I mean, in the end, USA is still better than the alternative.
I will freely grant that Euro money goes to completely obsolete heavy industries and luxury items rather than technology innovation (and blame all politicians for missing out on technology), but there are outliers like ASML that almost make up for the whole thing...
Choice is - USA or China. And I certainly know in which world I'd rather live.
Can't remember which countries where bombed by China in last 50 years, but I can give you plenty of examples for the USA
2A provides access to weapons. It doesn't allow people to murder one another.
> but where access to food, shelter, healthcare and education are all expensive privileges subject to the whims of the free market,...
Article 1 Section 8 doesn't enumerate Congress the power to provide any of those things.
What's more, I beieve the Federal government shouldn't. Rights should only ever be negative unless being a counterparty to positive action taken by the government (e.g., it makes sense to provide public defenders since it is reactionary to the government trying to take away your rights).
Healthcare, education, etc. are better served by the private sector with charity as the supplement for the less fortunate.
> and where you don't even need the popular vote to elect a President (it's just nice to have) because the electoral system is a series of 18th century compromises to keep slavers happy...
The electorial system is designed to prevent tyranny of the majority and is biased towards inaction. This seems better than a pure democracy to me because most government action is bad: inefficient, introduces moral hazard, etc.
In a system of pure democracy, the bottom 51% can vote to tax the top 49%'s income away. Then the next iteration the new bottom 51% can vote the same. Eventually this could lead to purely even distributions. That seems wildly worse for society: all incentive to produce would be void.
But most of what the government does introduces dead weight to economic transactions or moral hazard. This is especially true when the government tries to provide social benefits beyond taking over a product or service that could perfectly well be provided by the private sector.
I would have little argument against the government regulating that private healthcare providers cannot discriminate on the basis of preexisting conditions. It would increase costs uniformly across the industry. I do have arguments for providing healthcare on the basis of income, as I believe the program would be better served by private charity. Those who argue the contrary do so only because they want to force all citizens to contribute to the private charity (run publically) of healthcare-for-the-poor, because they want to solve someone else's problem but don't want to have to bear the burden themselves.