Holland would be great goal for US. Everyone has good health care costing 50% less than US. Everyone gets a good public education. Everyone learns a second language. Dutch aren't invading and bombing the hell out of someone all the time. Dutch have gays in the military. Though I gotta say with gay marriage and legal pot winning big in US elections (those statist Europeans pulling Obama's strings?) we are turning into the Holland of world.
Damn. Just reading that makes me so sad. Holland USED to have all that stuff.
Healthcare has steadily been increasing in price, and decreasing in quality. The latest Dutch government, held hostage by the socialist left "Labour" party, suggested to tie healthcare to income, essentially increasing the cost of healthcare by hundreds of dollars a month. That was revoked, after pressure by the media, but new unpleasantness is awaiting, undoubtedly with the left eager to dump public healthcare further down into the deep abyss.
Public education in Holland also is not exactly a current given anymore. Heck, a significant number of applicants at the PABO, which is where teachers get trained, is barely able to read or write, let alone do math. Classes are forced to adapt to the learning rate of the slowest learners, and because of some pupils being extremely sensitive, things likew the holocaust are frequently skipped in school in order to avoid confrontation.
Higher education is not a cakewalk either, with many a colleage or university basically giving away diplomas becuase they get paid per graduating student. There's documented cases of where failing students were given grades for totally sub-standard essays, just to get them to graduate and thus secure the bonus the government provides the faculties.
The social security system in Holland is about to go bust, due to an ever-increasing pressure on it by people who barely contributed to it, but who rely on it in every possible way. Elderly, whose pensions have been skimmed off by the government, are showered once a week, because there simply is not enough personel to attend to everyone. The medical institutions and schools are riddled by a bureaucratic layer of middle-management, keen on stuffing their pockets, and making the lives of those working with the patients and students ever more complex. Most of the boards of medical and educational institutions are, unsurprisingly, stacked with members of the same labour party, whose only purpose is to grab as much of the public cash as possible. If they are eventually exposed for the incompetent ****e they are, they simply get rotated by the party to the next public function with a wayy-above average salary.
You mentioned gays. Amsterdam once was the gay capital of the world, and the Dutch were so proud of it. Nowadays openly gay couples risk being beaten up (or worse) by the same people who cannot be arsed to hear about the holocaust. Gays couples have been bullied and harassed, and are left to rot by the left mayors, who pretend every new attack on a gay couple (or Jews for that matter) is an incident.
Holland is the prime example of why always trying to please everybody is a horrible idea. A country so ruined that the working class is struggling to make ends meet, with taxes ever increasing.
Thankfully, I don't live there anymore, but I feel deeply sorry for what the country turned into over the last few decades. I always had high hopes for the US providing me with a Galt's Gulch, but if a Dutch system is where the US is headed, I guess I'll look elsewhere.
