All Boxed In: A Manifesto

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,1
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there’s doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry,
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university,
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.

And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

I am amazed at how relevant and true this song is, fifty years after it was written (by Malvina Reynolds). In fact, it seems the cookie-cutter, conformist nature of our society has only intensified. Even non-conformism has been standardized and commercialized!

From the moment we’re born, we’re primped, pruned, and pressured – like little pieces of … See Moreclay or bonzai trees – to emerge from the assembly line with “acceptable” looks, values, sexuality, fashion sense, income, etc. Each of us has an innate unique personality. But instead of blossoming at the pace and in the direction it wants to, this individuality is gradually squelched and replaced with a counterfeit that better fits the requirements of politeness, morality, religion, etc.

There is a Skinny Box, a Job Box, a Heterosexuality Box, many Religious Boxes, a Democrat Box, a Republican Box, a Marriage Box. Most of us spend most of our time in literal boxes: get up and shower in a box, work all day in a box, drive in a box, come home to a box, sit in a boxy chair and stare at a box for a few hours, then lay down on a box to sleep.

So really it’s no surprise that so many of us are frustrated, tired, and confused. What else can you be when all your life the message has been “Who you are is intolerable. Either change it or hide it away”? The insistence that everything be properly geometrical, symmetrical, and regular has crippled our souls and deranged our minds.

And now we are afraid: afraid of an open life, addicted to the illusions of certainty, definition, and resolution. Terrified to confront our true selves before they have been defined in more “manageable” terms.

I’m going on the record right now to say that this is Bullshit. I am not a cube. I am never the same as anyone else, and I change from day to day, hour to hour, sometimes without explanation. I have many layers and no corners. I am not a final product but a work in progress. I was not built; I have grown. I am not a product of the algorithms of social engineering. I am an expression of the mystery of life. I’m not completely comfortable with that, but I’m getting there.

Is Mainstream Economics the Servant of the Wealthy?

JK Galbraith, writing circa the election of Reagan, made this observation (from “The Conservative Onslaught”):

That a large share of all economic comment comes from people of comfortable means will not be in doubt. High social, business, and academic position gives access to television, radio, and the press. And professional access to the media also gives a relatively high income. It follows that the voice of economic advantage, being louder, regularly gets mistaken for the voice of the masses. On the need for tax relief, investment incentives, or a curb on welfare costs, the views of one articulate and affluent banker, businessman, or acolyte economist are the equal of those of several thousand welfare mothers.

I want to use this observation to raise an issue different from the one Galbraith was addressing.

I have long suspected that mainstream economics is an ideology – a set of justifications and rationalizations of the status quo, dressed up to look scientific, engineered by the status quo’s beneficiaries in order to safeguard the wealth which it bestows on them.

I have suspected that mainstream economists want “free markets” – in both developed and undeveloped countries – because “free markets” make them and their (mostly corporate) cohorts very comfortable, indeed. These economists are warriors in a class struggle, and their primary weapons are the graphs, equations, and “laws” that every attentive freshman knows so well.

What raised this suspicion initially, and keeps it alive today, is the regularity with which attempts to aid the less fortunate and redistribute wealth are swarmed by self-assured economic analysts prepared to demonstrate that the attempt will blow up in the face of those who make it via interference with a “free market”. Also peaking my suspicion is the regularity with which attempts to reign in corporate malfeasance and market interference are swarmed by (usually the same) self-assured economic analysts prepared to demonstrate that corporations ferment wealth in all sorts of ways and ought not be constrained by distorting regulations.

These orthodox – and yes, conservative – arguments are easy to recognize, especially after Hirschmann classified them in his book “The Rhetoric of Reaction”. Time after time, conservative economists argue that redistribution or welfare program x will have the opposite of its intended effect, will interfere with established liberties, or will have no effect at all.

Another cause of suspicion, which you will notice if you observe carefully, is that many, if not most, of these arguments are made by people associated with obscure paper-organizations with patriotic-sounding names. These organizations are think-tank corporations, essentially paid by big business to contrive arguments against tax-and-transfer programs and other attempts at increased social welfare. Examples of such conservative think-tanks are the Heritage Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, and the Cato Institute.

(A great parody of these “research firms” can be found here.)

I do not want to engage in conspiracy theory here. However, ideology has choked collective welfare in the past, and there is no reason to believe that it has disappeared. Ideology uses the binding principles of the day, accepted by almost everyone, to argue in favor of social, political, and economic arrangements that benefit a very few. An example of this is the famous “divine right” theory of monarchy in the 16th and 17th centuries. This theory was used to justify and rationalize oppression by kings and queens. Perhaps the most important thing about the “theory” is that it would not have worked if most people did not believe in God.

Just as ancient monarchs furthered their political agendas using popular theology, I suspect that modern economists and business interests further their own agendas using a healthy mixture of popular political sentiment, centered on “liberty”, and somewhat intimidating economic “analysis”.

Cleanliness is Next to Godliness (at least if you’re filthy rich)

Everyone should read Brad Delong’s Economic History of the Twentieth Century.

Perusing through Chapter 2 – a terrific expose on productivity growth since ca. 1870 – I came across these lines:

Almost the first luxury that a working-class family moving up would purchase would be the services of a laundress. Since laundry was expensive and difficult, few working-class families could maintain uppermiddle-class standards of cleanliness. How often would you take baths if the water had to be brought in from an outside pump, and then heated on the stove? How often would you wash your clothes if everything had to be washed out in the sink, if the fabrics were three times as heavy and the
detergents one-third as powerful as the ones available today, and if as a result the laundry was a full day’s chore? Laundry was not a two hour a week but a ten hour a week task.

As a rule married women did not work outside the home—unless they were African-American, in which case they might well do their own family’s housework and be paid for doing a share of some white family’s
housework as well. Meal preparation was not a one-hour-a-day but a fourhour-a-day task.

Barring a shift toward larger-scale communal or cooperative living—a shift which simply did not happen even though anticipated, hoped for, and worked for by many feminists—within-the-household production and
maintenance soaked up one-third of the potential adult work hours. It made it next to impossible for married women (unless they were quite rich, or quite poor) to have independent careers and still fulfill the social
expectations of household maintenance.

Those who could afford the resources to maintain bourgeois styles of cleanliness flaunted it. White shirts, white dresses, white gloves are all powerful indications of wealth in turn of the century America. They said
“I don’t have to do my own laundry,” and they said it loudly.

I’m reading these words in a certain coffee shop in a certain plaza in a certain part of a certain town. Unlike my side of the tracks – where people steal cars (yes, including my own) and tag everything in sight – this part of town is “blessed”. You know, God has smiled upon it.

Next to the coffee shop is – of all things – a dry cleaner. All day I’ve watched ridiculously wealthy people haul in their designer clothes – Armani, Tommy Bahama, Ralph Lauren, Dolce & Gabbana – for low-paid workers to clean the fun out of.

As Delong shows, productivity has exploded in the past century and a half.

But some things never change.

National Wage Theft Action Day

Interfaith Worker Justice is holding a day of awareness for wage theft. Wage theft is the withholding of payment for work: workers are not paid for overtime, not given their last check after departure, etc.

Wage theft is more common than you think. Unless, of course, you happen to be one of the millions of workers in this country whose employer simply failed to pay at one time or another.

IWJ reports that it

recovered
$1,249,052 in wages for workers during
2007 alone. More than two million dollars
was recovered by the network in 2008. But
while this was invaluable to the workers and
their families who got their back wages, it
was a drop in the bucket.

A recent study, reported by the New York Times, found that in the areas of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, an average of $51 was stolen from workers by their employers. Although wage theft can happen to anyone, victims are typically low-income workers.

IWJ’s website has more information on wage theft, including a survey you can take and distribute to educate your neighbors about this widespread – but of course not widely known – form of business fraud.

In Favor of Incremental Reform

Since the HR’s passage of a health insurance reform bill, many liberals have been up in arms.  Unlike Republicans who oppose the bill because it goes too far, these liberals oppose it because it does not go far enough.

Among progressives, this has always been a fundamental bone of contention. Shall we make our progress one step at a time, or shall we constantly be trying for a revolution-style “great leap for mankind”?

On the one hand, quick and complete reform seems unrealistic, and to try for it seems self-defeating. After all, there is opposition out there, some of them have valid points worth considering, and some of them are very, very powerful and will not let us reform without a fight.

On the other hand, the willingness to settle for partial progress can dwindle into spineless compromise, and we can find ourselves happy with progress so insignificant that it isn’t worth how hard we fought for it. As Eugene Victor Debs said, “It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.”

For my money, incremental reform is the only way to go. Obviously, all of us progressives would like to see the nation – its values, policies, legislation, and overall vision – drastically altered to suit our own, and we’d love to see all of it happen overnight.

But as that one guy said in that one movie, “Wishing can’t make it so.”

Neither can zealotry.

Politics is all about give-and-take, push-and-pull, this-for-that. Nobody likes to give, and everybody loves to take, but everybody doing both is how the whole ship stays afloat. You can’t get from one side of the room to the other by teleporting; you have to traverse every point inbetween. Likewise, you’d be foolish to ask $100 for your grandma’s old K-Mart vase; if you really want to sell it, you have to dock your price.

Similarly, if you want to pass real reform – without bloodshed – you have to realize that it will cost someone, and you must be prepared to make that cost a tolerable one. This is best accomplished by incremental reform.

Furthermore, as much as it can boost self-esteem, zealotry tends to alienate people. Standing on a street corner shouting “Universal Health Care or None at All!” and “Single-Payer or Nothing!” (or whatever) will not endear you to most people. More importantly, it won’t make your ideas for reform attractive. Before very long, you’ll be singing to the choir and no one else.

Why? Because you don’t look like a safe place, that’s why. People are deeply suspicious of extremism, and it doesn’t matter what you’re extreme about. If you were an extremist in the cause of children’s welfare, there is a threshold of extremism beyond which people would think you were some kind of pervert. I can almost guarantee this.

People don’t always prefer the moderate candidate. But they will almost NEVER abandon their accustomed ways in order to join a closed-minded hardballer who is incapable of listening to reason and determined not to negotiate with interests contrary to his own.

In Jesus’ day, there were Jewish zealots everywhere. Their goal was to overthrow Roman rule by violence. In fact, much of Jesus’ teaching was against the zealots’ call to revolt. Jesus understood the folly of revolution in certain circumstances. Far better, he argued, to turn the other cheek, to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, to give not only your shirt but your coat, as well.

Sure, you could call Jesus a spineless compromiser. But he changed the world by letting his teaching work “like a mustard seed”, “the least of all seeds”, that gradually grows and overwhelms its surroundings.
As for the zealots, most of them died in 70 C.E., when Rome annihilated their rebellion and their Jerusalem temple, abandoned to the dustbin of history. They weren’t very relevant then, and they aren’t relevant now.

The take-home lesson? Sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good. There is such a thing as flying too close to the sun. If the fire burns too fiercely, no one will come near. If you reach for the moon, you probably won’t land among the stars; you’ll probably just look like an idiot that no one wants to associate with.

Incremental progress is the only kind we get. So while you’re on your uber-liberal soap-box refusing it, you’re cementing the status quo with as much gusto as any conservative.

 

“Obamao”?

Conservative fear-mongering

In China, and in the US, shirts depicting the face of Obama in the garb of Mao Zedong are pretty popular. The Chinese government has banned sale of the shirts, for fear of offending the US president.

Very interesting, this. Conservatives are – yet again – trying to distract the American public from their own malfeasance by pointing the finger at government. Most Republicans I know wouldn’t know Mao Zedong if he tried to reorganize their furniture. Similarly, most of them don’t know what “communism” or “socialism” are. All they know is that their well-heeled gurus on the TV and the radio spout pejoratives about them every time the US government tries to better the lives of its non-wealthy citizens.

This is how the Republicans have survived. They lie to their constituencies to keep them ignorant, and then they prey on that ignorance.

This is conservatives’ favorite tactic. It’s called “slippery slope”: you argue against a position by claiming that that position will lead to worse consequences, which will lead to even worse consequences, etc. This is how Republicans are able to magically transform every attempt by government to do its job of representing everyone (not just owners and investors) into a commie plot to rob Americans of their liberties.

Anyone who’s ever taken an elementary logic or rhetoric class knows that this is one of the classic logical fallacies. But what do conservatives care about logic?

But all of this is only interesting in the sense that it is infuriating. First of all, demonization is in horribly poor taste. Second, where do all these conservative “defenders of American values” disappear to when corporate profits and executive compensation blow up? Where do they go when presidents (usually named Bush) tell outright lies to the American public in order to gather support for oil-driven wars that cost trillions of dollars, not to mention hundreds of American lives? Did they purposely wait for a president to try to help people, instead of fleecing them to line corporate pockets, to conscientiously object?

It would seem so. Frankly, it’s a little frightening to me that one of America’s two parties is okay with presidents who lie, marginalize the non-wealthy, and indulge imperial ambitions, while getting up in arms about a president who wants to make sure that people can see doctors when they need to.

A Rising Tide Drowns Everyone Without a Boat

Lately there’s a lot of talk about income inequality and the disappearance of the Middle Class in America. The poor, it seems, really do get poorer, while the rich get richer.

In response to these observations, conservative businesspeople, economists, and politicians always tell us that “a rising tide lifts all boats”. What they mean by this is that, as income and productivity have steadily grown in the US, everyone has benefited.

This “argument” misses the point by a long shot. The whole problem is that an increasing number of people in this country face a rising tide – without a boat.

Or, more specifically, without a yacht.

Here’s a passage from the Economic Policy Institute’s “State of Working America 2008/2009“, a recently published almanac of economic statistics, graphs, and tables:

“When the job market began to contract in 2008, it drew the curtains on a recovery that had seen strong productivity gains that never translated into adequate income growth for most workers. As a result, working families are seeing extraordinary economic challenges. In the first half of 2008 alone, the economy has lost over 400000 jobs. Unemployment has jumped to 5.5% by mid-2008, up from 4.4% in March 2007, pushing an additional 1.8 million persons onto the jobless rolls. This weakness in the job market has taken a further toll on already lackluster worker earnings, with most paychecks actually losing ground after inflation.

These recent problems have correctly been linked to a confluence of events. The sharp spike in energy costs – up 25% since the middle of last year – is taking a huge bite out of family budgets (and at a time when wage growth is weakening). The bursting of the housing bubble […] has undercut home values, shutting down a significant source of household wealth. This in turn is fueling millions of defaults on home loans, often followed by foreclosure. Spillovers from the housing crisis have wracked financial markets and frozen credit markets. In turn, diminished borrowing, including home equity lines of credit, is choking off one of the main sources of consumer spending growth in the 2000s.

Yet working Americans are more productive than ever. Putting aside the current cyclical downturn, the men and women who routinely keep this country running have been working harder and smarter. Since the mid-1990s, the growth of output per hour – or productivity – has undergone a resurgence, and the folks responsible are the 140 million Americans who go to work every day.

When it comes to efficient, profitable production, the men and women of the American workforce have a lot to be proud of. But when it comes to being rewarded for the work they do, the skills they have sharpened, and the contributions they make … well, that’s a different story. Their paychecks have been frozen, their health coverage is being cut back, their jobs are at risk of being shipped overseas, and their pensions are more precarious than ever.

For the first time since the Census Bureau began tracking such data back in the mid-1940s, the real incomes of middle-class families are lower at the end of this business cycle than they were when it started. This fact stands as the single most compelling piece of evidence that prosperity is eluding working families.

Where has all that productivity growth been going? As this book extensively documents, it has gone to the top of the income scale, and the higher up you started out, the better you did. From 1947 to 1979, the top sliver of wage earners made about 20 times that of the bottom 90%. By 2006, that ratio had catapulted to 77 times more.

Now, there are some smart, hard-working, and creative people up there in that rarefied end of the economic stratosphere, and some deserve large returns for their labors. But they cannot possibly be the only ones whose living standards should be boosted in a growing economy. Productivity growth is a result of the efforts of the whole workforce, not just the fortunate few. Yet, it reflects the work of the CEOs and CFOs at the top of the corporate ladder. But it also reflects the work of the waitperson who serves those executives their lunch, the construction worker who builds their homes, the manufacturer who forges the steel that girds their corporate headquarters, the home health aid who cares for their aging parents, the cop who protects their beat, and the teacher who educates their kids.”

So You Thought Racism Was Dead…

In my last post, I called attention to the “States’ Rights” veil, which conservatives have used to disguise essentially racist motivations. 

One might imagine that, here in 2009, racism would be dead in all but small, especially backward portions of the nation.  Not so. 

Also in my last post, I compared racism with wood in a fire, which does not vanish but is transformed into more subtle, less visible smoke. 

The Arizona Daily Star today carries more evidence of this lamentable truth.  For some time now, the state of Arizona has been debating issues surrounding the funding of the desegregation of the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD).

Guess who is first in line to fight the district’s right to levy a tax to help fund the desegregation effort? The Goldwater Institute.

The Goldwater Institute is another “think tank”, a shadow organization of intellectuals who are handsomely paid to drum up arguments in favor of policies and legislation that favor the wealthy and trap the less fortunate. Other such paper-organizations are the Heritage Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, the Thorpe Foundation, the Templeton Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute.

These think tanks often do constructive work. The Goldwater Institute, for example, has long campaigned for higher test scores and civic literacy in Arizona. Nevertheless, although these organizations claim to be “independent research firms”, they are actually the well-funded architects of the conservative ideology that presents the greatest obstacle to social, economic, and political freedom and opportunity in this country.

Until a legislative fix appeared to resolve the issue, the Goldwater Institute was fully prepared to sue TUSD for raising too much money toward the cause of desegregation.

Here we have two of conservatism’s favorite dark horses: taxes and racial integration. From the dawn of our country, conservatives have been fighting them tooth and nail. Why should they stop? So what if supply-side economics has been shown to be a sham? So what if slavery and racial discrimination have been constitutionally outlawed? So what if “government” no longer means “evil King George”? So what if taxes provide public goods such as law enforcement and public education? So what if the tide of culture has turned permanently away from racism and toward diversity and toleration?

Why should the pig stop snorting? He is a pig, after all.

Here’s a little background about the man who gave the Goldwater Institute its name. Barry Goldwater was an Arizona Senator in the 1950s who eventually ran against LBJ for president (and was thoroughly smacked down). Although Goldwater was not the most bigoted of conservatives (that distinction belongs to Jesse Helms), he nevertheless allied himself with the infamous John Birch Society (a fear-mongering radical anti-Communist group of the 1950s and 1960s) and the Southern segregationists. In his political tenure, Goldwater opposed Walter Reuther and the UAW, the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Indeed, so popular was Goldwater with the segregationist South that in his race against LBJ, outside of his home state of Arizona, he won only 5 states, all in the Deep South.

No matter who he was as a person, as movement conservatism rallied around him, this is what Goldwater politically came to represent: opposition to workers, opposition to African Americans. This leaves little doubt as to whom he really represented in Congress: rich white owners and investors.

Now an Institute bearing his name fights a desegregation attempt. Knowing it is no longer politically feasible to enforce segregation, conservatives settle for the next best thing: they fight the fight against segregation.

The worst of it is that, by playing on people’s dislike of taxes, they are able to fight their nasty fight by appealing to the very liberty which, for so long, they denied to African Americans.

Reagan and “States’ Rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi

Many people seem to believe that racism is all but dead in the USA. 

The argument goes like this: Slavery is gone, the KKK is not prominent in the media (though they are definitely still out there), and lots of black people are making good money. So racism is not an issue in this country anymore. So black people should stop kicking up dust about it. They’re only hurting themselves, you know.

People who argue this way are not exactly famous for subtlety of intellect. So it is no surprise that they don’t see that race identity and race discrimination are still one of the major obstacles to human betterment in this country. Like wood in a flame, racism in this country has not disappeared; it has merely taken different, more invisible forms.

Since before the Civil War, conservative racists in America have tried to disguise the monstrosity of their cause by sublimating it into highfalutin talk of “states’ rights”.

Here is a lesson that every American should learn: whenever a conservative politician or pundit advocates “states’ rights”, he is fighting for the right of individual states to discriminate against the less-fortunate, free from the “interference” of the federal government.

The most repulsive example of this was one of the most repulsive acts of symbolism in American history. It happened in 1980, in a small town called Philadelphia, Mississippi. There, Ronald Reagan announced his intention to run for President. He portrayed his platform in the typical conservative code:

I believe in states’ rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment.

Putting aside the facts that Reagan, as actor, had been the poster-boy for arms-industry corporations involved in the largest price-fixing scandal in American history and as governor of California had fought against the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the student movement, and LBJ’s Great Society. Nevermind, also, that his legacy was a tripled national debt, crime- and drug-riddled slums, rollbacks on taxes for the wealthy, and ballooning corporate profits. For now, just nevermind all that.

Just focus on a few facts. Philadelphia, Mississippi was a town with nothing to recommend it to a President seeking to put himself in the public eye. Not big, not famous, not wealthy, not even close to any major media outlets. In fact, it was a little “backwater”.

So what was Reagan doing there, giving yet another “states’ rights” speech?

The answer is disgusting. Fifteen years earlier, in that same town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, 3 civil rights activists had been murdered. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were their names.

Reagan didn’t mention these young men or the tragedy surrounding them. He just trumpeted the “states’ rights” dogma.

A little history of the states’ rights doctrine. Most people think the American Civil War was about slavery. It was. But conservatives – then as now – would have you believe that it was a battle fought for the loftier-sounding cause of “states’ rights”.

The Confederacy and all the conservative racists who supported it did want “states’ rights”, but only in the sense that they wanted to safeguard the Southern states’ ability to hold slaves and otherwise marginalize and exploit their African victims.

Every conflict that precipitated the Civil War – the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, John Brown’s Raid, the formation of the anti-slavery Republican (!) party, the Dred Scott case – every last one of them was first and foremost about slavery. And at the war’s end, the only concrete political change that had been wrought was that the slaves were free men.

Yes, the Civil War did expand federal power over the states. This, however, was incidental to the South’s quest to remain a slave-holding nation. They bet the farm – and their “states’ rights” – on this.

John C. Calhoun, the founder of the states’ rights movement, had this to say about slavery:

I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding states between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good – a positive good.

And here’s Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, on the purpose of his would-be nation:

Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery […] is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

Racism is the monster that always lurks behind the mask of “states’ rights”.

Of course, the “states’ rights” doctrine is not the only one that conservatives have used to fight the expansion of political and economic liberties and opportunities. Two others have been “Social Darwinism” and “supply-side economics”. But these are another story for another day.

One final note. Reagan located himself, geographically and culturally, on the racist side of the struggle against racism. Where did President Obama announce his run for the presidency?

Springfield, lllinois. The birthplace of Abraham Lincoln.

The Basic Argument for Health Insurance Reform (Again)

Imagine a world in which law enforcement was carried out by private, for-profit corporations. How would this play out?

Well, I can’t be sure, but I can make a thoughtful, educated guess. Here it is:

Rich people would enjoy the protection of the law. Poor people would not. What do you suppose would happen to the poor part of town after a while? It wouldn’t shape up, that’s for sure.

Thus we see that to hand over the police force to private for-profits would be morally wrong and socially disastrous. Every citizen who pays taxes, does not eat human flesh, and is human ought to enjoy the full protection of the law. Very simple.

Basic and catastrophic health care are like law enforcement. They are a right, not a privilege. When you base them on ability to pay, you get what we have now: millions of people priced out of the protection of the system, by the system itself.

You shouldn’t have to do anything – over and above paying taxes – to receive them. Certainly you should not have to compromise or fatally wound your financial health, as thousands of Americans do every year.

That’s pretty much it.