MatrixAlgebra

They don't say "no" unqualified. They say the focus of the site is to build a knowledge repository, rather than being as nice as humanly possible.

Complaints about SE "toxicity" seem far overblown. If someone doesn't take the absolute most possible and delicate care in disagreeing with someone else, that's not "toxic".

There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of Spanish speaking people and families living in LA, NYC, Miami etc. Many business in the area offer their services in Spanish, and there are enough entertainment options in Spanish that there isn't much of a need to learn English to get by day to day.

Bad idea.

A steady trickle of immigrants is much better because then it forces cultural integration, especially when the immigrants do not speak English. A flood of immigrants will lead to a nation divided among cultural lines without the possibility of integration because the cultural bubbles will have already been established.

We should focus on helping impoverished nations develop, so people don't have to leave from their birth countries to find comfort.

For most it is. For some it is not.

Everything you say (except for the bit about me being willfully ignorant or an asshole) is true.

The solution to the problem is getting people to be realistic about their prospects. Guidance counselors play a role in this solution. So do parents. And the students themselves.

But the solution absolutely does not involve raising taxes to pay for everyone to go to college.

So essentially:

You're trying to argue that forcing the entire population to pay for college education for everyone is justifiable even when the people going to college may study subjects or intend to enter fields that have very poor financial prospects or lack productive value for the society as a whole.

As opposed to....

A system in which people have the freedom to decide for themselves how to allocate their own financial resources based on their career goals and not use other people's money to fund 4 years of useless study (if they study a useless subject)?

You have a very skewed understanding of what is fair and justifiable.

If people make poor financial and educational decisions, that's on them. Don't punish the rest of society by forcing it to foot the bill for someone else's foolishness.

The sad thing is, Europeans will be the indentured servants for the rest of their lives because of the depressed wages they'll have to endure and the high taxes they'll have to pay.

The information is available to them, they have no one to blame but themselves. It is not the duty of the taxpayer to fund poor decision making.

That's one of the major philsophical differences between the US and Europe: people must take responsibility for themselves and their own lives.

The problem with free education is that as more people become educated, the signaling effect of education becomes diluted. So the Europeans are paying for something that decreases in real value the more that people have access to it. That's a self defeating policy, especially since it encourages people to remain in academia for significantly longer than they would otherwise, because hey, it's paid for by the taxpayer.

Someone earning a second Master's degree in Russian literature is not a productive use of taxpayer money.

In the US by contrast, people are able to make decisions for themselves about how to educate themselves because loans are widely available and are just a tax on their future income. If they want to pursue a high income career, they will take out a loan to cover educational expenses since it makes financial sense to do so. If their desired career is less lucrative, they will not take out more loans than absolutely necessary, freeing that money up to be put towards more profitable projects in the broader economy.

This article fails to understand the true costs of European economic arrangements.

Let's consider healthcare. Often touted as an example of how much "better" Europe (and Canada, etc) is than the US, consider:

1. Wait times are often much greater in countries with socialized medicine and this has serious implications: in Canada between 1993 and 2009, around 40,000 people died as a result of increased wait times due to socialized medicine. [1]

2. The US has "significantly lower rates of 30-day-stroke-induced mortality than every other OECD country aside from Japan and Korea". [1]

3. Cancer survival rates in the US are equivalent to or higher than in similarly developed nations. [1]

Furthermore, let's consider the places where innovation in medicine is most robust.

European nations do not get cheaper drugs for free. That is to say, there is a real cost for the price ceilings and controls imposed on the European healthcare sector in the form of reduced ability for European forms to produce new drugs and therapies which has real implications for future mortality rates.

The US, by contrast, has become an engine of growth for the healthcare sector owing to its free(r) market.

Among the US to France, Germany, Switzerland, Japan and the UK, the US share of drug discovery (based on inventing company headquarter location) has increased from 31% from 1971-1980 to 57% from 2001-2010. This clear upward trend will likely continue for US innovation as European nations grapple with rising healthcare costs by continuing to clamp down on the free market. [2]

If the US were to adopt a European approach, it's likely that drug discovery and innovation would collapse and as a result many millions of people in the future who would have been saved by novel therapies would instead have to suffer death at the hands of the socialistic stranglehold on innovation.

This is not to say the US is perfect or that it is always better than Europe, but it is to say that discussions of the merits of US vs European healthcare often fail to capture nuanced facts and realities that cannot be ignored. European healthcare may be more available to European citizens, but it is in general of lower quality (given wait times) than comparable US healthcare. And the US, through its free market approach, has become the global engine of healthcare innovation which directly benefits other nations who have shunned free market principles in healthcare.

[1]: https://www.google.com/amp/s/fee.org/articles/if-american-he...

[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/05/16/sure-w...