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I’m going to jump in with both feet (possibly stuck in my mouth). It’s a visionary agenda, not meant for implementation, at least not for the next four or five decades. But it is precisely in relm of vision that the liberal democrat fails to offer anything towards the realization of a more just or humane project than the conservative rep. It is really no more radical than the conservative agenda which contemplates a society controlled by religious edict, sexual hysteria, exploited labor and corporate oversight.
What differs the right from the left at this moment in time is that the right does have an agenda (horrifying as it may be) and that they generally stick to it even as they mask it as best they can. They were willing to absorb a few decades of lost elections and liberal ascendancy while they sharpened their practices and presentation.
What I propose is a vision in which compartmentalization of the political conflict replaces the transparent warfare that produces little but subversion under the name of ‘compromise’. It divides the activity of citizens into those that operate by capitalist rules and those more nearly socialistic applications, that do not. The two sides do not get to undermine the projects and vision of the other. The result is not that of ‘joint conference committees’ where projects turn into the opposite of what they intend, and disguises are designed to prevent the voter from ever knowing what happened. Recently, the dismantling of Medicare was begun under the deceptive title “Medicare Reform Package”. In reality it was merely the third stage in a long series of ‘deregulations’ that delivered our health care system to the insurance industry and the health provider industry. A system which those industries had largely designed for their own benefit.
Capitalism is inadequate and in conflict with its own profit-self-expansion missions to address the need for an effective, accessible health care system. Overburdened at best, Darwinian at worst – it either mitigates in favor of profit or doles out life, liberty and relief from pain as a class privilege. These are not acceptable conditions for the modern conscience. Equally, though, Socialism cannot offer much better. Its successes (as in Euro-socialism) are undeniable but modest. Healthcare provision and delivery stretch it to the breaking point. The Canadian system is beginning to show the strains, and what is left unreported would raise serious doubts that it succeeds any better than we do with our hodgepodge of insured, Medicared, wealth-up-front, emergency room drop-in, patch&forget system.
Indeed, these failures also appear in the minimum, ‘safety net’ provisions of other ‘essential support’ goods and services – food, shelter, clothing – to which I’d add ‘information’ and ‘energy’. Much of the failure is buried or hidden. The recent welfare reforms were little more than masquerades by Capitalism to inflate the labor pool with low-cost workers, but did not move anyone further up the income/class ladder. It just added competitive stress to the lowest end of the working poor. But I digress.
Both-feet-in-mouth: What I propose is that the entire list of basic human needs (well, perhaps ‘clothing’ can be dropped) be shifted from welfare/class-war objects to entitlement-objects. What I suggest is that they be shifted (including healthcare) not as entitlements because they are essential (though they are), but entitlements because they are earned, by each and every citizen of this country. How does that get done?
The ‘entitlements’ thing isn’t new, of course. Social Security (for all its faults) makes that experience clear. You get social security because you earned it/paid for it by your own labor. The faults of the system have nothing to do with the principle in that definition, which clearly sets it apart from say, welfare (you get because you need). That is why it is not okay to humiliate or disparage people for taking social security (not even the wealthy who are entitled to dip in), but it is okay to humiliate and punish welfare recipients. They didn’t earn it, let them pay in shame and deprivation, if nothing else. No one talks about how this serves Capitalism which is completely at easy with exploiting the misfortune of others, but that’s another story.
What lacks in our concept of entitlements (and to some extent makes it vulnerable in coming years) is that:
1. The entitlement does not generate wealth for the system it is meant to support. The surplus of your labor still goes into the business you happen to be in at the time. It could be wealth for the porn industry; it could be wealth for bagel production. The earmarked taxes for social security are over and above the wealth you generate (usually they are “surplus” from your own pocket which was nearly empty to begin with).
2. The entitlement is delinked from the specific lacks that may befall a citizen in later life (though it generally answers the question, What do you do for money if you’re too old or disabled to work?)
Moving the list of things we need (which only wealth or welfare now supply) from the ‘gift’ category to the ‘entitlement’ category suggests that we earn them in a way that deposits surplus directly into the systems we wish to deliver as entitlements. To do this we must revisit that almost unspeakable phantom – the Social Contract. Life, liberty and other goodies simply cannot be delivered to every citizen throughout their lives. It costs too much. We see it in healthcare because the cost begins to eat into features of the product which are not simply bells and whistles. Some of those features can mean lifetimes of tremendous pain. Some just kill you. When we come into this world (or, more germane, into our majority) we discover doing without certain items may be not doing at all. There just isn’t any option to run off and find a patch of land and scratch a living, or die. The essential tools to do that are no longer free. We must have wealth to even escape. Most of what might be useful is already used – as somebody else’s right-of-way. So that’s not an option. Work is a lottery – let’s face it. Merit plays its part. But the hundred at the door are not unmerited because only one gets the job. Needing to eat doesn’t wait. Sickness may cost the very source of wealth that was supposed to pay for the medicine. And the actual distributions of work pretty clearly show that more than a little Confucianism is still operating no matter how much we like to pretend in ‘equal opportunity’.
But imagine, if the social contract were to put the citizen (the consumer of critical goods) back in the picture. Suppose it includes the statement, You can go in the military if you want. Or, you can choose to work from 2-4 years in two of the six essential services (food, shelter, health,…) to produce a surplus that will entitle you to have those goods and services (from any of the six categories) for the remainder of your life. Yes, I know it sounds like ‘fighting words’. But if you think about it, consider what it implies:
1. It shifts things like healthcare from welfare to entitlement in the true sense (you earned it through the surpluses you created).
2. It links the product of your labor for a brief part of your life directly to the services you may need for the remainder of your life. You, in fact, become the insurer and the insured.
3. It places an essential part of the social contract beyond the pale of either socialism (government) or capitalism (industry). Ruling classes may still come and go, but they no longer wield the threat of starvation or homlessness or treatable pain and premature death to exploit the labor need to operate their machinery.
4. It partitions those parts of production which are found to be essential to survive and function into a non-competitive compartment while leaving the other parts free to be exploited and fashioned by Capitalism. Viagras & viagras yet to be discovered can remain the grails of Capitalist pursuits. That doesn’t effect your ability to survive or recover from illness.
5. It encourages the participation of the consumer as the ‘owner’ of essential entitlements to be directly involved in their description and delivery. Consumers Unions for healthcare would likely have already appeared had their essential parts been part of an entitlement package.
6. It solves the problem of a perpetual state of war between left and right (liberal/conservative) and exposes the fact that Socialism and Capitalism are more alike in their failures to deal with these matters than they are different in their methods. Indeed, ‘liberal/conservative’ and ‘Socialist/Capitalist’ can be described as single-axis functions which mirror each other and, at their extremes may even resemble each other.
After a couple of years in the National Entitlement Service – producing for say, healthcare and first-time affordable homes – the citizen is free to decide, do I want to live with just minimums, or do I want some of those luxuries (dvd players, trips to the mineral baths, etc.)? Voila! the Capitalist labor force is still intact and ready to engage the worker and the incentives for advancement are still in place. What is missing is that the worker cannot be forced to work through fear of deprivation; they have to be coaxed with good salaries and nice perks. Now that’s a whole new work environment, no? Ah, can you hear the Capitalists sharpening their swords.
A few other things flow from the proposition of entitlements. Without going into any of them, I mention only a few:
Personal Housing in the range that satisfies the minimum provisions is removed from the sphere of cash transaction and real estate speculation. Ultimately, no one owns the dwelling place of anyone else, excluding luxury housing which is left to the vagaries of the market place as is all commercial real estate. In short, housing values change as a result of improvements and upkeep invested in them. It is primarily through that investment that the citizen obtains larger and better housing.
There is no “death tax”. There is no inheritance, either. The inheritable assets of the country are put into a pooled fund upon the death of a citizen (allowing for provisions for dependents and spouses/domestic partners, etc.). The fund is then distributed to citizens as an equal share entitlement upon their completion of National Service. A grubstake, if you wish, whose size is dependent on the size of the pool at the time of distribution. There are no individuals who begin adult life equipped with lavish and unequal privilege.
Entitlement service is non-profit and the Entitlment Fund is fully repaid for the work that machines do in the production of essential goods and services. Public education is also an entitlement. University research is directed towards improvements in the production and development of the entitlement sector and its economy.
Ok – that’s how z-axis thinks about the problem. It’s a rough and shoddy, but not a well-beaten trail. Like it or not, it is an alternative to right wing visionary thinking, which would breach any social contract I would willingly participate in. That’s it. Have at it!
z-axis
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