Jason Y wrote:
In fact, a Chinese that I knew in Saipan (who loathed Americans), was always bitching, saying “In China, we don’t have social welfare.”
Well, even though he’s a dickhead, he was right. Americans are pampered by the social welfare system, which gives them an edge over most of the world’s population.
Well in China I think you always have a job. Not sure about that. But a lot of the rural people have moved to the cities because you can make more money there. Apparently a lot of them are unemployed. However, it is illegal to be homeless in China. If you are homeless, they will pick you up and put you in some sort of a hostel type place in the city, or if you are from a rural area, they will just send you back to the rural area.
If you can’t find a job in the city, you can always just move back to the country. Everyone has a little farm back there, and yep, it is quite enough to survive. So it looks like China always lets you live. Also a tremendous number of people continue to work in public enterprises. It is not so easy to get fired from those jobs. And all education is completely free. You can go walking around anywhere you want in China in the wilder areas because there is no private property! The state owns all the land. All the wild land you see in China is owned by the state or by the people. You can go tramp around or I suppose hike or camp out there all you want and no one will bother you.
I suppose you can even walk onto people’s farms because there are no privately owned farms. All farmland is owned by the state.
Under Mao they had free health care, but that bastard Deng and his successors got rid of that when they abolished the village communes in the rural areas. For a long time, all health care used to cost money, and a lot of people were dying from lack of healthcare. Now they have a state insurance program that pays 85% of your expenses, but I understand that it is rather expensive and out of reach to most people.
Nobody starves in China. There’s always enough food for everyone.
So he is not really right that there is no social welfare in China. It is still very much a socialist country.
All normal advanced decent countries have fairly extensive welfare states. It goes with the territory of being a wealthy country. Many backwards and barbaric do not have good social welfare systems. The Right wants to get rid of the welfare state in the US. What that means is that they want turn the US into a backwards, barbaric Third World shithole. Or perhaps a wealthy version of a Banana Republic if you will.
So a welfare state is a sign of a healthy and prosperous people. A lack of one is a sign of a people who are backwards, barbaric and probably poor.
As always, it boils down to a choice between socialism and barbarism, just like Rosa said.
