[frenchfried]

That's not quite what he said, though. Here's the full quotation:

"I guess to make a broader point, so often in the past there's been a sharp division between left and right, between capitalist and communist or socialist. And especially in the Americas, that's been a big debate, right? Oh, you know, you're a capitalist Yankee dog, and oh, you know, you're some crazy communist that's going to take away everybody's property. And I mean, those are interesting intellectual arguments, but I think for your generation, you should be practical and just choose from what works. You don't have to worry about whether it neatly fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory -- you should just decide what works."

His point seems very straightforward and noncontroversial - why should we marry ourselves to ideology when what we truly care about are solutions to problems?

What would you call a CEO or an executive at a company who rejects a solution simply because it doesn't match their rigid ideology regarding the matter at hand? Bad - very bad.

There is much to be said for the flexibility and wealth of options that a free market can provide, but is there truly nothing that other systems can offer?

Cuba is in many ways far behind us, and I am glad that we aren't in their situation. Havana looks just as it did in the 1950s.

But at the same time, the Cuban health care system has far better coverage than ours. You can decry waiting lines and shoddy doctors and so on, but there is objective truth to my statement. Cuba has a lower child mortality rate than we do - 4.83 per 1000 compared to 6 per 1000. Just last year, Cuba became the first country to eliminate mother to child transmission of HIV. The first!

When we talk about the world (I guess economic systems in particular) as simply a matter of capitalism vs. communism vs. socialism and so on, we limit our ability to solve problems and make progress. That's all Obama was trying to say, I think.

[spoiledtechie]

You say these medical advances would be true, but do you really consider them to be correct? Coming from a communist country, they do in fact control the media. They do in fact control what is disseminated and what's not.

On that note, comparing a government to a company is generally wrong. Why you ask, because companies have the ability to run as a dictatorship, but if a country did that, it would be denying of someone's rights, to compare a company to a government, is simply and fully incomparable and quiet frankly scary.

[frenchfried]

Well the facts about health are true because they come from the World Health Organization of the United Nations, which compiles health-related data on all countries. It's a reliable source.

You're right about not running countries like companies - I was just making a point about management style. It's important to consider ideas from all sources and toxic to tie yourself to ideology. Free market, socialist, etc. - fundamentally, these are all methods of solving problems for people, and there is nothing wrong or controversial about borrowing the best ideas and practices from each. I think most people would agree that a government should marry itself to finding solutions, not ideology.

[1] http://www.who.int/countries/cub/en/

[icebraining]

Ideology is the lenses through which we decide what the problems are and how we can evaluate the solutions. It's meaningless to say that a solution is better than another; it just has different tradeoffs. Ideology is what gives weights to those tradeoffs and makes the choice meaningful.

People who say we should just ignore ideology and "choose what works" are just passing off - consciously or not - their own ideology as the 'natural' state, which doesn't really exist.

[spoiledtechie]

You don't actually think Who gathers its own information, do you? It's supplied its information by governments.