After having lived in a couple of those other countries and experiencing, first hand, what it is like to live under the different senarios I can state that the US is decidedly the best. Primarily for one reason "checks and balances in the US system". Having the Senate elected as here versus having it appointed by the majority party as in Canada makes a HUGE difference in fairness across a whole country. Probably the best form of government now is capitalist with government as watchdog. Here again the checks and balances are vital. I lived one place where the socialist highway system got so bad that it had to be privatised. There the state owned the highways but contracted the maintainance and building and then the state oversaw the quality of the work. That system worked much better but checks and balances were still the key. In some ways I enjoyed socialized medicine but the abuses were rampant. People checking their kids into the hospital for the weekend so they could go on a bender. This was no isolated incident but endemic. The hospitals were always so full that you had to go out of the country for elective surgery(in this case elective meant not life threatening). A friend, a serious heart patient, moved and was told there were no doctors in his location who could take new patients, so he had to drive about 400 miles each way to see his old doctor for nearly a year. The most discouraging thing about socialism is the defeatist attitude that overcomes the everyday people in time. I noticed this when I lived in those countries but now friends that still live there are really noticing the depression in their fellow citizens. They feel taxed beyond reason and see no hope of ever being any better off. I guess hopeless best describes their attitude. After living in these countries and being responsible for organizations that work in several more I am firmly committed to fight socialism with everything I have for the rest of my life. Capitalism is the only way but there has to be a watchdog system which itself has to be watched.
Sounds to me like this is pretty close to what we have in America anyway. At their crux, Repubicans are capitalistic while Democrats are socialistic. What this creates is a precarious teeter-totter whenever the oval office changes hands, and everyone gets tired of riding without even realizing it. We have all figured out by now the economy is perception. The Clinton administration created the perception of a stable - if not booming - economy just by him showing up at the SOU Address every year and saying everything was great, while implementing high-end taxes most people don't see or hear about anyway, dangerously depleting the military, then dumping the resulting money into social programs and public schools who were staffed by people who weren't qualified or equipped to manage this money. In the meantime, the bulk of the workforce at the bottom of the scale were kept just happy enough by strategically implemented minimum-wage increases so they thought things didn't suck as bad as they did (even though they still couldn't afford health care), the middle class were quieted with substantially boosted IRA incentives that places like the WSJ jumped on and preached for years, and enough illusionary money and opportunity existed to directly inspire minor things like the dot-com boom/bust, Enron, and Comcast. Now enter GWB whose election inspired a brief stock upswing (as placing a new Republican in office historically does), stood up and said the economy actually did suck, then disappeared to let the election controversy die down while Cheney took the brunt of the limelight and the rest of the administration devised a plan to cut back all these bloated programs Clinton put in place. Then, much as I hate to use this benchmark, 9/11 happened. Like magic, there was now a hyper-valid reason to pump lots more money into the military (and resulting defense contracts), new agencies were rushed into their creation without any clear purpose while the FBI suddenly figured out it was understaffed and needed more money also, the already nearly-bankrupt airline industry was forced to actually justify all the money they were previously mismanaging, and the American public did their best to act like they weren't wringing their hands while high end investors perched and acted on Greenspan's every twitch. The scenario is readily explained once you realize most of this is caused by each political party reacting to what the other did previously - once someone finally acheives enough political clout to react, that is. This is one reason I'm firmly convinced we need a strong third political party in this country. Right now the only Rep/Dem mediation happens by bouncing their respective flaws against each other until they either seem to disappear or explode.
Apparently you are writing this from a far off land and being helped by a translator. Come to America and find out how far from the truth this statement is. Peace, RS
welo-I agree with everything you said except the need for a third party. I too once held this view until I lived in a basically two party country that had a minority third party. The problem occurs when the third party allies with one of the two major parties but can dictate to that party nearly everything it wants because with it's few votes it holds the reins of power to make either major party the in or out party. What happens is that the third party can be either right or left very far and put through some very bad things because of this leverage. It sounds good and should be but it just doesn't work out that way. The republic form of government is fairest to all concerned. A true democracy is bad if you are on the minority side for a long time.
I keep hearing variations of this rebuttal, and for years the most popular one has been that the Democrats are more likely to lose votes to a third party, making the Republicans more likely to surreptitiiously back third party candidates. There is very little statistical information to back this up, however. The stats from the last Presidential election show no discrepency between the popular and electoral vote, and are quite consistent with who would have won anyway. Even if you add all of Nader's votes to Gore, Gore still lost the popular vote and those corresponding states, regardless of potentially detracting Green party votes. F.ex. Nevada 301,575 Bush, 279,978 Gore, 15,008 Nader (279,978 + 15,008 = 294,986, or Gore 6,589 behind, even if you give him Nader's votes). The only real potential disparity was Florida, and we'll prolly never figure out what really went on there. With a 537 popular vote lead for Bush and 25 electoral votes at stake, someone conveniently misplacing one ballot box would have done the trick. However, I must admit how the Green Party doesn't exactly turn my crank either. They have some pretty good standpoints and potential solutions to various issues, yet seem to deter their own momentum due to lack of congruency in their candidates. Plus the name just really sucks . As to what extent this scenario has worked to the detriment of other countries I can't really say, since I was in the military while I lived in other countries and there wasn't exactly time or incentive to keep track of local politics. If you could provide a concrete historical example or two it'd be nice. I cast an eye northward to Canada's 5-party system and they seem to get along ok.
Canada is a great study in the three or now five party system. It is however influenced by the French seperatist problem which dominates much of its politics. There is a very deep split between east and west and a lot of hard feelings in the west. Several years ago it used to be a two party system and they were both somewhat middle of the road. Then along came the NDP which was pure socialist and the Liberals had to appease the NDP to stay in power but the NDP pulled the Liberals further left and then the So. Creds. had to go farther right to offset the balance. The Liberals have dominated national politics now for a long time and the west, which is more conservative, has really been given a bad deal. They could help the situation by allowing the Senate to be elected with each province having the same number of Senators but the power in the east will never allow that to happen and end their complete dominance. They have voted once on seperation and there are rumblings of that happening again. The many people I work with in the west are very depressed and feel taxed and abused by the east. They are perplexed as to what party could save them and turn things around. The NDP was elected in BC for several years until they drove nearly all private business away and then a year or two ago they where totally thrown out. Even in the US the constituencies that make up the Democrats are pulling them farther and farther left. You mention the Green party and I'm sure that to keep them from running a third candidate the Dems have to move a little left. Our founding fathers really had it right to form a republic with lots of checks and balances. Live and operate somewhere else and it is easy to see their wisdom.