U.S. employment conditions compare poorly to the rest of the developed world

Let's consider healthcare. Often touted as an example of how much "better" Europe (and Canada, etc) is than the US, consider:

1. Wait times are often much greater in countries with socialized medicine and this has serious implications: in Canada between 1993 and 2009, around 40,000 people died as a result of increased wait times due to socialized medicine. [1]

2. The US has "significantly lower rates of 30-day-stroke-induced mortality than every other OECD country aside from Japan and Korea". [1]

3. Cancer survival rates in the US are equivalent to or higher than in similarly developed nations. [1]

Furthermore, let's consider the places where innovation in medicine is most robust.

European nations do not get cheaper drugs for free. That is to say, there is a real cost for the price ceilings and controls imposed on the European healthcare sector in the form of reduced ability for European forms to produce new drugs and therapies which has real implications for future mortality rates.

The US, by contrast, has become an engine of growth for the healthcare sector owing to its free(r) market.

Among the US to France, Germany, Switzerland, Japan and the UK, the US share of drug discovery (based on inventing company headquarter location) has increased from 31% from 1971-1980 to 57% from 2001-2010. This clear upward trend will likely continue for US innovation as European nations grapple with rising healthcare costs by continuing to clamp down on the free market. [2]

If the US were to adopt a European approach, it's likely that drug discovery and innovation would collapse and as a result many millions of people in the future who would have been saved by novel therapies would instead have to suffer death at the hands of the socialistic stranglehold on innovation.

This is not to say the US is perfect or that it is always better than Europe, but it is to say that discussions of the merits of US vs European healthcare often fail to capture nuanced facts and realities that cannot be ignored. European healthcare may be more available to European citizens, but it is in general of lower quality (given wait times) than comparable US healthcare. And the US, through its free market approach, has become the global engine of healthcare innovation which directly benefits other nations who have shunned free market principles in healthcare.

[1]: https://www.google.com/amp/s/fee.org/articles/if-american-he...

[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/05/16/sure-w...

There is an interesting lesson on giving up control of your rewards in favor of an uncontrollable but larger reward. Stupid humans.

This is not in fact what is actually happening. Lots of people take out loans whey they are first starting college, when they are young, inexperienced and by definition uneducated. Few of them even try to calculate the expected value of college for their future income, and the ones who try don't have high quality information.

Even though I completely agree with you on the policy issue: Given that the other party is literally harboring white supremacists, is it really a surprise that people in black communities reflexively vote democrat? If you think about it, some of these policies are incredibly bad for them. E.g. public unions divert money intended to help people in need to pay above-market salaries for middle class, mostly white people. Why would folks in black communities keep voting for that? Because they're worried the other side wants to take away their right to vote. When people feel attacked they'll band together with the people who aren't directly attacking them.

We just had our republican mayor in Annapolis booted in the blue wave. Larry Hogan is facing a much tighter race than he should. These guys are very moderate and very competent, but when your party is responsible for children being separated from parents, it's a tough sell.