As a study recently published in the New York University Law Review pointed out, national constitutions based on the American model are quickly disappearing. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in an interview on Egyptian television, admitted, “I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012.” The natural replacement? The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, achieving the status of legal superstar as it reaches its 30th birthday.
I'm just a simple man trading a simple plan.
My daddy always said, "Every day above ground is a good day!"
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
First off, you can't use average/mean values to evaluate any sort of socio-economic aspect.
If you were to use the "average" home value for an area, you might choke, till you realize that the upscale/gated community with homes that are 100, 500 and 1000 times the price of a typical home, skew the results.
That's why we use MEDIAN incomes. I won't bore you all with explaining the mathematical difference, you probably already know.
Secondly, these types of studies do very little to determine intangible things like, quality of life (even though there's metrics out there for that).
If the Candadian health care system is so wonderful, then why do rich Canadians and those that can afford it travel to the states to get either better/more specialized care, care sooner, etc?
Look up the average wait times for typical procedures in Canada. I dated a Canadian for several months. She said going to the doctor was a horrible and regrettable experience, as everything took forever.
Socialism is great if you're the dirt poor guy being lifted by it's aspects. Socialism is terrible if you're a self starting, independent and successful person.
Whenever I was in college and had a difficult concept to understand, a wise professor once told me..."take it to the extremes and that usually reveals trends and correlations that are linear in nature."
France is trying to implement even more socialism and business and jobs and wealth is running for the door. Places like Brussels and London are salivating and licking their chops.
Lastly, we've recently breached the threshold where our government spends more of our avaialable earnings than Canada does.
Canada also benefits from not having to spend virtually ANYTHING on defense (unless they absolutely want to do so, more out of some sense of self respect than anything).
Imagine how prosperous we would be if we didn't HAVE to spend a dime on defense......
I'm not bagging on Canada, I think of the industrialized world, it's great. I'm just saying I hate these stupid, biased reports/articles that try to make socialism seem to be some form of viable/potent solution.
You can track the downfall of America in everything from manufacturing to education by how "socialist" or statist we have become. We led the world back when we were a free market, Constitutionally bound nation.
People shouldn't bag on capitalism, mainly because we don't live in a capitalist nation...we live in a government-partnered crony capitalist society where corporations are in bed with government. (which is exactly what the founders predicted would happen when we started ignoring the Constitution they worked so hard and fought so hard to create).
"A dumb man never learns. A smart man learns from his own failure and success. But a wise man learns from the failure and success of others."
1. Because the USA has the best medical care available... as long as you can afford it. If you can't ... you die.
2. You realize Canadian troops have suffered casualties in Afghanistan ... right?
3. Which begs the question... why do we "have" to spend so much on defense? We spend more on defense than the next 7 nations combined. Perhaps we should stop starting wars....
I'm just a simple man trading a simple plan.
My daddy always said, "Every day above ground is a good day!"
Our healthcare system/edge is actually declining because of the FDA. More and more, Americans embark on "medical tourism" to go around the world to get cutting edge treatments either not available in the U.S. at all, or at a much lower cost.
The cost of healthcare is a direct result of statist/socialist policy (as well as some other factors like legal challenges and tort reform, scope creep, etc).
Education used to be dirt cheap in this country. People used to be able to work during the day and pay for night or weekend classes with the disposable income they made while working. The days where a person could "work" their way through college (with no government assistance) are long gone...unless you're a coke dealer or a mortgage broker.
Big government types and socialists sold this notion that the government must step in and assist the poor in education and pumped massive amounts of money into the system. So what did colleges and universities do? They took full advantage by increasing their labor burdens, buying fancy research facilities, etc, etc. Having a $Zillion atom smashing machine is great if you're a nuclear researcher, but doesn't do much if you're a freshman taking 100 level World History.
The same is true for healthcare. The government keeps pumping soo much money into the system that the system now expands and charges both what the free market was willing to offer AND the additional money from the government.
The same problem is true for primary education. We dump hundreds of $BN's at the problem trying to make education work again, but it simply makes it more expensive, not better.
At any rate, the FDA is another "big government"/statist problem. The FDA is now inundated with lobbyists and former pharma and food conglomerate executives who are more interested in serving profits for their former and future masters than looking out for the well being of the citizenry. The FDA stonewalls new drugs and procedures and equipment and techniques that smaller firms and individuals with less resources (for lobbysists and bribes and campaign funding) in order to protect profits for the corporations that have all those corrupt resources.
Like all statist/liberal ideas, the FDA started out as a seemingly great idea (although it's unConstitutional in many aspects). Who doesn't want clean safe milk and meat products? But it's since grown (as all government/statist ventures do) to turn into the modern nightmare we face now where food companies poison the people and drug companies "fix" them with drugs....both making massive amounts of money in the process. Additionally, the FDA criminalizes small individuals like farmers who want to sell their excess milk and vegetables or a nutrionist who wants to blog about the benefits of a paleo diet (i.e. cutting into food conglomerate profits) or a person who wants to blog about the benefits of natural remedies and medicines (which cut into the profits of the pharma companies). We now end up with a system that villifies people like Dr. Byrzinski (you should watch the full length documentary) in order to try to steal his work and sell it to corporate interests, all the while, new cutting edge cancer therapies remain shelved or less accessible.
The problems with the American health system aren't capitalism, it's a lack of capitalism and complete government interference. Government seeks to socialize the cost of medicine, so that a healthy, young male who eats right and exercises and does not smoke, pays the same or similar health costs to the overweight, 35 year old female who's had 3 kids (and still doesn't have her tubes tied) and smokes a pack a day and doesn't even know what exercise is. The government refuses to allow competition among insurance companies in pools or across state lines....
why do you think when you watch television, every 30 seconds you see a commercial for auto insurance? Auto insurance is a VERY competitive market. That's because the government isn't pumping $BN's into it and because they let the free market provide good competition which gives consumers a great choice of cutting edge products and services.
Ron Paul (who's a practicing physician btw) said it best when he said that before the government got involved, people used to have insurance only for serious/significant medical events....they used to pay out of their pocket for routine and normal/common medical needs...because it was simply that cheap. Try walking into a clinic today to get a perscription for a Z pack. It costs a fortune (even if it's not you that ends up paying it).
Make no mistake, we were MUCH better off, even the little guy, before the big nanny government stepped in to try to save us from ourselves and each other. We had better products, better access less crony-capitalism to corporations and lived better lives for it.
"A dumb man never learns. A smart man learns from his own failure and success. But a wise man learns from the failure and success of others."
Secondly, I'm not a Republican, I'm a libertarian.
Don't confuse "Defense spending" with military adventurism that we now employ.
Defense spending is spending money on capabilities to defend yourself from invasion and from legit, threats to your sovereignty and legit legal interests abroad.
What we have today is a military that's carrying out a vicious foreign policy that's outdated and reaches all the way back to the cold war with the soviets when the CIA discovered it could manipulate foreign governments and outcomes to the benefit of American interests (which are now corporate interests).
Having 900 military bases around the world is not defense spending. Fighting endless, unnecessary wars against propped up supposed threats (while really serving underlying alterior motives) is not defense spending.
My point was that Canada, like Japan, like Germany, etc, doesn't have to spend a dime on defense unless they really want to spend on that.
I'm not discounting the Canadian contribution to any conflict or their military. I'm simply pointing out that they spend a fraction of what we do, in much part because they can. They know that if someone ever tried to invade, we'd be there to take care of the problem, simply out of self interest (and of course, being a valued friend and neighbor).
If we simply had the luxury of spending at the level the Canadians do, our budgets, and our economy would be doing much better.
Japan has enjoyed this luxury since WWII....imagine how much worse they'd be doing if they had to spend 3-5% of their GDP on defense?
"A dumb man never learns. A smart man learns from his own failure and success. But a wise man learns from the failure and success of others."
