Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
This leads back to the core of the discussion. The US values the outlier in it's social structure, at the cost of the statistical average. The EU values the statistical average at the expense of the outlier. You see this in these discussions, whether you are talking about education, health care, taxation, or most other issues.
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Economic outliers, you mean. Or really the top 10-20% of those who "perform", because the rest really aren't that statistically special either. Because, no offense, if there is anything the US does not seem to value it's
social outlying. After all, try being a socialist, or "having" a
deviant sexual identity.
Additionally, there are quite a few Europeans that do fairly well even on the economic & innovation fronts (our GNPs aren't that much lower, after all), just on the front where it comes to accepting wealth redistribution.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
One can't say that one is "better" that the other, because that is a value judgement, which falls back upon what value base you judge by. Different bases give different answers.
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Sure you can. The only problem is that result comparisons are not deemed "valid". If the european system yields 5-10% living below the poverty line, whereas the american system yields 15-30% living below that same poverty line, you could very well argue that one system is more humane (although both murder and love are human behaviors, so the word is admittedly a bit weird) than the other. Similarly in income discussions. Sure, for a few it might be preferable to live in a country where it is possible to earn a $1 billion a year income, but seeing how that happens to what, a couple thousand people out of 300 million, the odds you'd be betting against would be horribly long.