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by mantas 1446 days ago
At the same time, the world would be a better place if people cared about more things than material well being.

If people are fine with less consumption and are willing to trade it for the sake of what they see as a better society.. Why not?

That's like looking at hippy community out in the forests. And then bitching at them that they'll have very serious economic consequences.

1 comments

Health is material well being?

And really, people are not keen to give up quality if life to exclude immigrants, they've been suckered into believing immigrants are a burden on the state and are DESTROYING OUR CULTURE BY CAUSING MULTICULTURALISM. Yes, multiculturalism, the recognition that people of various cultures can benefit from that mixing ideas, is a curse word for the right-separatists. As if a few North African restaurants and a couple of mosques will cause Québécois culture to disintegrate.

Quebec has been next to the USA and anglophone Canada for it's entire existence and every American or Ontarian concept has been molded to suit, but has never replaced a local tradition unless the local wanted it to.

Health is primarily a cultural thing. Lifestyle, diet etc.

US is stark example how over-the-top money shovelled into healthcare may give abysmal results if culture is lacking.

Migrants may be a burden. Denmark recently published a detailed origin-based statistics if migrants are, materially, a positive or negative.

Nobody counts few restaurants as multiculturalism. And once you have significant number of outsiders... Various tensions come up. For example how Russians act in the light of Ukraine-Russia war in ex-USSR. Over here, we also had interesting issues in dealing with pandemics based on ethnicity.

In Quebec the health system (RAMQ) is culture. Everyone is incredibly proud of it (much like the NHS), while also understanding that it is underfunded and struggling. Immigrants understand they will never get a GP unless they move to the country because GP places are gerrymandered, but locals rarely experience this problem.

In Quebec, a few restaurants with foreign sounding names is enough to trigger the anti-multicultural police. God forbid they should have menu items with arabic or Chinese names.

The immigrants do all the shit jobs with low pay. But without them critical services wouldn't happen. I don't call that an immigrant problem. If you count building schools for their children a burden then yes, growth is a burden. Rich people snort cocaine like hoovers but no one counts them as part of the drug problem, but the entire Haitian ethnic group gets called drug dealers.

Why shit jobs stay with low pay? Because market economy is disrupted and there's no pressure to raise the pay.

In normal countries with social safety net (assuming Canada is one of them), those who do „shit jobs with low pay“, end up receiving from the state more than they pay in taxes.