Comment by _heimdall
6 hours ago
There's a whole ball of wax here that boils down to whether a society would rather be individualistic or collectivist.
Its a chicken and egg problem as well, the way we regulate and manage health care and health insurance (at least in the US) allows for costs to pretty easily bleed out to the rest of society. That implies that we must then be collectivist in other policies, though that is counter to many of the original goals of our country and the question is whether we changed those goals or inadvertantly built a system that requires changing gials after the fact.
We have a similar problem with immigration laws. Our immigration laws today are completely counter to what they once were, and counter to what is still written on the Statue of Liberty. We have immigration laws now that are necessary because of the welfare programs we implemented, even if we wanted to live up to the older ideals we couldn't without abandoning those welfare programs entirely.
> whether a society would rather be individualistic or collectivist
Like many of these sorts of choices, its false to think of it as binary because its about choosing a place on the continuum between them.
On the methanal risk issue, one possible compromise would to have places which can run free checks on booze for methanal. Not too different from the practice in France where you can bring in mushrooms you've collected to the pharmacist who can tell you which ones are delicious and which are death incarnate. But of course this would have to be a publicly funded service which america seems to loathe ("I'd rather go blind than have a single tax dollar go to free booze testing!")
> There's a whole ball of wax here that boils down to whether a society would rather be individualistic or collectivist.
Yeah, but the US seems to me to be one of the worst places for individual responsibility. Everyone expects their environment to be perfect safe, and they can behave with a large degree of personal negligence, and if anything goes wrong they want to sue anyone they can think of. And then corporations take defensive actions against that, and you wind up with "do not take Flumitrol if you are allergic to Flumitrol" kinds of warnings everywhere. It is "individualistic" in the most narrowly narcissistic sense, which I don't think is what the founders envisioned either.
The statue of liberty poem was never a legally binding immigration policy. Not to detract from your point, which I agree with.
It was marketing that was installed on the statute of liberty in 1903, when the U.S. was already fully developed. It doesn’t reflect the original intent at all.
It was written in 1883, as part of fundraising for the pedestal. It might not reflect precisely the "original intent" of the statue, but it's very much in line with all of the other context.
> a society would rather be individualistic
This is a bit oxymoronic. People are a bit too happy to pick and choose what they like and otherwise pretend they're an island to themselves, but it doesn't take a communist to see the contradiction.
You're assuming its a binary rather than a spectrum though. I wouldn't expect to find anyone who is entirely individualistic or entirely collectivist.
Plenty of people would agree they're willing to pay taxes and give governments the authority to build and maintain public roads, for example. That doesn't mean they would also then be okay with government taking over industry.