Agreed. It's hard to believe that so many Americans are stupid enough to believe that we can afford to use our tax dollars to pay for everyone's college tuition, plus cell phones, cars, homes, health insurance, etc for half the population at the expense of the other half. I guess that as long as we cannot give everyone "free" tuition, these people will have to spend 18 hours a day every day on dozens of internet forums pretending to be either doctors, missionaries, globetrotting oil company execs, investors, etc with homes all over the country and the world. Maybe with free education they'll eventually learn to use a different username with each different personality per forum - particularly on the gay dating sites.
Well, other countries afford it. IMHO how you pay for something is not directly attached to how much you pay for it. For example every social democracy in the world gets their health care for less than the US, which is the world's most expensive at 14% of GDP, even despite many people not being covered in a comprehensive way (or at all). On the flip side the treatment available for the super-wealthy go further here than anywhere else. You either take money through fee, or you take them by tax. You either have a good system, or a bad one. There are socialist countries with great systems that provide high quality education at no or little cost (Scandanavia, New Zealand, Scotland) and there are ones with no functional school system at all. The same can be said of purely capitalist countries. Then there are intermediate one like the US where pre-tertiary education is available free or cheap and post-tertiary is wildly expensive. That is a mixed socialist/capitalist system. And I am not sure of your last point. Yes I am a forum wh*re, but I still have a 100% genuine PhD on my wall that I got for under $5000 fees in one of those darned socialist countries. It kick-started a career that has let me amuse myself living in four different countries and seeing how despite differences in political system they are all actually pretty much the same. These thing matter less at a sociological level than most people seem to think.
Socialism is something that scares the wealthy people everywhere because it is a system where everything should be equally spread in the society as a whole. So, the rich won't get richer and poor won't get poorer. Quite the opposite. Even though that is not very probable the thought of socialism brings about notions that are not welcome to the cream of society in America. My country felt the power of socialist regime and it was fake enough to destroy whatever was there to be destroyed.
Out of those two I actually do like the idea of free education and free (or cheap) healthcare. Both of those can EASILY be accomplished. Easily. At least with the way things are in Europe, I don't know the US budget too well but I'm guessing if you would just cut off things like foreign aid you could already offer free education. Many many many European countries are already doing this, and yes their budgets are starting to look like crap but that is not because of these things, it's other stupid stuff. (such as some of the things you mentioned above)
While I understand that Americans (and most Europeans) do not seem to understand the differences between Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, or Communism...people who support any of these varieties of a dictatorship and wholesale slaughter of innocents if decided upon have apparently forgotten how Socialist and Communist dictators of the past (in any variant construct) have done just that. They don't seem to recall how Bolsheviks tortured and killed 80 to 100 million people in Russia for the simple crime of being a white European, Christian, and a burden to the system that no longer wanted them to work for or be alive to see it any longer. These people today don't seem to understand that free things have to come at someone else's expense, and if it is given by a government, a dictatorship, or any other method of control, then that government claims ownership over the recipients in ways which invalidate their humanity and rights as a living being. People are inviting this upon themselves; inviting a debasement, a living standard below the poverty line that places one on par with Ethiopia and other regions unable to feed, clothe, or keep people alive. It isn't that these people are not able to feed the world or take care of them...it's the fact that people are so easily mislead into thinking that they would, the riches and military power are transfered in exponential rates out of the hands of each subclass, until there is no wealth, or food, or medical help, or safety, or anything else left except to those in the protected class at the top who convinced others to give up any amount of what they had for a lie. The children and adults of today are in a precarious and dangerous position because they are not aware of their history, what transpired in that history, and who died and sacrificed themselves (be them civilian, military, or other) so that people, families, friends, and others may escape those places and conditions. America is not a socialist country. America is not a communist country. America is not a democracy, either. America is a republic, and although every other place and people of the world seem to want to change that, those same people are the first in line to come here to escape what their country has become and the conditions it has now thanks to socialism or communist dictators. If it was so great, then why are they swimming through trenches, digging holes underground, hiding in trunks of cars and trying to jump fences to escape it? Maybe socialist is such a bad word to those who know what it means because...tada! it is!
Go look up the Red Scare. People in America equate Socialism to the Soviets and Americans generally do not want big government. Americans have no concept of "Democratic Socialism" that is prevalent in Europe.
One of the problems is that most Americans do not travel. Going to Disney in Florida is their idea of world travel. They do not understand that there is a reason why the USA is 28th in the world in education and why healthcare is so expensive here. They simply have no experience with how it works in other countries. It is ego, they simply cannot imagine that someone, somewhere does it better. We are 28th in the world in education, and they think adding a few more charter schools will make the difference.
I honestly think that the problem is with most Americans being completely afraid of any sort of change. If they think anything is going to happen that goes against a single thing they are use to, they throw a fit.
Maybe because Americans always equate socialism with communism, which unfortunately has been implemented haphazardly by despotic if not power-hungry rulers across time. Alexander Pope had branded it as the "equal share of miseries" as opposed to capitalism, which he considered as an "unequal move of blessings." The principles behind such an ideology are great but because of wrongful interpretations by rulers with nothing but their self-interests in mind, the word socialism now leaves a sour taste in many people's mouths.
