Australia is a bigger country than Norway and they have a very similar system and it has been working well for years. Free public healthcare for as long as I can remember, free education, lots of what could be called 'socialist' aspects. So that proves that a system like that can work for larger countries. However, again the US is much MUCH larger than Australia so obviously I'm not comparing them directly, and I guess you can't really compare them.

The Zealand system is pretty much the same as the Australian system. I've always been happy with the amount of tax I pay and the benefits I get. To those who were asking about the amount of tax we pay, I always feel as though I come out on top. I don't feel like I pay much tax at all compared to the amount of benefits I get in areas like health, education, and other government support.

I think Obama's healthcare 'reform' or whatever they are calling it is a step in the right direction. However somebody told me that the healthcare the US will have now is still only at the same level as ours was 30 years ago, so I guess there is still a long way to go.

I'd invest in a spellchecker first.

WTF we have a black president now?

I need to get out more.

I love the usage of "payed" attention in this thread.

That said, the healthcare bill has quite a few flaws, the SEC just went after GS which should be quite a show, and he did quite poorly on choosing his NCAA tournament games. Not a shining year for him.

Unemployment doesn't really bother me too much as it's a lagging indicator.

Also reading through this part bothered me since it's pretty much completely wrong. Unemployment numbers have nothing to do with freeloading. Those numbers reflect people that are actively searching for jobs but cannot find them, not just a simple number of people unemployed divided by the population. If someone was freeloading, they simply would not be searching for a job, and thus not included in the unemployment numbers at all.

Really? How do you know what those numbers are based on? I would think people who don't work for example because their health doesn't allow it would be included in that data. And if you can find a better way to illustrate the relative amount of freeloaders, go ahead. ;)

Freeloading implies that they are getting some kind of benefits from the government i.e. in this country it could be unemployment benefits, incapacity benefits, income support, social fund etc. So all these people are recorded by the government and would be included into any unemployment figures where it applies.

People who are not claiming anything and are not looking for work wouldn't be included, but you couldn't call them freeloaders as they are not getting any money from the system.

Because that's what unemployment is?

By that logic, babies and children would be included in unemployment.

I'd love to see the complaints with the fractional reserve system. It is needed, if you don't feel comfortable with the banks using it, go ahead and keep your money under your mattress, but have fun keeping up with inflation.

Sorry for not explaining better. I guess I'm not used to having to spell it out like that. Since I obviously do, look here. You wrote :

This is a statement where you say what sort of people make up the statistics. I reply to you with a question; how do you know that? You reply with "Because that's what unemployment is?". No, it's not.

Did you read Akira's post?

Here's the kind of insight I was hinting at. There are people who are not actively searching for jobs and who are still unemployed. In this country, they are likely to recieve benefits from the government. This makes them "freeloaders" and because they are registered in a system, they should be part of the unemployment statistic. This means that unemployment stats here do give some insight into how many "freeloaders" you have in the country.