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Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

I'd be very hesitant to throw out so many of the fundamentals that made America into what it has been for the last couple centuries.

The goal, at least here, is to expect individuals to mostly take care of themselves rather than depending in the state or some other authority to do it for them.

Universal healthcare, guaranteed indefinite severance, universal childcare, etc are completely antithetical to our system. Maybe the majority is ready and willing to throw that old system out, but if so we need to do it by focusing on the fundamentals rather than getting distracted with higher level implementation details.

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you mean that system that has created the most wealth inequality in many decades if not ever?

Yet people risk their lives to go in illegally. Something doesn't track.

Its because, inequality is not the problem.

The problem is the ability to move between income levels. That coefficient used to the highest in the US. Rich people could and did go poor. Poor people could be rich.

That index was always the highest by far in the US, but now its decreasing. That's the real issue.

It can be simultaneously true that the US has a serious wealth inequality problem (and other serious problems), and that other countries have problems far more severe, causing people to want to relocate to the US.

i recommend investigating what the root causes are for most the undocumented immigrants coming into the US and why their countries are destabilized (hint: the cause rhymes with Shamerica)

Empires often create increasing wealth inequality as they begin to fail, that's not unique to the US.

> Universal healthcare, guaranteed indefinite severance, universal childcare, etc are completely antithetical to our system.

I don't see how that follows. How is your system that different from e.g. the UK, which manages to have all of those things (severance is not indefinite and is unemployment).

Unless I'm drastically misinformed, the UK is dealing with a mountain of issues including immigration, economic problems, and quality of the healthcare being provided.

First of all, are those problems you would say do not exist in the US?

And if that's the case, I'd disagree. But would any of those problems be somehow explained by the differences between the British and American systems? Especially when countries with very different systems (like all of continental Western Europe), and the US, have then too.

Many (all?) of those problems do exist in the US as well. My point, though, was that the US was historically based on ideas that don't align with welfare programs. I only raise the issues in the UK because you were comparing the two and it seemed important to note that though the UK has many welfare programs, it isn't going well for them currently.

Toy original point, the US was based on individual freedoms and rights that simply didn't exist in the monarchical UK system. For much of the US's history the, albeit politically idealized, expectation was that you come here and make your own way. We didn't have a feudal system and didn't depend on a monarch to run many details of our daily life. We have seen more and more of that creep into the American system over the last century or so though, and yes we are coincidentally also running into many of the same issues seen in more socialist European countries today.

> We didn't have a feudal system and didn't depend on a monarch to run many details of our daily life.

Neither were the British by the time the American revolution started.

I don't see much difference in the personal opportunities and rights between post-independence US and industrial Britain. Apart from, you know, the US having slaves with no rights nor opportunities.

The British absolutely was a monarchy during the American revolution.

The British don't have a right freedom of speech, for example. They gave been arresting and charging people for social media posts.

We're getting way off on a tangent here though. The original point you were commenting on was that welfare programs, including those the US already has, don't fit in the model the US was original founded on and operated under for a majority of the time the country has existed.

You are mistaken. Socialism (or the streams of thought that would eventually become socialism) have always been a part of American culture. Perhaps most famously Thomas Paine advocated for a universal basic income.

Thomas Paine's writing, especially Common Wealth, inspired many of the revolutionaries but he had no direct role in the country and we never implemented his UBI. Its also worth noting that his writings themselves were fiction, he invented a past to paint a picture of how he wanted the future to look.

What socialist type programs can you point to in the US, say before the New Deal?

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