for those of you that are so sure that a "Social" program means the "end" of your "Freedoms"... you might take a look at the GDP of places Like France, and England, Germany, The Netherlands, Canada... these places all have
Higher education standards,
Lower Crime rates
Infant Mortality Rates
Health Care
Day Care
Much Smaller per capita prison Populations
Longer Life Spans, Etc,etc,etc,etc.....
and despite the endless banter in this country to the contrary... a better way of life.
Think you are free in U.S. ?... Try losing your Job, or being laid off by a company that you have worked for for over 10 years, or have your retirement and Health Benefits stripped away from you so that the company you work for can stay "Profitable"..
Foreclosure, repossessions, .... the Banks own us, how free do you really think you are?
and of course we pick and choose among which programs we call "socialist"...
as the answerer noted,
Police
Post Office
Fire Dept are all... socialist programs..
The Babe has clearly never been anywhere outside of the U.S.... if you were to google all of the points you just made you would see that you are wrong across the board, but that is the reaction that I would expect...
I don't eat fast food...ever. Can you say that?
What's really happening is that as a result of repeated, propagandistic messages, not just on Fox news and hate radio, but more generally, in advertising, people have been conditioned to respond emotionally to words, with no understanding about the concepts that the words convey.
Thus, certain words produce emotional responses, words such as "socialism," "red," "homosexual." It's a long list.
It works with words such as "feminism," "democrat," "liberal," "conservative." People can be trained to have a positive or negative emotional reaction to a word.
You could train people to react to the word "banana" the way they do to the word, "socialist."
People who have been well-educated are aware that "socialism" is a word for a complex and varied set of ideas.
And you're right to point out that many of these people have never left the U.S. So they have extremely strange, blanket notions of other countries.
People who have no real education (a thorough grounding in the liberal arts and sciences, gained in formal schooling or independently), are the most prone to the influence of propaganda.
It also works more effectively on the young than on the old, because the brains of younger people are hard-wired for emotional response, and it is more effective when people are living in a state of fear.