Most people are trapped in their job and a lot do go without meals and healthcare. I'm not saying this is always the cases but there are too many instances where it is.
Most of the people who are "trapped" are actually just not uncomfortable enough to leave. After nearly 30 years in three different industries I can tell you most of the stories are very similar.
1. There is only one major employer in town & the do not want to leave their home town, so they feel trapped.
2. They have to many years in & do not want to start over.
3.They do not know how to do anything else, so they feel trapped.
Boo Hoo on all of them. They are trapped by their own fears, inadequacies, or choices, not the system.
As to the health care, according to Dear Leader's own numbers 90% of us were covered before he and his cronies started monkeying around with the system.
When you subtract the 12 million illegals, and another 10 million young people who just do not want to pay for insurance, 2 million who qualify for Medicaid but do not apply for whatever reason, and an average of a couple of million who are uninsured
temporarily do to life changes that 30 million uninsured becomes about 4 million or 1.3%. That system seems to work pretty well to me.
China is a Capitalistic country. Only the rich who had acres and acres of land wanted to flee Russia because they wanted an oppurtonity to exploit and be greedy and rich. The majority did not want to leave because they were guarnteed their right to live.
What fairy-tails have you been reading?
Economically there are two Red China's. There are the industrialized coastal cities where a bastardized Crony Capitalism (also known as Fascism) is practiced in order to bring money into the country. Then there is the rest of China, where things still run pretty as they have since Mao died. The country is still communist where the government owns practically everything. The "foreign" factories are owned by the Government & leased, employees & all, to foreign companies. The government also owns all the raw materials, the farms, the housing, the railroads & most of the trucks. The government sets the wages & the prices. That is
not capitalism. The people who cannot travel around the country without internal passports & visa's. The people who do not live in the cities are often denied permission to even visit there.
Perhaps in the first few years after the revolution what you said about Russia
might have been true.
As the people became educated that changed, especially after WWII. Most of the old landowners died or escaped long before WWII. After the revolution all the land, & everything else belonged to the state. During the 40's & through the 80's most of the escapees were educated professionals, tradesmen, Jews & other oppressed minorities, with enough military & intelligence community defectors to make life interesting.
More escapees came from the outlying republics & client states than from the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic due to simple logistics. Once they were out of Russia, they were still had to cross one or more Soviet "republics" or at least one client state before reaching a border that led to freedom. The primary exceptions were a very cold & inhospitable border with Finland and a cold Pacific crossing to the east.
The desire to leave was real to a lot of folks, as were the razor where & machine guns put in place to prevent it.
I still am waiting for an answer to why they were needed if their system was so great.
People who do not like it here are free to leave, although a statistically small number actually do.
Hmmmm, makes ya wonder, doesn't it?
Hoplite, thread-banned. No further posts in this thread by you please.