Comments by "Geoff Lepper" (@geofflepper3207) on "Rural Russians name a country they like (besides Russia)" video.

Though I have heard the reverse too. That some people under communism in Eastern Europe knew that their own government's propaganda was nonsense but saw American TV shows and movies and got the impression that in the west (in particular the United States) almost everybody was rich and had a big let down when they moved to a western country and got a job at minimum wage and struggled to pay for food, rent and other basic expenses. I suspect too that many of today's immigrants from poorer countries to expensive cities like Toronto, New York and London often find their credentials not recognized and end up in poorly paid jobs and struggle to pay the extremely high apartment rents in these cities along with other expenses and have relatives who assume they must be rich because they are in rich countries and wonder why the folks who made it to the wealthy countries don't send more money home.
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@Invisiblehand123 the United States has an incredibly high number of people incarcerated both in total number and per capita. I'm pretty sure that being incarcerated in prison is not being free. Also, vast numbers of American citizens are stopped from voting due to voter suppression. That's not freedom. But I will admit that Americans are very free to die broke of medical problems because they couldn't afford medical insurance. People in most countries don't really like that type of freedom.
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@Invisiblehand123 the United States has the wealth, the scientists, the writers and artists in every field, the academics, the resources, the geography and the activists to have the potential to be the "greatest country" on Earth if such a phrase means something which it does not really. However the United States is not remotely close to being the greatest nation on Earth because it is not yet a developed country and it will never be in the running until it becomes a developed country. To become a developed country the United States would need to have paid maternity leave, universal health care, lower rates of infant mortality and deaths of mothers in pregnancy, value human lives more than guns, have far fewer homicides, have police kill far fewer people, imprison far, far fewer people, stop thinking metric is part of a communist plot and go metric, have far fewer religious fanatics and become a true democracy which it has never been. To become a true democracy the United States needs to have federal elections run by an independent, unbiased, neutral election commission with standard rules across the country instead of the bizarre system of having partisan elected officials and state governments run and manipulate the federal election process in each state. Also to have true democracy the United States needs to get rid of any significant gerry meandering, greatly reduce the influence of big money in elections, have automatic voter registration, get rid of the senate or base it more on population and get rid of the entire absurd electoral college system and let the winner of the popular vote become president. And of course the same changes need to happen for state wide elections. By many measures the United States is similar to very poor, impoverished, undeveloped countries instead of being like other wealthy countries.
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@mile_381 you just proved Buddy was right with your answer. You really need to start learning about how much worse the United States is in many ways in comparison to developed countries. Seems that right now you're just another American who knows nothing about how much better things are in other countries and so just assumes that the very poor measures of some things in the United States are best. They're not. Not by a long shot. And in particular gun laws in the United States are absolutely abysmal - among the worst if not the worst in the world. You really need to learn more about the world outside the United States.
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