In article <
[email protected]>,
"G.T." <
[email protected]> wrote:
> Tim McNamara wrote:
>
> > "G.T." <[email protected]> writes:
> >>Mark Hickey wrote:
> > You seem to think that homelessness is unique to the United States or
> > even to capitalism. It is not. If you're going to argue the liberal
> > perspective, at least do so with intellectual honesty rather than
> > setting up straw men.
> With capitalism and privatization homelessness increases:
> Example of a fairly social country:
>
> "Using this method of counting, in week 16 of 1999 there were 8,440
> homeless people in Sweden."
>
> Sweden's population in 1999: 8,911,000
>
> .09 percent homeless.
>
>
> USA:
>
> "An estimated 3.5 million people are likely to experience homelessness
> in a given year"
>
> USA population in 2000: 290,000,000
>
> A whopping 1.2%!
>
> Greg
Argh. You made me grab my copy of P.J. O'Rourke's _Eat the Rich: A
Treatise on Economics_ so I could look up a quote.
P. 69, from the essay "Good Socialism":
A Scandinavian economist once proudly said to free-market advocate
Milton Friedman, "In Scandinavia we have no poverty." And Milton
Friedman replied, "That's interesting, because in America among
Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either."
Now, just stopstopstop! Homelessness is bad, but it is hardly fair to
blame it on capitalism. There's a good case to be made that "Great
Society" policies of the 1960s had much more to do with the worst
oddities of American society than anything that happened on Wall Street.
There's a good case to be made that only Sweden could make the Swedish
social model work, for a variety of reasons. But given the
separated-twins examples of East and West Germany (or perhaps Poland and
the Netherlands), I think it's fair to suggest that communism was a
superb system for increasing misery and oppression.
Please, please, go ride your bikes or something. The purpose of
rec.bicycles.tech is to discuss bicycles. The people who actually like
arguing this stuff are all waiting for you on numerous blogs, on
talk.politics.economics.boring.stupid.stupid, or in your local
coffeehouse. If you can find a way to tie your economic arguments back
into bikes again (hey, let's do spec tolerance comparisons of Ti frames
made in China, Taiwan, and the USA!), then super. But until then, please
stop. You all know better.
ObBike: I gotta go for a ride now.
--
Ryan Cousineau,
[email protected] http://www.wiredcola.com
President, Fabrizio Mazzoleni Fan Club