[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.