Americans — the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth
Americans are, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.”
Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions.
This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete.
They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover).
One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?
Our cruel, inefficient, and monstrously expensive health system makes this obvious. Nations that provide either single-payer healthcare (like the UK) or a well-administered public option (like Germany) do indeed tax their populations for the purpose. But this is hardly a gross imposition on their citizens.
For one thing, they distribute tax liability far more equally across income brackets than we do. For another, they strictly regulate the prices providers may charge. The result is that the cost of health care in these countries is roughly half what it is here per capita, and the actual cost for individuals (especially those who are not extravagantly rich) is only a fraction of what we are expected to pay for the same services. The relative pittance most of us would be taxed to sustain a real public option or national health service would be—so long as our legislators were willing simultaneously to regulate pharmaceutical and other medical providers humanely and sensibly—as nothing compared to what we actually pay right now for the privilege of discovering, when the next shockingly unexpected medical bill arrives, that we still have far more to pay.
Consider: our insurance premiums already cost most of us more than we would be taxed for a health system like the one in Canada or in Sweden. Even if our employers pay most of the putative bill, this results in considerably lower real wages for us than our European counterparts receive.
If we are so unlucky as to have to buy our coverage directly, the cost is invariably exorbitant while the benefits are meager and grudging. And at that point our financial liabilities have only just begun. Quite often, deductibles alone far exceed any debts the average European or Canadian or Australian need ever discharge for medical care. Then there are, for no particular reason, the copays we have to add to what we have already paid our insurers. Then there are the absurd prices our bought-and-sold political class permits pharmaceutical firms to charge and insurance companies only partly to cover.
The price of insulin alone, for example, here as nowhere else in the civilized world, is a crime against humanity—one, in fact, that actually kills a substantial number of American diabetics each year. If we need to use the emergency room, and especially if we must call for an ambulance, the costs are almost unimaginably multiplied. Then, of course, when truly serious illnesses arrive, insurance companies deploy battalions of adjusters to deny us the very coverage we thought we were purchasing with our atrociously excessive premiums. These vigilant souls will do all they can to abbreviate our treatments, curtail our hospital stays, deny us as many therapies as possible, refuse approval of the newest therapies or drugs, or at least delay approval until (ideally) we have died.
If we fall terminally ill, we will spend our last days fighting for every penny of coverage at each discrete stage of our illness. And then, in all likelihood, our families will go deeply into debt anyway. Of course, even all of this is true only if we are among those fortunate enough to have any coverage at all.
Without the support of an omnicompetent, vastly prosperous, orderly, and violent state, global corporate capitalism could not thrive.
Is this freedom? From what, exactly? Certainly not from the state. The heavy hand of centralized government is no lighter—its proprietary power over its citizens is no smaller—here than anywhere else in the developed world. Quite the reverse. Certainly, where taxes are concerned, no government in the developed world is any more rapacious and no legal authority any more draconian.
Here, moreover, no less than anywhere else, the state governs trade, makes war, passes laws, delivers mail, does all the most basic things the modern state does; but here also, to a greater degree than in any other advanced economy, the government raises its revenues for the express purpose of transferring as much wealth as possible from the working and middle classes to corporations and plutocrats. It really would be hard to imagine a democracy whose state wields greater power over the lives of average persons.
To me, at least, it seems obvious that, where health care in particular is concerned, Americans are slaves thrice-bound: wholly at the mercy of a government that despoils them for the sake of the rich, as well as of employers from whom they will receive only such benefits as the law absolutely requires, as well as of insurance companies that can rob them of the care for which they have paid.
“Three Cheers for Socialism” by David Bentley Hart
*originally posted on Commonweal Magazine https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/three-cheers-socialism
