#42 JackT:
That’s a great idea- we’ll just stop buying prescription drugs from the “big” drug companies. We’ll start buying them from the Mom & Pop drug companies in the neighborhood. Instead of those awful anitbiotics I had to take when I had the kidney infection I’ll try the Indian health food proprieter downtown and he can set me up with one of those tried and true poultices of buffalo dung. You are correct on one thing- the western Euro-weenie countries do have a slightly longer average life expectancy than the U.S.- by about six months. Though to be honest, I’m not thrilled about trading roughly six more months of life after age 77 for Euro style, nanny state living.
Funny, you’d think with the advantages you cite of living in Europe that Europeans would be happier, but they’re not. I read some interesting poll results that attempted to gauge levels of optimism or life satisfaction and the Euros are strangely quite an unhappy, fatalistic bunch. Americans are far more optimistic and positive while the French, Germans, Italians and Spanish & Belgians are sour on just about everything. Not surprisingly, they are so miserable they seem to have stopped reproducing. Most of the Western Euro nations (the U.K being the exception) have fallen off a cliff in terms of birthrates over the last 30 years: they are at lowest- low fertility rates; meaning they are BELOW population replacement levels. You’d think with all that free health care, good food, and cultural superiority they’d be walkiing on air and reproducing like mad, but the exact opposite is happening- they are dying off in every sense. Their economies are dying. Their people are dying, they are commiting suicide in a sense. Is that the big payoff for being so superior to us dumb, blighted Americans?
As to your assertion about them being “more tolerant of different races,” I have to call B.S. on that one. Precisely how did you divine that they have a demonstrably more tolerant society than ours? Could it be all the non-white faces you see of all the heads of their governments? Funny, I see photos of Euro heads of state and various ministers and I just see the usual pasty-faced, rogues gallery of upper-middle aged bureaucrats. Guess they must be keeping all the evidence of their racial inclusiveness under wraps somewhere else.
