Freedom from health care, baby!
by Tom Sullivan
One question comes to mind often when speaking with people on the right: Where do they get this stuff?
Yesterday, it was a disjointed statement about British rule in South Africa (not for decades) fostering growing white frustration with black majority rule. The comment was apropos of nothing else in the conversation.
Well, yes. Blacks there outnumber whites about 10 to 1 (more than Republicans outnumber Democrats in Wyoming); whites out-earn blacks by about 5 to 1. Upon looking it up, the most likely source seems to be a Trump tweet from last August:
I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.” @TuckerCarlson @FoxNews— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2018
South Africa was not amused:
South Africa totally rejects this narrow perception which only seeks to divide our nation and reminds us of our colonial past. #landexpropriation @realDonaldTrump @PresidencyZA— South African Government (@GovernmentZA) August 23, 2018
Such stories have a way of percolating back to the surface of the Internet long after their first appearance. So perhaps that bit of disinformation was it, seasoned with some fiery, talking-head rhetoric over socialism and stoked by debate over South Africa appropriating “land without compensation.” Guess who holds most of the land?
Something else one does not expect is an essay in the New York Times of the sort David Bentley Hart just published on socialism. Stuck in an airport departure area surrounded by TVs running Fox News, the Templeton Fellow at the University of Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study found himself assaulted by Ben Stein “opining that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez espouses a political philosophy that in the past led to the rise of Hitler and Stalin.”
The insult to his intelligence was perhaps remotely akin to what I once felt while waiting in a hotel lobby with a TV tuned to “The Dukes of Hazzard.”
Hart explains:
It may be amusing to hear Republicans assert that a military kleptocracy like Venezuela is a socialist country because its government uses that word when lying about itself (rather in the way that North Korea claims to be a people’s democratic republic). It may make one wince to see Senator Bernie Sanders obliged (as he was on Monday at a town hall hosted by CNN) to explain once more that the totalitarian statism of the Soviet Union had nothing to do with the (far older) tradition of democratic socialist thought. But fair’s fair, it’s not much less bizarre to hear a “progressive” like Julián Castro, the former housing secretary, assert that “socialism” simply means state seizure of all the means of production. (Had Marx and Engels only known this, they might have spared themselves the effort of denouncing the socialists of their time for failing to call for a completely centralized economy.)
Well — only in America, as they say. Only here is the word “socialism” freighted with so much perceived menace. I take this to be a symptom of our unique national genius for stupidity. In every other free society with a functioning market economy, socialism is an ordinary, rather general term for sane and compassionate governance of the public purse for the purpose of promoting general welfare and a more widespread share in national prosperity.
The U.S. Constitution may twice reference government attending to the “general Welfare,” but we can’t have nice things if they shrink the natural inequality God intended rich, white men to enjoy.
Hart adds:
One need not idealize any of these nations or ignore the ways in which they differ in balancing public and private financing of civic services. But all of them are, broadly speaking, places where — without any unsustainable burden on the national economy — the cost of health care per capita is far lower than it is here and yet coverage is universal, where life spans are longer, where working people are not made destitute by serious illnesses, where a choice between food or pharmaceuticals need never be made, where the poor cannot be denied treatments by insurance adjusters, where pre-existing health conditions could never be denied coverage, where most people have far more savings and much lower levels of debt than is the case here, where very few families live only a paycheck away from total poverty, where wages generally keep pace with inflation, where every worker has decent vacation time each year, where suicide and opioid addiction are not the default lifestyle of the working poor, where homelessness is exceedingly rare, where retirement care is humane and comprehensive and where the schools are immeasurably better than ours are.
Americans, however, recoil in horror from these intolerable impositions on personal liberty. Some of us are apparently even, like Mr. Stein, canny enough to see the shadow of the death camps falling across the whole sordid spectacle. We know that civic wealth is meant not for civic welfare, but should be diverted to the military-industrial complex by the purchase of needless weapons systems or squandered through obscene tax cuts for the richest of the investment class. We know that working families should indenture themselves for life to predatory lending agencies. We know that, when the child of a working family has cancer, the child should be denied the most expensive treatments, and then probably die, but not before his or her family has been utterly impoverished.
Freedom, baby! Or so Americans perceive it through the same lenses that see Great Britain oppressing whites in South Africa.
[h/t GS]