A reader writes:
“A few years ago, I went with my Social Worker wife to an Open House of a new Birthright center… the Director showed us around and went over the details of services they provided… prenatal medical care, rides to medical appointments, financial help for food, rent, and medicine, after birth care and support
I said that this was all amazing and we should make this a national model as an extension of government services. She stared at me, wrinkled her nose, “No, that would be ‘Socialism’”.”
In a world where the defining psychological trait of conservatism is a sociopathic narcissism which cares only about the suffering of the conservative and that tiny minority of people who are extensions of his ego, the self, not the other, is always placed at the center. The question is never, “What will see to the actual needs of the other?” but is rather, “How can I get the credit for having stooped down to help this unfortunate I have deemed worthy of my largesse?”
Hence the hatred of state systems of social safety which are always alleged to “take away my ability to be charitable” and “force us to give at the point of a gun through taxation”. Such analysis does not, for one second, pay the slightest attention to those (and they are legion) who face choices between living under an overpass or watching their four year old girl die of leukemia. (One of the main reasons for GoFundMe’s is medical need.) The real priority of the “Do everything through charity, not the state” brigade is pure narcissistic vanity. And, of course, power. The conservative sociopathic narcissist gets to retain the power of life and death over the lebensunwertes Leben while kicking in five bucks to the $100K debt of some family and feel good about himself, all while standing tall against the Leviathan State he imagines he is bravely defeating. It’s All About Him.
And the suffering he inflicts thereby? Well, the sufferings of those he uses and discards is, like all suffering that is not his or an extension of his ego’s, non-existent, contemptible, funny, and/or an attempt at guilt manipulation.
Meanwhile, what the Church teaches is that health care is not “charity” at all. It is justice. Justice pertains to what is owed. If I’m on the bus next to you and I have 10 bucks in my pocket, I don’t owe you 10 bucks. I can give you 10 bucks if I like and that is charity. But if I don’t I’m not being unjust to you.
But if I step off the bus and you are lying on the sidewalk in a pool of blood after a robbery and I step over you and keep going, I have denied you justice, because you are owed your life. (That’s why the rich man wound up in Hell when he neglected the stranger Lazarus and that’s why the priest and the Levite sinned and the good Samaritan did not).
Well, here’s the thing: the state’s entire job is to ensure justice. That’s the reason it exists. So it is false to call a state-ensured health care “charity”. It’s not. It’s justice and it is entirely appropriate for the state to see to it that the sick get justice. Health care is not a therapy session so that narcissistic libertarians can feel awesome about themselves. It is for the sick. They are at the center. If a private person can see to the needs of the sick, great. Let them. Nobody is stopping them. But when the libertarian makes war on the state’s ability to help the sick by lying that it is “evil socialism”, he does not give a shit about the needs of the sick. He cares only about his own vanity, pride, and power.
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10 Responses
It’s interesting that anything that the government does to help the poor is “socialism”, but bailouts of corporations that get in trouble is OK. This goes along with the philosophy that tax cuts for the rich help us all. Well, we’ve had 40 years of tax cuts for the rich and what did we get? Exploding deficits and even greater wealth disparity. And we are told that this is a good thing.
By the way, so called “socialist” countries like Sweden, Norway, etc are nice places to live.
Trickle-down economic are a complete failure, but people still believe them because Reagan’s era had economic prosperity. Not thanks to trickle-down economics, but in spite of them.
The main reason people support them is because they hope they will one day be the ones to reap the benefits. They hope they will one day realize the American Dream and they imagine that the rich have a very high tax burden.
The second reason is what Mark alluded to in his article: trickle-down economics rely on the magnanimity of the rich who will graciously provide you with scraps off their table. If they don’t, maybe you could still hope for some crumbs to fall off the table, but the rich took care of that by adding high edges to their tables.
Norway is a nice place to live if you agree with the policies. Preferably if you’re childless and don’t have to worry about the topics your children learn at school. Sweden is not that nice anymore. It used to be, but Sweden doesn’t have the oil reserves that Norway does and they haven’t fully paid off their retirement funds.
The reason that “socialist” countries succeeded is because trickle-down economics don’t work, but wick-up economics do. As in, increase tax burden on the rich and ease off the burdens on and subsidize the poor. This has the effect of propping up the entire economy. The rich still become richer, but everyone does as well.
I can understand why billionaires like trickle-down economics, but I have heard working class people defend it. It’s bizarre. They have bought into the myth that if Elon Musk pays no taxes, we will all somehow be better off. Their reasoning is that if the billionaires have more money, they can invest more, create more jobs, etc. In theory, that sounds good, but it just doesn’t happen in the real world.
It used to be that the rich wanted to pay less taxes. Now, they don’t want to pay any taxes and Republican politicians seem to agree. The sheer greed is breathtaking.
You hit the nail on the head. Repeatedly.
I would draw the conclusion further: The idea is to help only as far as it doesn’t drag the poor out of their poverty. That charity needs to dangle in front of them and help them juuuuust enough to keep them below the line at which they won’t be able to pull themselves up to a higher social tier. Help them enough that they won’t be uppity, since you provided them with more than they could scrape together, but not enough that they would in the future usurp your rightful place in the middle class or in the upper class.
As for one of the two parables you mentioned: that of the Good Samaritan, I heard a bit of an explanation that drives the point further home among Jesus’s listeners. In points:
• The unnamed victim in the parable was leaving Jerusalem and going to Jericho. So he has only himself to blame, he decided to leave the Holy City and go to some unsavory place. In a way, he’s lucky he didn’t get there.
• The priest and the Levite on the same road are going to Jerusalem. They *obviously* must have had a dire need if they left Jerusalem. And they *can’t* care for the half-dead man because they would be ritualistically unclean and they had duties to tend to. Those duties were *clearly* more important than tending to some beaten up guy in a ditch who probably deserved his fate anyway.
I don’t think I need to expound on the fact that Judeans looked down upon the foreigner Samaritans, especially the traders who really took advantage of the opportunities that Pax Romana offered them (free trade) and the high prices in Jerusalem. This was clearly upsetting to the established local merchants who were happily fleecing the Jerusalemites. You can draw your own comparisons with the modern society.
Long years back when I tended to think more “conservatively” than I do now, I heard a professor of economics discussing universal health care. He said that it would never be available in this country, because as a society we were committed to racial and class distinctions. The thought that poor people, or people of a different race, having equal access to health care, was so repugnant that we’d rather forego it for ourselves.
I thought that was just crazy talk back then. But he was right and I was wrong. Call it “Socialized Medicine” and folks would prefer that nobody had access.
That is actually quite literal, as in that racism is the direct and explicit reason why we don’t have universal healthcare.
Tom Harman has talked about this in his book, “The Hidden History of American Healthcare”
“Why Healthcare isn’t a right in America”
As someone who has worked in human service non-profits for almost thirty years, most of them faith-based, I can say that this absolutely resonates with my experience. I’ve seen truly gobsmacking generosity on the part of people with great means, and not just sporadically, but repeatedly and faithfully. And I don’t want to demean or dismiss that gift. But let’s be clear, we are here in our role to clean up the mess left behind by unregulated free markets that are designed only to funnel money upwards and to perform our role in such a way as to assuage the consciences of those few who’ve won the game. Our work done uncritically blesses the system that creates the suffering that cries out for our work, in a cruel self-perpetuating cycle. Very few genuinely want to critique and repair the powers and principalities that step on the necks of widows and orphans. Oh, and racism…racism all the way down (*cough* Afrikaner refugees *cough*).
>> I said that this was all amazing and we should make this a national model as an extension
>> of government services. She stared at me, wrinkled her nose, “No, that would be ‘Socialism’”.”
I hear that a lot too, and it is just further proof that decades of Right Wing propaganda have been very effective. “Socialism” is one of those words that has become a moving target because so many people have misused it for so long.
Strictly speaking, socialism is when the state owns and operates the means of production and distribution. So factories, agriculture, industry, etc. are all operated by the state. I don’t of ANY American politician with any power — not even so-called “socialists” like Bernie Sanders and AOC — who are advocating for anything even close to that.
To many these days, “socialism” simply means “any service provided by the government.” Which is a ridiculous definition. By that definition, all police forces, fire departments, public schools, water departments, and the armed forces are all Socialist.
The problem is when trust in Government erodes so much that you don’t want to give them more money in taxes because you think they will use it not to help the poor but bail out rich people.
And that is a pretty good definition of fascism. 😉