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Originally Posted by DanaC
Okay. So, if we all do things the American way, everybody on the planet will succeed and live well?
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It works if you're a human, yes. America is chiefly inhabited by these.
What I'm saying is that we did it, and therefore so can you.
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Could you define success in this context please. And, if everybody deserves to succeed and live well, why does America have 12.7% of its population living in poverty? (the highest in the developed world)
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The government bureaucracies in charge of doing something about poverty have been known to redefine poverty upward. Thus they impress the gullible about how necessary they are. American poverty bears a surprising resemblance to Central and South American middle class.
Your thinking, Dana, is being very heavily colored by welfare-statism. The problem with the welfare state, and this is a problem that is sickening the entire EU economy, is that it raises the cost of employment far too much to allow the economic growth the EU's populations could actually accomplish given their head. It's basically the same effect as overtaxing, and often takes that exact form. The welfare state attempts to offer very extensive guarantees of some kind of economic maintenance. I have become suspicious of such guarantees, for guarantees suck the life out of opportunity. Guarantees are the stuff of totalitarianism. A free market, with as little as possible of the parasitic drag of taxation clinging to it, makes for unequal distributions of wealth, but there is a lot more wealth to go around in general, and everyone gets to cut their own piece of the pie, as their ability, fortune, and ethics allow. Bad ethics eventually lead to bad fortune, even in the freest of markets. For a nasty example of such, take drug trafficking: no ethics, and all takeovers are about as hostile as hostile is likely to get -- bang bang bang, bada-bing, bada-boom.
The free marketplace requires you to grow your skills, and it feels very good when you've got it mastered. Little by little if need be, every day that you do something better than you did, you're making yourself a better life. To set Marx on his head: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need -- and money is how the score is kept."