08.16.12
A swell directs you to the back of your hand
One of the swells at the New York Times tells us what we already know — European countries endure higher taxation than the US, have better standards of living, better health, a bigger social safety net, and aren’t all psychotically resentful over a paranoid belief brown people are coming for their money.
Excerpted, or what the swell found when his kid got sick on vacation in Italy:
There is something to be said for universal health care systems. (Ain’t that just the best lede, ever?)
When my son developed a rash on an Italian vacation in Liguria (beach resort area for the toffs and their shoeshiners) last month, the pharmacist showed me to the doctor downstairs, who diagnosed the problem at no charge and sent me off with a handshake and a joke about a daughter in med school at the University of California, San Diego …
Every developed country aspires to provide a better life for its people. The United States, among the richest of all, fails in important ways. It has the highest poverty and the highest infant mortality among developed nations. We provide among the least generous unemployment benefits in the industrial world …
Citizens of most industrial countries have demanded more public services as they have become richer. And they have been by and large willing to pay more taxes to finance them … The big exception has been the United States.
No wonder we can’t afford to keep more children alive …
Alberto Alesina, an Italian-born economist at Harvard, contrasts American individualism rooted in the belief that effort brings success with Europeans’ belief in state redistribution — born of Europe’s long history of inherited wealth. Americans who think they have a fair shot at striking it rich vote against high taxes on their expected future wealth. (When can we drive a stake through this one? The inner delusion that progressive taxation of the wealthy is bad because I, too, might someday be part of the club and don’t want to piss the noblemen off.) Europeans who believe wealth is mostly a matter of luck and connections are less resistant to paying taxes for collective welfare.
Ten years ago, the sociologist William Julius Wilson wrote that American whites rebelled against welfare because they saw it as using their hard-earned taxes to give blacks “medical and legal services that many of them could not afford for their own families.???
Of course, only the swell knows this because the rest of us don’t have the telling anecdote about the poxy kid who was treated gratis on the Mediterranean coast, saving the vacation.