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alexandraerinTwo of my favorite words are republic and weal.
"Republic" is from the Latin res publica, "the public matter" or "the public thing"... it could mean anything that belonged to the public or was of general rather than private concern.
Civic matters. Public property. Public good.
"Weal" means well-being and prosperity. It's the root of two modern words that have very different meanings: wealth (someone with great weal has wealth, in the same way that someone who's high up has great height) and commonwealth. The "wealth" in "commonwealth" is closer to the full meaning of the root word than it is in "wealth" by itself... again, it's rooted in the idea of public welfare, of a people's interest as an aggregate rather than a person's interest as an individual.
These are important concepts. They're strongly rooted in the foundations of the United States of America. As popular as it is to appeal to our idealized history as rugged individualists, we are a Republic. Our Founding Fathers talked about unity as much as they did liberty.
E pluribus unum - from many, one.
That's not to say that they didn't write and speak of individual liberty. Our Founders believed that the greatest threat to the individual was the overwhelming influence of majority factions... what would later be called "the tyranny of the majority". Accordingly, we have our systems of checks and balances. We have our Constitutional guarantees of specific rights. We have our weighted representation in the lower house and uniform representation in the upper house, to make sure that the less populous states cannot be completely subservient to the interests of the larger ones.
A lynch mob is a direct democracy in action: a noisy majority decides that some other person doesn't have any rights. This is why we don't do direct democracy. It's antithetical to the very concept of "individual liberty".
Today's Republican party... or at least the noise-making division of its national presence... has turned the idea of res publica on its head. Any time the majority is not allowed to work its will on a minority, they decry this as the death of individual liberty. Any time the government prevents a private business from holding the position of standing on someone's neck and crushing their trachea under a booted foot, the right-wing calls this "fascism".
Why corporate boots on our throats should be more tolerable than government ones has always been a mystery to me.
They ignore the supreme importance of collective action for common good in the founding, defense, and growth of our country... they make "collective" a dirty word... and pretend that our nation was built solely through the efforts of rugged pioneers, every one of them a Randian Man-God who personally built or earned every thing they ever had, including the bootstraps they used to pull themselves across the great rolling prairies, which were empty at the time because of course brown-skinned people who talk different didn't start showing up until a hundred years later when we accidentally invented food stamps and our once great civilization teetered on the brink of collapse.
...
But I digress.
When we talk about something like healthcare reform... affordable access for all, however it's accomplished... our rugged individualists say, "The government can't turn a profit with Amtrak or the USPS. Why should we trust them to manage this?" That presupposes that profit in the capitalist sense should be the goal of everything the government does.
But look at our Declaration of Independence. Look at the preamble of our Constitution. Look at the Federalist papers.
Where in the words of our country's founders does it mention profit as a goal or function of government? "In order to form a more Profitable Union?" No. "In order to provide for the common bank account?" Not in there. The purpose of our government is to serve the public good... to create weal, not wealth.
We don't need a post office or a passenger rail system that turns a profit for the American people... if they did I wouldn't be complaining, but that's secondary to the purpose of such things, which is serving we the people... all of us, including those who live in places where no commercial company could hope to turn a profit serving. Both the former Department of the Post Office (now USPS) and the National Rail Passenger Corporation (the entity behind Amtrak) have been the victims of pushes to "privatize" and "commercialize" them. The budget-slashing consequences of these actions could fill a number of blog posts all by themselves, but the reason I'm bringing them up here is because they're examples of just how badly the point of a government service can be missed.
Amtrak was created because passenger rail travel--while necessary in many parts of the country--was not profitable. What does the "free market" do in situations like this? Well, when I say "necessary"... the world wouldn't end without government subsidized rail travel... but a lot of economic activity that is itself profitable but is dependent on commuter rail corridors would cease.
That's jobs lost, businesses closed, the common weal suffering. The government is Constitutionally directed "to provide for the general welfare" (oh, there's another dirty word!), not to make a buck.
The people who like to position themselves as self-made captains of industry (or as people who would be self-made captains of industry, if the darn government didn't keep getting in the way!) would no doubt say that if there are business that depend on the benefits of passenger rail, then they should pool their resources and come together to provide it for themselves instead of relying on the government.
But this is exactly what the government is: a pool of resources to do what none of us alone can do. Res publica in action. The fact that we're all having our resources dumped into the same pool means that, on some level, I'm maybe paying for your stuff that I'll never need and you're maybe paying for my stuff that you'll never need, but it all comes out in the wash anyway. Larger pools mean we're more protected from things like unexpected shocks.
And of course, this all comes to bear on the health care debate. Before we go any further, I'm going to say one thing: I just checked, and France is still a country. Their government has not collapsed into anarchy from a total lack of funds, and their population has not succumbed to plagues that would be easily treatable by modern medicine if only they hadn't driven their doctors into bankruptcy and rationed care away to nothing. Cutting-edge medicine is practiced in France and the life expectancy at birth is 81 years. There is nary a commission de la mort in sight. So...
As long as France (along with every other modern nation that manages to care for its population) is still a country, "how adopting a similar health care system will destroy America" is a conversation that won't be had here. Okay? Okay.
I've written on this before, but it still amuses me that people who claim loudly and often that what the rest of the world has managed to do is beyond the limits of America's ingenuity and can-do spirit call themselves "patriots"...
Anyway, health care. If ever there was an "industry" where the clear focus should be on weal rather than wealth, it's health care. The insurance industry and the health management industry are excellent examples of what happens when Republican (in the res publica sense) impulses--collectivization of interests for the public good... shared risk, shared responsibility--collide with the profit motive. Through insurance and HMOs, we pool our resources, but we do so in the hands of businessmen, private citizens like ourselves who under the "Every Man Is An Island" version of the American Dream being peddled across the country owe nothing more to the world but to look out for themselves.
By pooling our resources through the government, we're keeping them in our hands. We The People. I'm not saying there aren't corrupt and greedy politicians, but there's a reason we call them "public servants". Unlike big business, they have to at least pretend to look out for our interests. Whatever the motives of the individuals who work in and oversee it, an entity like the USPS or Amtrak or a notional national health care institution doesn't care about profit. They care about controlling expenses to the extent that if they don't then somebody will score political points off them by talking about "trimming the fat", but they ideally don't have to worry about being in the black, much less having huge profits for executive salaries and dividends for shareholders.
Now, the bill that's going before Congress today isn't perfect. It's pretty far from perfect, in fact. Its flaws and the blame for those flaws would be a whole 'nother blog post. But my opinion on it is that it's a start that can be built on. If it passes, the situation will start to improve and its flaws can (and will) be corrected by future reformers. If it fails, that's likely to be all she wrote for another decade or more... the right's base will be pleased and energized that their representatives delivered what they wanted, whereas the progressive base will be completely disillusioned. Trying to reform the health care system will be seen as a total non-starter, political poison.
But whether it passes or fails, for things to go much further we need a change in national consciousness. We need people to realize they aren't islands, they aren't self-made men, they didn't earn everything they ever got.... not individually, anyway. Not on their own. The power lines and phone lines and plumbing (and increasingly, high speed data cables) that they depend on were very likely government-subsidized. Depending on where they live, it might only be through government "make-work" programs that they got power and plumbing in the first place, because otherwise it never would have been profitable enough for a utility company to come in. Roads are maintained through public money. Airlines... the airlines got more federal money in their post-9/11-slump bailout than "publicly funded" Amtrak has received in the past ten years.
And more, we need people to realize that this isn't a bad thing. It doesn't reflect poorly on them or on their country. It's why we have a country instead of just a bunch of little independent feudal holdings.
Of course, if we did have a bunch of little independent feudal holdings, the smarter landholders would quickly realize the benefits of working together, and would pool their strength, and absorb or annex or otherwise acquire their neighbors, and then if we were very lucky the result would be more like a republic than a dictatorship.
"Republic" is from the Latin res publica, "the public matter" or "the public thing"... it could mean anything that belonged to the public or was of general rather than private concern.
Civic matters. Public property. Public good.
"Weal" means well-being and prosperity. It's the root of two modern words that have very different meanings: wealth (someone with great weal has wealth, in the same way that someone who's high up has great height) and commonwealth. The "wealth" in "commonwealth" is closer to the full meaning of the root word than it is in "wealth" by itself... again, it's rooted in the idea of public welfare, of a people's interest as an aggregate rather than a person's interest as an individual.
These are important concepts. They're strongly rooted in the foundations of the United States of America. As popular as it is to appeal to our idealized history as rugged individualists, we are a Republic. Our Founding Fathers talked about unity as much as they did liberty.
E pluribus unum - from many, one.
That's not to say that they didn't write and speak of individual liberty. Our Founders believed that the greatest threat to the individual was the overwhelming influence of majority factions... what would later be called "the tyranny of the majority". Accordingly, we have our systems of checks and balances. We have our Constitutional guarantees of specific rights. We have our weighted representation in the lower house and uniform representation in the upper house, to make sure that the less populous states cannot be completely subservient to the interests of the larger ones.
A lynch mob is a direct democracy in action: a noisy majority decides that some other person doesn't have any rights. This is why we don't do direct democracy. It's antithetical to the very concept of "individual liberty".
Today's Republican party... or at least the noise-making division of its national presence... has turned the idea of res publica on its head. Any time the majority is not allowed to work its will on a minority, they decry this as the death of individual liberty. Any time the government prevents a private business from holding the position of standing on someone's neck and crushing their trachea under a booted foot, the right-wing calls this "fascism".
Why corporate boots on our throats should be more tolerable than government ones has always been a mystery to me.
They ignore the supreme importance of collective action for common good in the founding, defense, and growth of our country... they make "collective" a dirty word... and pretend that our nation was built solely through the efforts of rugged pioneers, every one of them a Randian Man-God who personally built or earned every thing they ever had, including the bootstraps they used to pull themselves across the great rolling prairies, which were empty at the time because of course brown-skinned people who talk different didn't start showing up until a hundred years later when we accidentally invented food stamps and our once great civilization teetered on the brink of collapse.
...
But I digress.
When we talk about something like healthcare reform... affordable access for all, however it's accomplished... our rugged individualists say, "The government can't turn a profit with Amtrak or the USPS. Why should we trust them to manage this?" That presupposes that profit in the capitalist sense should be the goal of everything the government does.
But look at our Declaration of Independence. Look at the preamble of our Constitution. Look at the Federalist papers.
Where in the words of our country's founders does it mention profit as a goal or function of government? "In order to form a more Profitable Union?" No. "In order to provide for the common bank account?" Not in there. The purpose of our government is to serve the public good... to create weal, not wealth.
We don't need a post office or a passenger rail system that turns a profit for the American people... if they did I wouldn't be complaining, but that's secondary to the purpose of such things, which is serving we the people... all of us, including those who live in places where no commercial company could hope to turn a profit serving. Both the former Department of the Post Office (now USPS) and the National Rail Passenger Corporation (the entity behind Amtrak) have been the victims of pushes to "privatize" and "commercialize" them. The budget-slashing consequences of these actions could fill a number of blog posts all by themselves, but the reason I'm bringing them up here is because they're examples of just how badly the point of a government service can be missed.
Amtrak was created because passenger rail travel--while necessary in many parts of the country--was not profitable. What does the "free market" do in situations like this? Well, when I say "necessary"... the world wouldn't end without government subsidized rail travel... but a lot of economic activity that is itself profitable but is dependent on commuter rail corridors would cease.
That's jobs lost, businesses closed, the common weal suffering. The government is Constitutionally directed "to provide for the general welfare" (oh, there's another dirty word!), not to make a buck.
The people who like to position themselves as self-made captains of industry (or as people who would be self-made captains of industry, if the darn government didn't keep getting in the way!) would no doubt say that if there are business that depend on the benefits of passenger rail, then they should pool their resources and come together to provide it for themselves instead of relying on the government.
But this is exactly what the government is: a pool of resources to do what none of us alone can do. Res publica in action. The fact that we're all having our resources dumped into the same pool means that, on some level, I'm maybe paying for your stuff that I'll never need and you're maybe paying for my stuff that you'll never need, but it all comes out in the wash anyway. Larger pools mean we're more protected from things like unexpected shocks.
And of course, this all comes to bear on the health care debate. Before we go any further, I'm going to say one thing: I just checked, and France is still a country. Their government has not collapsed into anarchy from a total lack of funds, and their population has not succumbed to plagues that would be easily treatable by modern medicine if only they hadn't driven their doctors into bankruptcy and rationed care away to nothing. Cutting-edge medicine is practiced in France and the life expectancy at birth is 81 years. There is nary a commission de la mort in sight. So...
As long as France (along with every other modern nation that manages to care for its population) is still a country, "how adopting a similar health care system will destroy America" is a conversation that won't be had here. Okay? Okay.
I've written on this before, but it still amuses me that people who claim loudly and often that what the rest of the world has managed to do is beyond the limits of America's ingenuity and can-do spirit call themselves "patriots"...
Anyway, health care. If ever there was an "industry" where the clear focus should be on weal rather than wealth, it's health care. The insurance industry and the health management industry are excellent examples of what happens when Republican (in the res publica sense) impulses--collectivization of interests for the public good... shared risk, shared responsibility--collide with the profit motive. Through insurance and HMOs, we pool our resources, but we do so in the hands of businessmen, private citizens like ourselves who under the "Every Man Is An Island" version of the American Dream being peddled across the country owe nothing more to the world but to look out for themselves.
By pooling our resources through the government, we're keeping them in our hands. We The People. I'm not saying there aren't corrupt and greedy politicians, but there's a reason we call them "public servants". Unlike big business, they have to at least pretend to look out for our interests. Whatever the motives of the individuals who work in and oversee it, an entity like the USPS or Amtrak or a notional national health care institution doesn't care about profit. They care about controlling expenses to the extent that if they don't then somebody will score political points off them by talking about "trimming the fat", but they ideally don't have to worry about being in the black, much less having huge profits for executive salaries and dividends for shareholders.
Now, the bill that's going before Congress today isn't perfect. It's pretty far from perfect, in fact. Its flaws and the blame for those flaws would be a whole 'nother blog post. But my opinion on it is that it's a start that can be built on. If it passes, the situation will start to improve and its flaws can (and will) be corrected by future reformers. If it fails, that's likely to be all she wrote for another decade or more... the right's base will be pleased and energized that their representatives delivered what they wanted, whereas the progressive base will be completely disillusioned. Trying to reform the health care system will be seen as a total non-starter, political poison.
But whether it passes or fails, for things to go much further we need a change in national consciousness. We need people to realize they aren't islands, they aren't self-made men, they didn't earn everything they ever got.... not individually, anyway. Not on their own. The power lines and phone lines and plumbing (and increasingly, high speed data cables) that they depend on were very likely government-subsidized. Depending on where they live, it might only be through government "make-work" programs that they got power and plumbing in the first place, because otherwise it never would have been profitable enough for a utility company to come in. Roads are maintained through public money. Airlines... the airlines got more federal money in their post-9/11-slump bailout than "publicly funded" Amtrak has received in the past ten years.
And more, we need people to realize that this isn't a bad thing. It doesn't reflect poorly on them or on their country. It's why we have a country instead of just a bunch of little independent feudal holdings.
Of course, if we did have a bunch of little independent feudal holdings, the smarter landholders would quickly realize the benefits of working together, and would pool their strength, and absorb or annex or otherwise acquire their neighbors, and then if we were very lucky the result would be more like a republic than a dictatorship.
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no subject
on 2010-03-21 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-03-22 04:14 am (UTC)no subject
on 2010-03-22 04:18 am (UTC)It's a little maddening and baffling.
no subject
on 2010-03-22 06:27 am (UTC)Now we've established that health care reform bills can be passed. The optimism and enthusiasm is important because the next step is showing that it's not political suicide for those who support it, which it will be if we don't get out the vote in November.
The other side is fired up. How do you win against that if you don't do the same?
no subject
on 2010-03-21 08:58 pm (UTC)I haven't been following the arguments about American health reform, not properly, I just have this sense of incredulous amazement that a suppposedly civilised nation that claims not to be third-world thinks free health care for all is in some way difficult, rather than a basic human right. It hadn't occured to me that anyone would have even considered trying to make it profitable - as you say, that's not the point.
I suspect I'd better carry on not taking much notice of it all, while I still have some basic faith in humanity left.
no subject
on 2010-03-22 04:17 am (UTC)no subject
on 2010-03-22 12:42 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2010-03-22 01:02 am (UTC)I think I would phrase it a bit differently though. We should make sure our public services are profitable. But we should measure the profit in weal, not wealth.
Not sure why I prefer it said that way, possibly because it allows me to sound more self-righteous than reasoned. Kind of a running joke... hard to explain.
no subject
on 2010-03-22 04:13 am (UTC)no subject
on 2010-03-22 12:16 pm (UTC)I don't know if this bill will be a good thing or not but I do know that it will be expensive. According to a story by the AP, the bill includes $400 billion in tax increases over the next ten years and $500 Billion in medicare cuts.
More important to me is that I currently just barely make enough to make ends meet. I have the bare minimum as far as health insurance goes and this bill will probably force me to pay more; And if I can't afford to pay increased premiums? Well I don't get a choice anymore now do I?
no subject
on 2010-03-22 01:24 pm (UTC)If they could be, they would be. "A delivery service" and "a rail service" could exist, but they couldn't do what USPS and Amtrak do. Those entities exist because they're engaging in activities that are not profitable in terms of creating wealth for the one engaging in them but are necessary in terms of weal (and allowing wealth to be created by the population.
Amtrak was created because private passenger rail service was failing. Its government-subsidized existence (again I point out that it often gets less federal money in a year than the airlines!) didn't kill off a thriving field of competition, it stepped into a void that was left when the profitability of private enterprise became too low to guarantee service over a large enough area to be worthwhile.
As for USPS... I used to work for a mail order catalogue. Our preferred carriers for deliveries were FedEx and UPS, depending on the area, but for some people's orders the carrier would default to USPS, and couldn't be changed.
Why? Because neither FedEx nor UPS included their area in regular service. Why? Because it wasn't profitable. In the absence of something like the USPS, the only way they could have received a delivery would be if they could personally make it worth someone's while to come out to their area in particular to drop off that one thing.
The U.S. government builds roads to places that at the time don't have the economic activity that would entice a private road-builder. Likewise with bringing electricity to rural areas. They subsidize flights to areas that don't have sufficient demand for the airlines to otherwise regularly service. In doing things like this, they spread the cost of such things around, which is good for everyone.
The rebuttal to this is usually "So why should taxpayers subsidize people living in these places?" See the entire post above. Do Americans who live in remote areas not deserve parcel service?
Or to reframe the question so it's not a matter of other people's desert but impact to you: are you,
Might you not be contending with more competition for jobs and housing if everyone who lived in certain areas were suddenly relocated? Might you not find services and goods from certain areas suddenly unavailable? Might you not find yourself paying a shitload of more taxes now that whole regions of the country are no longer producing measurable economic activity?
Maybe you want to roll the dice and bank on the idea that the cost to all in tax money will go down enough to balance out the cost to all in other areas. I don't. I mean, as soon as we start talking about "Why are we subsidizing people who want to live...?", someone throws out New Orleans. But it's not a wild coincidence that we built a city there... the port system around New Orleans is the busiest one in the world. What do we do if we close it?
Well I don't get a choice anymore now do I?
And if you wind up with a horrendously expensive condition that previously might have caused you to be dumped or capped, the insurance carrier is going to be going, "We currently just barely make our earnings projections. We give this person the bare minimum as far as health care is concerned and this bill forces us to give more. If we end up having to pay for expensive treatments? Well we don't get a choice anymore now do we?"
I don't know yet how I'm going to pay for my coverage under this bill, but you know what? I'm in a marginally better position today than I was yesterday, because yesterday I didn't know how I'd qualify for any coverage worth the paper it's printed on.
Anyway, this isn't a conversation I'm terribly interested in having. Your opening line demonstrates perfectly the attitude the post above is responding to in the first place. Continuing this discussion is just going to be an exercise in recursion.
no subject
on 2010-03-22 06:07 pm (UTC)I would also like to note that you didn't actually address my question about AMTRAK and the USPS(interesting rant though).
no subject
on 2010-03-22 06:35 pm (UTC)The bill should have included a public option, clearly... it just was impossible to pass a law with it. But if we can prove that passing health care reform isn't political suicide then we might get it in the next go-round, as both the benefits and limitations of this bill become inescapably clear.
writing from northern europe
on 2010-03-24 02:27 pm (UTC)Let me give you my perspective on it: through my eyes, it looks exactly like the American people are desperately fighting FOR their God-given right to pay exorbitant sums of money to some corporation or other. Every time I read about my favourite webcomic creator getting in an accident or suddenly discovering they have a very lethal and serious condition... they end up with a bill of about $3000.
What? No, wait... what? Seriously? WITH HEALTH INSURANCE? What is wrong with these people that they WANT to live a life like that? My home country does not have something like private health insurance. They simply don't exist. If you need help, you pay a symbolic sum of 50.-, which is under $5, and you are helped. Unless you are a child, in which case, everything is free, yes, even dental care.
Perhaps the quality is less here - I don't know. There ARE shitty doctors and a city hospital that does shitty things occasionally where I live, but nonetheless I won't exactly starve for a couple of months after getting sick or needing tests done or whatever.
I don't... I don't understand it. I would like to! I would really like to sit some American people down and go "listen, you don't have to DO things like this, Sweden and Finland and others have been doing health care for decades now, and they're VERY healthy compared to you!" (not backed by facts, mind you)
I guess this post was simply one of incredulity - I'm not looking to you for all the things I don't understand, mind :P just commenting.
Re: writing from northern europe
on 2010-03-24 02:59 pm (UTC)And considering that our healthcare is ranked 35th in the world, you'd have a long ways to go to be worse than ours.