[_heimdall]

There's a whole ball of wax here that boils down to whether a society would rather be individualistic or collectivist.

Its a chicken and egg problem as well, the way we regulate and manage health care and health insurance (at least in the US) allows for costs to pretty easily bleed out to the rest of society. That implies that we must then be collectivist in other policies, though that is counter to many of the original goals of our country and the question is whether we changed those goals or inadvertantly built a system that requires changing gials after the fact.

We have a similar problem with immigration laws. Our immigration laws today are completely counter to what they once were, and counter to what is still written on the Statue of Liberty. We have immigration laws now that are necessary because of the welfare programs we implemented, even if we wanted to live up to the older ideals we couldn't without abandoning those welfare programs entirely.

[yonaguska]

The statue of liberty poem was never a legally binding immigration policy. Not to detract from your point, which I agree with.

[rayiner]

It was marketing that was installed on the statute of liberty in 1903, when the U.S. was already fully developed. It doesn’t reflect the original intent at all.

[AlotOfReading]

It was written in 1883, as part of fundraising for the pedestal. It might not reflect precisely the "original intent" of the statue, but it's very much in line with all of the other context.

[rayiner]

The statute of liberty was from a french admirer of the constitution and abolitionist. It was conceived at a time when Napoleon III had declared himself emperor. The connection to immigration was a completely unrelated glomming-on.

[AlotOfReading]

Death of the author. People sailed under the statue to get to Ellis island, it's not a difficult connection to make. The location was known when the poem was presented in 1883, 2 years before the statue arrived in the US and the author volunteered for one of the numerous aid organizations helping jewish immigrants.

[rayiner]

The fact that people used it after the fact for marketing an unrelated issue doesn’t have anything to do with the original intent of the statue. There was a lot of ret-conning American history in the late 19th to early 20th century as a result of mass immigration.

[dv_dt]

| We have immigration laws now that are necessary because of the welfare programs

They may have had an effect of causing a political discussion, but fiscally, immigration policy has little impact on welfare programs.

[dualvariable]

> There's a whole ball of wax here that boils down to whether a society would rather be individualistic or collectivist.

Yeah, but the US seems to me to be one of the worst places for individual responsibility. Everyone expects their environment to be perfect safe, and they can behave with a large degree of personal negligence, and if anything goes wrong they want to sue anyone they can think of. And then corporations take defensive actions against that, and you wind up with "do not take Flumitrol if you are allergic to Flumitrol" kinds of warnings everywhere. It is "individualistic" in the most narrowly narcissistic sense, which I don't think is what the founders envisioned either.

[dv_dt]

The way I see it is that enabling individualism, perhaps through strongly collective rules is very different than individualistically segmenting all sorts of experiences and protections. The latter of which, as you have noted, may not result in individualism on any sort of practical level - especially if it just lets large corporations mow down all sorts of people segmented to an individual level of power.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

> whether a society would rather be individualistic or collectivist

Like many of these sorts of choices, its false to think of it as binary because its about choosing a place on the continuum between them.

On the methanal risk issue, one possible compromise would to have places which can run free checks on booze for methanal. Not too different from the practice in France where you can bring in mushrooms you've collected to the pharmacist who can tell you which ones are delicious and which are death incarnate. But of course this would have to be a publicly funded service which america seems to loathe ("I'd rather go blind than have a single tax dollar go to free booze testing!")

[_heimdall]

> But of course this would have to be a publicly funded service which america seems to loathe

This hasn't been my experience in the US over the last couple decades. Both parties like to complain about the other side, but they both spend money we don't have and are happy to fund new government programs as long as its their party's program.

[eru]

> [...] its false to think of it as binary because its about choosing a place on the continuum between them.

Yes. It's not even a continuum: it has more than one dimension.

[Cpoll]

> a society would rather be individualistic

This is a bit oxymoronic. People are a bit too happy to pick and choose what they like and otherwise pretend they're an island to themselves, but it doesn't take a communist to see the contradiction.

[_heimdall]

You're assuming its a binary rather than a spectrum though. I wouldn't expect to find anyone who is entirely individualistic or entirely collectivist.

Plenty of people would agree they're willing to pay taxes and give governments the authority to build and maintain public roads, for example. That doesn't mean they would also then be okay with government taking over industry.