this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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In fairness, the meme doesn't work all that well in Europe. The "far left" statement is defines centre-left parties here; far left is usually about enforced wealth and income sharing, even if it means imprisoning or mass killings. See Marxist collectivisation efforts, for example.
I wrote a whole 3 paragraph reply to this, but it crashed and now I'm too lazy to write it again.
But yes, this. "Everyone getting UBI and universal healthcare" is not far left. Far left is firebombing pharmaceutical companies or forceable seizure of private property to distribute amongst others, or enforced working arrangements to bring about equality.
What most Americans on Lemmy call "far left", I'd call "basic respect for your fellow man and the compassion to put others before yourself".
We have an Overton window problem here
Yeah the furthest left American politician that has any sort of following is Bernie Sanders. And his basic ideas are let's tax billionaires and give people healthcare. Not exactly revolutionary stuff.
it is in murica lol
Which is why it's so crazy that people in America try the enlightened centrist thing. Our far left is center in many other countries.
Can we stop with the "many other countries" thing and just say Western Europe? We all know you're not referring to India.
you mean excluded literal autocratic dictatorships?
that seems implied
For that matter, even "Western Europe" covers a lot. This argument tends to rest on the overall better social safety net policies of those countries. When it comes to gay marriage, trans rights, abortion, or even racism, many of those western European countries don't survive the comparison looking quite so rosy.
Yes, so a reasonable centrist comes off as a little more left than right - but the failure of the Republican party to retain it's moral center doesn't make the left correct or sane in its thinking.
The key thing is getting out of party mentalities, and getting into well-reasoned positions by identifying and facing your own (personal) fears.
Emotions scale up into collective action - you get a bunch of angry, hateful republicans who haven't dealt with their losses of power and moral authority well, and the whole organization becomes angry and hateful.
You get a bunch of idealistic, unrealistic thinkers who can't help but see themselves as victims, yet can't help but ride the Hate Train when anyone does something that dares to look like it's something bad, or foes against current virtue signaling trends? ..well, that organization also becomes avoidant, irrational, and hateful in its own way. It's just, with all the avoidance, it doesn't have to deny the hate - the people involved genuinely believe they're "the his guys".
Deal primarily with your oen issues, and utilize whatever power you personally have for the best good you can see. That makes me centrist.
Your "far left" are centre-right conservatives by civilized standards.
Tis the bane of my existence that people in the America's tar socialism and communism with the same brush ignoring their own history of market socialist policy creating long periods of stability. That McCarthism is one hell of a drug and they overdosing.
There are plenty of far left people on here, if violent rhetoric is a key indicator. E.g., run into more than a handful of people that clearly assume most white people are white devils that genocide people of color in their spare time and that need to die, who also use the language of social leftism when they’re not spewing hate.
Besides the Overton Window shifting to the right in the US, another problem is defining what is “left”. Does left mean open borders, or does it mean not using migrants as political pawns? Does left mean enforcing secularism in the public sphere, or does it mean bending over backwards with tolerance toward exclusivist minority religious groups who would not return the favor if they gained power? (Does it mean I have to learn how to uptalk and entirely repress myself to the point where I don’t even know what “me” is anymore and only a select few can take me seriously?)
People who push UBI dont understand how economy and incentives work. Here in our EU country, we have universal healthcare and there is also some sort of UBI for a period of time if you were working previously, but lost your job or something. And its definitely not the saving grace people from US picturing it to be...
The public healtcare here is in rumbles and pre-colapse, you either wait for some essential treatments up to a week or you will pay up and go to a private ambulance anyway... The treatment you get are also basically on the bare necessary level. Most hospitals are buildings from soviet era, with minimal up-keeping and modernization... Many of those workers who work in state hospitals are under payed and overworked, so many of the younger ones just get up and go somewhere abroad where they are payed better for the same job. We have the most doctors post retirement age (65) still working (probably oldest average age in the whole world), due to qualified workers shortage, as they mostly leave. And thats the not so nice real picture, of what many of you from US want to implement.
Sure, first it will be nice and great to have free health care, but basically in every country they have it, the service quality slowly getting worse over the decades, as there is no incentive to modernize those hospitals that much, when its free after all, and you pay for it anyway, only that you pay for it with your taxes, so even the option to vote/choose with your wallet is removed from you...
UBI for a period of time is not UBI, it is unemployment insurance.
and having been in Germany/America (privileged, I know) a week? there are Americans waiting MONTHS for essential treatment, fuck Americans routinely die in the ER waiting room. or if they don't have insurance, in front of the parking lot!
yes, the post soviet system is genuinely better than what the Americans have right now, unless your walthy, but those people don't have these types of issues anywhere
I'd much rather wait a week for treatment than the... Currently zero treatment I'm getting right now in the US because I can't afford medical debt and the safety net systems in place repeatedly refuse to help with it.
Dont you pay a health insurance in US ? Because here you pay it and its mandatory - you basically pay it together with income tax, social insurance and health insurance - all directly deduced from your monthly paycheck... So its not like free free healthcare...
Here in America, you pay for insurance so that instead of going bankrupt when you have a baby or break your leg or have a heart attack, you only pay thousands of dollars.
Going to the doctor when sick still costs $500. You get "free" yearly check-ups with our healthcare... Sometimes.
Your healthcare is a lot cheaper compared to that. Ours is cheaper as long as you never get it and never need it.
I am a Canadian with a lot of American friends. I cannot believe how much they spend on healthcare. Here's some of the major issues I've spotted.
Their insurance payments are still higher than what is deducted from my paycheck and theirs doesn't scale with how much they make. Like it's insane the cost of what is being paid for healthcare. It's not a "tax" but it's still money you need to pay for a service that opting out of entirely will mean likely dying by something preventable. When I have been jobless or making so little money as to just scrape by my medical payments have dropped to zero. Theirs has just caused them to take risks by dropping it or forcing them more quickly into debt. Theirs is based out of something closer how many family members need coverage and how personally safe they want to be meaning there are less safe but cheaper options.
There are gaps where private insurance doesn't cover. You get taken accidentally to the wrong hospital in an ambulance you are immediately paying more for "out of network hospitals"
Insurance just covers a deductible, not all services have the same deductible so you can end up very poor for having the wrong kind of health issue. The only thing I have ever paid for in a situation is $100 for a cast. That is what an uninsured person in the US practically pays for an aspirin.
Their healthcare plans are often provided by their work meaning leaving their current jobs often mean putting themselves in financial or physical danger if they want to quit. This makes them more personally exploitable to business as a whole.
Medical coverage is approved or denied by insurance adjusters. These people are NOT doctors and are constantly under pressure to deny anything that isn't highly defensible in a courtroom. This means you essentially have random people informing your available healthcare options which is basically practicing medicine without a licence.
Their hospitals are not faster where it counts. You still get placed in queue for life threatening issues at about the same rate. Emergency rooms, oncology and all the specialists take about the same time. The one place where it's better for timeframes are joint surgeries and elective surgeries.
If you are personally unhappy with the state of your health care then fight to make the funding of it more of a thing and be prepared to chip in. Of course it isn't free. It's not a charity where doctors are just doing side gigs to help out and medical equipment is donated. Everyone gets bent out of shape that "I don't have a choice it's taxed!" but look over the fence and you'll realize how fairly our system is priced and run based on that lack of choice. Like I will never feel as unsafe here as a citizen as my American friends. I literally worry about them so much whenever they are unemployed, travelling to a new city or in the midst of divorces, job transfers or any period of financial instability because it's a sword of Damocles. We need to reinvigorate a pride in doing one's civic duty to pitch in and make things better across the board rather than just "got mine, fuck you." Creating a public good does have cost but you are unprepared for what a private system will charge for the same thing but less safe.
But what are you trying to say at the end? I dont think the US doesn't do any better either, what could be better than both of them?
Not sure what system we need, but a state owned universal healthcare system is definitely not it either...
Question though. Do you know about the budget of your country? Do you know if state healthcare consistently loses funding over time? Or does your country continue to invest in state healthcare and ensure it has everything it needs to function properly?
The healthcare budget for 2023 is 8.1 Billion Euros in our country, from that 6.8 B. are going directly on treating patients, according to our state site.
Clearly, nobody in the US healthcare system has waited for an important appointment for several months. Nope, doesn't happen.
Our system sucks ass even when you can pay for it.
While that may be true to some extent, our "third-world country" healthcare is great once you get through the door. We have competent doctors (some of whom I personally know) who got a great education from our public universities. We also occasionally get modern equipment like the new state-of-the-art sample processing robotics lab that's the size of an apartment. And while one of my relatives has been waiting on an affordable CT scan for some time, it's only because they're literally constructing the building. The system may be limping along, but it's honestly not that bad.
When I saw any self-described leftist call for that level of violence, my gut instinct was that they're a right wing neo-Nazi type trying to make leftists look bad.
I'm starting to really dislike the "left vs right" paradigm, because it's so not enough to describe the variety of positions people hold, and it tends to lead into "us vs them" ways of thinking that are characteristic of fascism anyway.
About which centre-left parties in which countries are you thinking?
Here in Ireland, the Social Democrats. I'd throw Sinn Féin into the same category, but they are more populists than a genuine centre left party. SocDems in other countries in general tend to be the centre-left party that fits the "we want to provide for everyone's basic needs" definition.
Sinn fein for me was always way more left than center.
I agree that social democrats or socialist democrats would fit in the definution given here. However for me in Germany our socialist democratic party went really neoliveral 20 years ago and strayed away from these goals. Now it is a fat left position.
Example: the current chancelor does too little to help with one the basic human needs there is: housing. So at least here centre-left is not trying to reach that.
So the difference between center left and far left is the approach, not the goal?
I'm no political scientist, but I think you are somewhat correct there. The end goal seems to be the old phrase, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." The approach differs, though: cenrte-left is focusing on the later part of the sentence, so each according to his needs. Far-left focuses on the first part, from each according to his ability.
In practice, this translated to "We'll force to work your arse off, and we'll make it illegal for you to keep any merit-based reward for your labour" in the former Eastern Bloc countries. I'm familiar with this, as I grew up in one of those countries. It was illegal to be unemployed, and if you were skilled in any way, you could bet that you'd work long hours for miserable pay, because you've had the "ability".