A note on health care: perhaps the most infuriating thing I've heard out of the incumbent President is his recent comment to the effect of "we already have a health care safety net; people can go to the emergency room."
So he's not opposed to a form of socialized medicine. The free rider without health insurance can (and, according to the President) should receive socialized medicine, but only in a really ****ty and economically inefficient manner. I am quite strongly libertarian in my political beliefs, but comments like this make me realize that: (1) we will never have a free market in medical care; (2) therefore, we will always have a very large socialized sector in medical care (Medicare/Medicaid/"emergency room" health care delivery); (3) that this semi-socialized medical care delivery system is actually worse than the Canadian/Scandinavian/French [you name it] delivery systems. So I must compromise my ideals on this issue. Just copy Sweden.
Other than that, the bloat of the federal government just sickens me. Not just "defense" [read: military] spending; also transportation pork, agricultural subsidies, the whole Department of Education, you name it.
Heltonfan, don't forget Iceland, or even (depending on the definition) Finland.
"Nordic countries," not merely "Scandinavian!" Other than that, I agree with you and with rockieprogress: American educational performance is bad, many things are better in other countries, but they've also got things that infuriate me more than the USA ... and I too say this after having spent significant time abroad. Watching a Swedish-Dutch colleague spend the equivalent of a month or worktime every year trying to devise tax avoidance schemes will teach you a valuable lesson about taxation and efficiency ....
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