More Soshulisum

I mentioned in an addendum to my previous post on this word that the U.S. is in fact already a socialist country, it ' s just a matter of what we do and do not socialize.You don ' t have to take my word for it:“The roads hold such a special position in our brain that we use logic around them that we would never use around everything else,” [Prof. Michael] Manville said.Other countries have socialized health care, parental leave or housing, Jeffrey Tumlin, a transportation consultant at Nelson\Nygaard, pointed out. In America, we ’ve socialized driving — and housing for our cars.“We don’t let people put their self-storage containers in public parks, but it’s just fine to store their cars on other public land for free,” Mr. Tumlin wrote in an email. . . .Industry publications [in the 1930s] linked the need for “free” roads to patriotism, the Bill of Rights,even the Minutemen.Today, because most people seldom pay directly for roads — or because general funds do — it can seem as if no one does.In other words, we think of socialism as freedom in the case of highways. But in this particular case it doesn ' t work well in major cities because it leads to overuse and congestion. However, different markets work in different ways. We don ' t think of education as being overused -- we want all children who have the basic intellectual capacity to at least get a basic education and be prepared for employment. In health care, because of provider induced demand, we g...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs