There Are Very Few Socialists in America: Krugman

[wnylib]

55. Most American voters don't have that background understanding

of Europe, but they do know that health care is more available there for everyone than in the US. I read your post about the cost of your recent health crisis. In the US, many people would have gone bankrupt to get that care. Others would simply not have received it at all because of an inability to afford the initial visit to a doctor to be diagnosed. By law, ERs here have to treat people who arrive without health insurance, but in practice, those patients get poor attention and treatment because they can't afford the cost of health insurance or to pay out of pocket for diagnosis and treatment.

Of course not all European nations are the same and not all people within them are the same. But in general, there appears to be a better approach to some issues of quality of life than in the US. Here there is an attitude that my German-born great aunt used to refer to contemptuously as, "I've got mine and devil take the hindmost." She was my grandmother's sister and their family left Kaiser Bill's German Empire in 1890 when they were young children, long before modern social programs.

From what I sometimes read, the EU's regulations on things like social media and food production and processing are more mindful of people's protections than in the US where corporations under unregulated capitalism are kings that own Congress. Yet European nations also have quite successful capitalist businesses and corporations. I don't believe that they are faultless utopias, but they are more socially oriented in many ways that we are not.

I was born a few years after WWII ended, so I remember when the US still had corporate regulations from the FDR era on monopolies that prevented huge corporate conglomerates from ruling as if capitalism were a governing system instead of being a financial tool of society. That was before RW politicians chipped away at financial regulations in pursuit of raw, unregulated capitalism.

I am also old enough to remember who the European leaders were that you mentioned. Not that I knew a lot about them, but I did have a very general idea of where they stood politically. Even with a more conservative swing in Europe now, they are socially ahead of the US in many areas of quality of life.

I don't have an in-depth knowledge of German history, but have learned on my own more than we were taught in high school and college courses on European history. I wanted to understand the background of my mother's family. So I understand what you mean about the post war period adjustments from the Prussian authoritarian, bureaucratic way of life.

My mother's paternal side were from West Prussia, near what was then the southern border between Prussia and Poland. Her grandfather was a Uhlan general from an untitled junker family. In 1888 he supported the social and political reform plans of Kaiser Wilhelm II's parents, Kaiser Friedrich and Kaiserina Victoria (daughter of Queen Victoria) for a parliamentarian system like Britain's. But Friedrich only lived a few months as Kaiser and his son, Kaiser Wilhelm II, charged his father's reform supporters with treason, so my mother's grandparents fled with their children to the US.

The maternal side of my mother's family came from a little village called Dargun in what was then Mecklenburg-Schwerin, not very far from the Danish border. The village was founded by Danish monks (13th century, I think) who built their monastery on a mission to convert the Pagan Germans there. That side of the family left, like hundreds of other people from Mecklenburg, for better economic opportunities.

Bureaucratic sloganeers are, IMO, the downside of socialism and one reason why I couldn't support socialism as a political/economic system. But incorporating some social programs into a capitalist democracy as the FDR adminstrations did, is something that I think Americans are ready to do as a reaction against the present move toward a fascist oligarchy.