did anyone watch the yank elections?

[Rose Love]

Hi Luna,

I'll try to give this a thoughtful response. The US is hardly monolithic, and I don't imagine I speak for the majority. The answer is it varies.

Some probably do view socialism as communism. I don't think that's the main issue. I think it's that our government spends too damn much and seems wasteful, corrupt, and too incompetent to run massive programs either. There is also an independent spirit rags to riches narrative that is bred into a lot of us. There is a view that you may end up working hard only to have it taken away to give to people that don't want to work.

We see the riots in France and Greece, and think that's where socialism leads. Some truth there. That said, I don't believe that truth is the whole truth. I do believe that there is a mixture of capitalism and socialism that most people in the US want even if they don't like socialism philosophically they practically like some aspects of it. People aren't always consistent.

Another issue is that with the size of the country and 314 million people it's hard to pull off. If you restricted these programs to the discretion of the fifty individual states you might be able to pull it off. Though people would begin moving and skew the systems of some of these states probably overwhelming the system.

Nothing is ever easy.

Yet it seems to work fine in Canada...Canada has the best health care system I have ever had the fortune to be treated under.

Considering that all other countries in the West, I think, would be considered socialist or maybe even communist, by American standards, how is it that you attribute the riots in just France and Greece to their socialism? What about the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US (and the fascist crackdown on that by the police)? How can you single out France and Greece for protests and attribute them to the fact that they are socialist countries when the US has its own riots and you can count on one hand the number of socialist countries that are dealing with riots?