Culture Matters

I'ts a common target, so I won't labor the first point. Saying that a european country has "free" healthcare is a lie, because that healthcare is funded through the tax structure, which citizens are paying for. It's a distributed cost plan, not a "no cost" plan. That's the first level that you're all familiar with.

But there's another level where this term is misleading and unhelpful, and indicates that the term has no place in a valid Political Science field. By calling it "free" you deny the fact that it's a distributed cost. By doing that, you deny people the opportunity to consider the nature of the culture and citizenry tolerating those costs. That culture (Sweden, if you're wondering) is willing to tolerate an income tax rate twice that of the United States to fund their social programs. That's not free, and people in Sweden don't wander around all day oblivious to that fact. So what elements of the Swedish nation allow for that degree of support for socialized programs and the correlating distributed costs?

If you call it "free", those questions never get asked. That's not science, it's just offensive.

I'm going to go right ahead and say that uniting 9 million people who are 87% Lutheran is a much easier task in both values and scale than uniting 303 million who exist in a baffling array of religions and value systems. They have a much higher innate ability toward cultural unity, because there is less significant variance. Sweden also has no transnational issues to speak of, which means a smaller degree of political polarization than we frequently see in the United States, where foreign policy is always a touchy issue.

But all of these things are cultural issues, which are pretty likely to be glossed over by the preposterous Liberal notion that "we're all just people". We're all people, raised and conditioned in widely varying environments and in very different value systems and support structures. I'm afraid that the similarity stops at physiology, and does not continue on through the human psyche. This isn't good or bad; it just is. It's a reality to be operated within, not an "indoctrination" to decry or an "enlightenment" to foster.