So much for "enlightened policies". We knew this was the case all the time around; now we have Obama being unapologetic about it. He wants to turn the United States into another socialist country. In his own words,
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"The test of our progress is not whether we add to the abundance of those who have much. It is whether we provide enough to those who have little.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt
"No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country"
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Pablo,
This is so easy to refute, that I am surprised that you brought it up. I have no choice but to repeat myself :D. Using the words of a maxed-out Obama supporter who is a well respected (and Pulitzer Prize winner) Stanford historian, David M Kennedy,
"He also unleashes some convention-shattering theses, such as his revelation that "the most responsible students of the events of 1929 have been unable to demonstrate an appreciable cause-and-effect linkage between the Crash and the Depression" and his subsequent argument that, although it made order out of chaos, the New Deal did not reverse the Depression--that, he says, was the war's doing"
So, yeah, people in the US fear socialism for a reason. New Deal, Great Society are names of socialist policies that not only have been tried unsuccessfully in the past in the US but they have increased dramatically the size of the Federal Government unnecessarily.
Last, I am glad that you seem to implicitly agree that Obama's economic policies are pure European-style socialism.
I have one question for you though. How do you explain that socialist Europe being so great and capitalist American so bad, the number of EU and Canadian citizens who come to the US in search of better opportunities is significantly higher than the number of Americans who go to either Canada or the EU searching for better jobs. As a matter of fact, and this is my own personal experience for what it is worth, I have yet to meet a single American who decided to emigrate to Canada or the EU searching for BETTER opportunities. I've known Americans who like the EU's decadence, food, better place for vacation, etc, but not a single one who sees the EU (or Canada) as a better place for having a career. As a matter of fact, the number of British citizens who immigrate to the US each year is so high that British citizens do no qualify for the Greencard Diversity Lottery,
"For DV-2010, natives of the following countries are not eligible to apply because the countries sent a total of more than 50,000 immigrants to the U.S. in the previous five years:
BRAZIL, CANADA, CHINA (mainland-born), COLOMBIA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, ECUADOR, EL SALVADOR, GUATEMALA, HAITI, INDIA, JAMAICA, MEXICO, PAKISTAN, PHILIPPINES, PERU, POLAND, SOUTH KOREA, UNITED KINGDOM (except Northern Ireland) and its dependent territories, and VIETNAM. "
Fernando,
Regarding your initial paragraphs, are you really questionning the president that according to all rankings (including very conservative ones like Wall Street Journal) is either the best president of the USA or second after Lincoln, or third after Lincoln and Washington?
You really have guts to question every single scholar and newspaper in the country.
You have a very distorted image of the americans if you think that they do not hold Franklin D. Roosevelt in the highest standard.
Good luck convincing americans that Roosevelt is a dangerous commie!
Regarding your second thoughts about inmigration, the answer is purely cultural and a lot of it derives from the Second World War.
First of all, each european nation has a different culture, which means that just travelling the same distance as from SFO to LA you change languages and cultures. That means that we are very used to move to a completely different culture, which is not the case in the US, where culture is uniform across the continent.
Secondly, the americans are very proud of their own country. Nationalism in the US is considered a good thing all across the political spectrum. Europeans on the other hand have very recent memories of the second world war where the nationalism of Germans destroyed the whole Europe. Not only that, but most of the european nations have seen the rise and fall of their empires. So for the europeans being too nationalist is actually a bad thing, it is much better considered to be open to the virtues of other cultures than to defend your own. That means that many americans follow the mentality of "Why travel when you have the paradise in your back yard?" (which by the way I have been told that phrase literally twice in the last two years by two different people) while Europeans love jumping from one culture to another, and they do not mind giving a big jump.
Finally, the last problem is the language. Given the dominance of english in science since the fall of german in the second world war, every european knows how to speak english (or at least enough to start) while precisely that dominance has made that americans put very little emphasis in learning correctly other languages. Most of them take many years of Spanish but they barely know a couple of words once they finish their undergrad, which makes it very hard to emigrate to any country but the UK, Belgium or the Netherlands.
By the way, don't you think that your last list kind of destroys your point? Only the UK and Poland have sent a significant number of inmigrants to the US (50.000 in 5 years) in the last five years.
Today McCain fell another two points in the Gallup poll, he is down to 41%. I think that your terrorist-commie strategy is really working very well. I am looking forward for the dinner you have to pay me.
Pablo,
On the first point, you are mixing things. I don't question that Roosevelt was a good president, I am questioning his economic proposals. If you check those rankings, Roosevelt place as one of the top 3 presidents in US history (together with George Washinton and Lincoln) is due mostly to his role in World War II. Again David M Kennedy puts it best in this 2004 article when he speaks about Roosevelt and socialism
"That is a worthy ambition. But the sad fact is that it hasn't been realized through more than two centuries of the nation's history. Roosevelt's unfinished revolution may be destined to stay unfinished, for reasons embedded in our history and values. The ''pernicious individualism'' that so upsets Sunstein runs deep in American culture. It may or may not be pernicious, but it surely continues to make us who we are."
I keep using David M Kennedy because of his dual position as one of foremost experts in Roosevelt and his status as maxed-out Obama donor. I am still astonished that his head hasn't exploded yet.
Regarding your disertation about why you think people keep coming to the US, I don't find it very convincing. Several weak points:
1- I disagree with your diagnosis about the "openness" of Europeans. It's true that there are continued efforts by the EU and the different EU goverments to create some kind of "European identity". But alas, when you don't know what that identity is supposed to mean, it ends up meaning nothing. While many Europeans travel to other countries for pleasure, each country is and remains mostly very closed culturally to foreigners, be them form the EU or not. During the 2000s, several European countries whitnessed the resurgence of anti-immigrant political forces with significant representation in their respective countries: Jean Marie Le Pen in France, the late Haidder in Austria, the late Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands... European countries continue to be fueled by ethnic nationalism.
2- I think that you confuse Nationalism with Patriotism. And although what you say about Europe's past is true, Europeans have only themselves to blame: the different European powers have proved the world that the only way they know how to live in harmony is if each of them is so weakened militarily that it poses no threat to its neighbors.
3- Still I am not convinced. If there was pressure to get out of the US, people would learn the language. Besides, English has the status of official language in both Canada and the UK and we don't see a flux of Americans to those countries, not even by those who threatened to go to Canada if Bush won a second term.
Regarding the eligibility for the DV lotery, that's just an example. I'll give you another. The 2000 census listed ~ 360000 Spaniards living in the US (note that those are different from those who claim "Spanish" ancestry or Hispanic ancestry who are listed separately). On the other hand you have ~ 100000 Americans living in Spain. It's a no brainer that the migratory pressure is from Spain to the US, not the other way around. A similar analysis could be made with the US and every single EU country and Canada. Simply put, the myth that Western Europe is heaven and that the US is hell is just that, a myth because the migration patterns point to the opposite conclusion: more Western Europeans and Canadians (both in absolute and relative terms) find it more attractive to come to the US than Americans find those countries attractive. And that's what it's a stake.
Finally, on te dinner. I give you that last week was a very rough one for McCain, but I am not giving up yet. A new Gallup poll for USA Today (which is different from the tracking poll you mention but still done by Gallup) shows a smaller margin, 5-6 points. The article also mentions that voters don't trust Obama by and overwhelming margin on the economy; it also mentions that Ronald Reagan was able to reverse a 3 point lead by Carter. Given that the markets seem to have bottomed, there might be an October surprise after all :D.
So Pablo is from Europe... That makes sense. I suspected that was a condescending tone from the land of condescending laggards...
Yes, Pablo is from Spain. Isn't that obvious?
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