When I visited England in 1996, fish and chips constituted at least a quarter of my diet. Though it was chilly out, we usually took our food out to eat it outside, in order to avoid paying the 17% VAT on food consumed inside a restaurant. According to an interview I heard on public radio recently (the name of the interviewee and the title of his book escapes me), income tax, estate tax, and so forth are all sky-high in Europe, but in return Europeans receive free medical care, schooling, and so forth. In one country (Norway?) the government pays new mothers the salary they previously earned for one year after the baby is born, and guarantee her job back afterwards. What’s-his-name, the interviewee, said there were big student protests in England after they tried to start charging $5000 per year tuition at Oxford or Cambridge, the student’s said that “our beloved welfare state” was in danger.
\nThinking about this, I wonder if this is a good idea, a bad idea, okay for Europe but not for the U.S., or what. Personally, though it would be nice not ever to have to worry about….anything, I guess, I don’t think I would like this. I’ve gotten a lot of help from my family, but insofar as I’ve ever been somewhat self-sufficient, I’m proud of being able to take care of myself. To me, it feels good to be able take care of myself and my family. Also, of course, I like having more say in what happen with the money I earn, what I want to use it for, and it certainly feels a lot better to freely donate money to causes instead of having someone just take it and apportion it for me.
\nOn the other hand, America seems to have a hard time getting health care etc. to people in need, and maybe giving up autonomy in return for making sure everyone gets what they need is worth it, I don’t know.
\nAnother question I have is, why would people living under such a system ever do anything? It seems like there wouldn’t be any advantage to behaving responsibly or working hard or doing anything at all. There’s no question of trying to build a better life for yourself or your family, no need to work to make the world better, the government just does everything for you. The interview guy also said that religion is pretty much nonexistent in Europe, which really makes me wonder what people value in life, what gives life meaning.
\nAnyway, just some idle wonderings. I know there’s some people who know more about Europe than I do who frequent this blog, any insights into comparisons or contrasts between Europe and America would be appreciated!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I visited England in 1996, fish and chips constituted at least a quarter of my diet. Though it was chilly out, we usually took our food out to eat it outside, in order to avoid paying the 17% VAT on food consumed inside a restaurant. According to an interview I heard on public radio […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}