Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "Comrade Sergei's First Impressions Upon Arrival to the United States in 1995" video.

@T4SelNiNO Okay, a little economics lesson. There is no free healthcare, no free college, no free anything. You either pay for healthcare up front by buying insurance or you pay on the back end with taxes. No one builds a hospital for free and no doctors or nurses work for free. Where exactly do you live?
17
Have you ever actually been to the United States?
13
@T4SelNiNO I see. You actually believe state enterprises in the USSR ever generated enough "surplus labor value" without direct taxation to pay for healthcare at the levels of that available in the US? You know that's not true. Healthcare was provided at only the most basic level, and it was scarcity that that rationed healthcare rather than money. You think the USSR didn't also dispense its share of imperialist pain and suffering? Since you have spent so much time studying Marxist economics and theory, you hate the US, and you hate England, there's a simple cure. Planes leave every day for the worker's paradise. I suggest you take the chance to live there for a couple years and see what your attitude is then. I don't think the Jeremy and the rest of you Labour Marxists are going to succeed in turning Britain into the kind of place you want to live.
11
@T4SelNiNO It's a little hard to tell what the real industrial output was in any year under Stalin due to well known issues of corruption and data manipulation. It absolutely didn't surpass the combined output of the US, UK, France and Germany in 1933. The only reason it even came close to Germany was the effects of the Depression hit Western countries before it affected the USSR. I'll need your citation to discuss that further since I can't find any data to back up that claim. We know for certain that the USSR's GNP, a much better measure of economic health than industrial output, didn't surpass Germany before WWII, and the Soviet's GNP of $75 Billion in 1938 was 20% less than the combined numbers of France and the UK. Add in the US and the GNP is about 60% less. I think you'd do better abandoning the Stalinist economic position that the USSR of 1939 was somehow orders of magnitudes better than the Western powers. We have enough real numbers since the fall of the Soviet Union to know that most of those claims were pure Stalinist propaganda. The chart at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Soviet_Union#/media/File:Soviet_Union_USSR_GDP_per_capita.png gives a relaistic picture of the historic Russian and Soviet economy. Bernie doesn't really understand what democratic socialism means. He has never been in favor of state ownership of the means of production except in limited cases. That's a bedrock principle of socialism. and anyone skirting the issue either doesn't understand socialism or is trying to sneak it in through the back door. He's really in favor of wealth redistribution without any of the precursor things needed to make it even slightly equitable. He just hates the wealthy and thinks taking their money and giving it to people who "need" it is reasonable. Rather ironic for a guy who lives in a million dollar house and has a net worth between $3 and $5 million. He has never held a private sector job. He has been a member of Congress for 28 years. In all that time, he has had exactly two bills he sponsored become law, and one was renaming a post office. I think he's a decent guy, but I doubt he'd be any more effective as president than he has been as a legislator.
10
That was quite an introduction to the US. Americans really are generally friendly.
4
@joek600 First, the 2008-2009 economic crisis wasn't caused only by Lehman. The crisis was already in progress, and they happened to be the weakest link in banks lending on subprime mortgages. The US certainly has an economically inefficient healthcare system today, but universal healthcare carries its own burdens of inefficiency. Spreading the cost to all means the young and people otherwise healthy subsidize the care of the elderly and unhealthy. The really poor already have free care. Medicaid covers some of the costs, and doctors and hospital eat the rest. The economically well off can pay for their own care. It's the people in the middle we need to cover. Rather than change our entire system, something Obamacare has shown is fraught with peril, we can do some simple things we aren't doing, like allowing health insurance to be sold across state lines. We'd introduce real competition, drive down costs, and provide better coverage, much like what happens with auto insurance now. I'm in favor of trying things like that before we get into rationing healthcare through scarcity, the inevitable result of single payer systems.
4
@T4SelNiNO I have the data that's behind that graph. I can find it if you want it. The data comparing one country to another, although it may not be exact, shows clearly the differences in relative GNP over the years. In a country like the USSR, industrial output isn't a good measure of the real economy. Five year plans dictated the output, not need or demand, so you could have massive increases in materials and finished goods because workers that would otherwise be put on more productive jobs were switched to ones to meet the goals of the plan. For example, there was a goal to produce a million caterpillar type farm tractors in 1935. That was about 700,000 more than had ever been produced in a year. Stalin made it clear this was "really" important goal, s workers from the gulags and other political prisoners were marshalled to make tractors. They reached the goal, but some were wooden mockups for photographic purposes and about 30% of them ran around the factory long enough to be filmed before the engines seized from poorly ground valves, bad pistons, and just general build quality failures. They all had to repaired over the next two years, and the repaired units were counted as new. Now, do your really think counting industrial production in a country like Stalin's USSR should be done uncritically? BTW, I hope I'm not talking with an unrepentant Stalinist. I don't particularly like Trump but, compared to Hillary, he's not out to sell the country down the river, start a war with Russia, and I do think he's a patriot that can get things done. I'm sympathetic to Bernie for some of the plans he thinks are socialist and really aren't, but I just know he won't accomplish anything. Trump is 71 and will be five months away from 73 in January, 2021. Bernie is 77 so he'll be about eight months from 79 in the same month and year. I've been to both of their rallies. Trump is very energetic for his age for the one hour timespan he was on stage. Bernie...well, Bernie looked like he was ready for a nap after about 10 minutes. Corbin isn't far behind at 69. We have a bunch of old politicians to choose from. Lest someone think I'm ragging on old people, I turned 73 four days ago, and I know what my energy level is like. :-)
2
@joek600 You don't think the government aren't past masters at "corruption, inefficiancy and criminaly high rates"? The difference is private insurers are always looking to expand market share by cutting prices and improving coverage and services, and something like the NHS has no incentive to any of that, just get by on whatever the government says they have to do. My complete physical last year was $5, and I pay an extra $37 a month for a gold plated medicare plan that covers almost everything. Even the NHS isn't completely free. There are treatments and medications you still have to pay for, but the chief method of cutting costs is to have long queues for your free care while having an inadequate staff of doctors and other professionals see as many people as possible every day. Up to you if you like that system. And of course i want the cost of defense spread to every taxpayer, just like the cost of police fire protection. Those services could be needed at any time by almost everyone, there's no means testing, and you don't get better or worse service based on health conditions or age.
2