Interesting Lancet Study Divides Winners and Losers:

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2810%2960703-9/fulltext

This is a new up to date study on infant mortality rates across space and time. There's plenty of good news, which correlates well with the idea that the world is in fact getting better every year, not heading towards Armageddon and 'total collapse' scenarios: 

"Between 1970 and 2010, the number of deaths in children younger than 5 years has fallen by more than 52%, even though the total number of births has increased by 16% in the same period.10"

There's also some very ironic news, for those who consider America the greatest economic or political model. Yet again we find the 'richest country on earth' performing no better than the developing world, even though we spend twice as much per capita on health care than any other country. Nevertheless, public health care is 'bad' and privatized health care is 'efficient,' 'effective,' 'innovative,' blah blah blah. Libertarians only argue in the world of theory, this is because all facts prove them wrong. The facts show that public health care delivers better care to a country's citizens than private health care. Libertarians ignore all facts and studies and keep stressing that theoretically, they must be right. They then repeat their theories endlessly as already proven conclusions in every debate. Libertarians have clouded the minds of the American people and left us one of the most backward states in the civilized world.

As proof, I introduce this picture from the above study:
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673610607039/images?imageId=gr5&sectionType=red

America's right up there with other luminaries like Mexico, Brazil, Russia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam in infant mortality rates.  (To be fair, we are in the lower bound of that color range.  But the ridiculousness of our situation remains, as the richest country on Earth with the most spending on health care per capita on Earth, our results are comically underachieving.)

Meanwhile, the socialist world, with public health care, is in the lowest bracket of infant mortality.  Japan, Canada, and western Europe are all poorer than us, but they all provide better health care for their children.  Since theoretical riches mean very little compared to dead babies, what we have here is a more direct comparison of quality of life, and thus quality of economic/political models, within our nations.  The USA, despite its massive GDP, is still sub-par in terms of concrete measurements of quality of life, and thus doubly sub-par in the quality of our economic/political model.

Until we start viewing our citizens as assets to be invested in instead of burdens to be ignored, we will continue to trail in all major categories.  This is similar to the fact that Western Europe and Australia have all announced goals to provide high speed broadband internet to everyone in their country, while America limps along with 2 megabyte/s connections that can't do anything.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/us-happy-with-4mbps-baseline-europe-demands-30mbps-for-all.ars
In the past, the US government connected America via power lines, railroads, canals, and interstate highways.  Now, America is too chinzy to pony up the funds necessary to connect America via high-speed internet.  Even though commerce is steadily switching into the virtual world, and more and more people connect through the internet instead of physical transportation networks, the government prefers to subsidize transportation networks and turn a blind eye to the far more important information networks.  Libertarians cite their tired old claims about how the government can't invest in anything to make the country better, despite America's history of having done so from the very beginning of its history, when it was as libertarian as libertarians could ever dream.

If socialism saves lives and provides better public services, what does capitalism provide?

It certainly is good at getting us into war.  Canada, Australia, Japan, Singapore, and Europe all seem to have the ability to stay out of war and have good relations with their neighbors.  Only America has constantly been at war both during the Cold War and after, when the whole world should have calmed down and presented zero threat to American citizens.  Our military-industrial complex saps trillions of dollars from our economy every year to produce weapons and wars we don't need and serve no purpose.  A recent article proved mathematically that we have 16 times as many nukes as we could possibly need:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/opinion/24schaub.html

"This may seem a trifling number compared with the arsenals built up in the cold war, but 311 warheads would provide the equivalent of 1,900 megatons of explosive power, or nine-and-a-half times the amount that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara argued in 1965 could incapacitate the Soviet Union by destroying “one-quarter to one-third of its population and about two-thirds of its industrial capacity.”"

Our other weaponry makes even less sense, like our naval fleets which exist solely in order to wage war outside our borders and thus can't be for the sake of self defense.  We also have endless numbers of tanks and planes that have no counterpart to possibly fight against, since the rest of the world's militaries consist of far fewer and far less modern versions of the same.  Building up these kinds of arsenals which could take on the entire world at once makes even less since when we consider the enemies we could possibly be fighting, rag-tag terrorists and a few impoverished small rogue states with a handful of tanks and planes for us to blow up.  It may well be that the military is seen as a safety valve, a way to employ all those impoverished young men into either manufacturing/designing weapons, or wielding them overseas.  But as a social welfare program, couldn't we have picked anything other than slaughtering foreigners as our default source of employment?  For both humanitarian and practical reasons, this seems like it creates more enemies than it is worth.

Capitalism has been unable to build any new nuclear plants in America, whereas socialist Europe and Japan has already moved well past the industrial revolution's dirty fuels and switched to nuclear, wind, and solar.  Our energy infrastructure is little different from what it was fifty years ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country

France - 76%
Belgium - 54%
Sweden - 42%
South Korea - 36%
Germany - 28%
Japan - 25%
Finland - 22%
USA - 20%

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power#Penetration

At present, a few grid systems have penetration of wind energy above 5%: Denmark (values over 19%), Spain and Portugal (values over 11%), Germany and the Republic of Ireland (values over 6%). For instance, in the morning hours of 8 November 2009, wind energy produced covered more than half the electricity demand in Spain, setting a new record, and without problems for the network.^[27]

In Education, we rank 18 out of the 36 countries of the developed world.  Trailing, of course, socialist countries like Finland and Japan.

http://askville.amazon.com/United-States-rank-education-industrialized-nations/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=21721726

In world happiness rankings, we again trail socialist Europe:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5224306.stm

"1st - Denmark

2nd - Switzerland

3rd - Austria

4th - Iceland

5th - The Bahamas

23rd - USA

41st - UK

90th - Japan

178th - Burundi"

 Is there anything we don't trail in?  Anything concrete?  Aside from our per capita GDP, can we point to anything our money is actually successfully buying?  A modern energy infrastructure.  A modern internet infrastructure.  A modern education system.  High levels of personal satisfaction.  Health care.  Peace.  Lower crime rates.  Anything?  We trail in every conceivable category of actual quality of life.  Worse, due to misguided libertarian thinking, we're unlikely to catch up in any field.  We will continue to import endless immigrant labor in support of libertarian ideals where all borders are eliminated and there is a free flow of people as well as goods, all of whom drive down our national averages.  We will continue to spend too little on education, including college education which is generally a right outside of America but a sure way to go $100,000 into debt inside America.  We will continue to fall behind with our outdated infrastructure, from railroads to internet to energy, because libertarians don't want to invest in any public goods.  Our trade deficit will continue to inflate, because the rest of the world exports finished goods, while we only export financial swindles and weapons.


I suppose the good news is America will be an object lesson for the rest of the world on 'what not to do.'  Just as the Soviet Union taught us to give up centralized planning and price fixing, America will teach us to give up on capitalism and libertarianism.  Liberty is just laziness by another name.  If you know something is good, it stands to reason that it should be done.  If the free market is incapable of doing it, who else but the government can?  Decreasing childhood mortality is good.  Increasing broadband speed is good.  Happiness is good.  America's free market has proven itself incapable of accomplishing these goals.  Government has proven itself capable of accomplishing all these goals in other countries.  Therefore, government is superior to freedom in all of these cases.  When a comparison is made that shows freedom acting superior to government, we should allow freedom to reign.  When a comparison is made showing government is superior to freedom, government should reign.  The Soviet Union falsely assumed everything was done better by the government, and the United States falsely assumes the reverse, that everything is done better by the free market.  The real answer is somewhere inbetween -- looking at reality case by case, item by item, and attributing spheres of influence such that everyone ends up as well off as possible.  As technology and culture and demographics change, the spheres of influence that create maximum utility will also change, and so our governments must constantly be changing what they do and don't do as time passes as well.  This requires a more flexible and quicksilver government than the current US model, which is restricted by its constitution and two-party winner take all system.  Other countries are far better at adapting to change, using parliaments that have absolute power and represent all parties and people, large and small through proportional representation.  Authoritarian rulers like the Chinese, so long as they aren't corrupt, are even more able to adapt to change.  This is why China continues to skyrocket ahead in terms of new nuclear power plants, railways, 10% economic growth per year, etc, while America limps along in perpetual deadlock.

One can only hope that someday, at some point, American patience will run out as we get tired of last place in everything except war and crime.  On that day, human bio-diversity aware socialism, that uses eugenics right alongside public health care and IQ test based hiring right alongside citizen's dividend welfare, can emerge as the new consensus mix between merit and empathy, freedom and government, competition and cooperation.