If you have my luck, your hometown is rife with golden year economic pontiffs who made their comfy riches in the "socialist" 50's, 60's, 70's and early 80's (before their hero Reagan's free-market revolution did its deep damage).
And if you have my fortune, these paragons of self-reliance have found their voice in your community. You'd know by the indignant railing against the "lazy" homeless and the "feckless" unemployed, the "mooching" insurance reformers, and the "spoiled" young adults who refuse to just "put themselves" through college.
I don't know about you, but the last time I heard this refrain, I very nearly screamed myself Beck.
So, I came up with some talking points, to remind them of their history, and of the America under which they prospered. You know, the America they've worked tirelessly to drown in a bathtub.
I'm hoping, next time, these will at least keep me from exploding like a balloon of Chunky soup.
Please feel free to add to the list.
- Thirty years ago and earlier, we didn't see so many homeless on the streets, because the mentally ill were housed in public medical facilities.
- There weren’t so many unemployed, because the government invested heavily in its citizens: making low-interest loans to small businesses, hiring people to teach kids and adults, preserve parks, and build infrastructure (Projects that New Orleans and Minneapolis, say, might have liked to see continued).
- People didn’t lose their homes or savings overnight because banks weren’t allowed to gamble with our mortgages and pensions, nor were banks allowed to grow too-big-to-fail. No bailouts were necessary.
- Local mom-and-pop shops had a better chance against big box stores, because anti-trust policies were at least marginally enforced.
- It had not been made so easy for corporations to export jobs and import exploitable labor, so domestic manufacturing, agriculture and construction work was more plentiful.
- Households only needed one breadwinner at a time, because unions and labor laws kept wages apace with inflation. Fewer people needing to work meant more jobs, more time for the arts, more time for volunteering, more connecting with community and loved ones, and less need for costly childcare. (If we ever get that economic setup back, I nominate the men to stay home with the kids.)
- Folks didn’t often go bankrupt from medical bills because insurance companies were nonprofit.
- There were no crushing student loans because public universities were funded and affordable, and GI's were sent to school for free.
- War profiteering was once reviled, and opportunistic wars characterized the enemy, not us.
- The super-wealthy were taxed at very high rates, and hiding money offshore had not become the norm.
Those extra hundreds of billions in tax dollars stayed home and created jobs, and America flourished.
Today, we have right-wing, “privatize everything” economic policies to thank for our haggard middle class, our ocean of unemployed, our crumbling infrastructure and our dangerous streets teeming with vulnerable homeless.
I might be slightly less bitter if the folks who elected the "free market" reactionaries weren't the bootstrappin' generations who, thanks to "socialist" policies, enjoyed decent wages, accessible health care, affordable college educations, plentiful jobs, secure mortgages and pensions, and now, of course--OF COURSE--Social Security and Medicare, which Reagan insisted would morph us into the USSR. I might feel marginally less postal if they weren't now devoting their comfortable twilight years sanctimoniously kicking the people they've knocked down.
The “free market” has freed us alright. It's freed us from our health, our jobs, our pensions, our homes and possibly our very planet.
Thanks, conservatives.