This is my first diary on DailyKos, though I have been e-stalking you guys for years. I guess I have finally reached critical mass, wherein if I don't exercise SOME outlet for my frustrations I may implode, leaving my children orphaned. As that would be rather unfortunate, I am posting this.
So....here goes
When considering how our modern day society actually works, it is important to understand the feudal system and how it worked.
There was a king, and he was the big boss man of all things. Because the swath of land the king ruled was too large for him to manage on his own, he had vassals. These vassals were in charge of the day to day running of their chunks of land, called fiefs, and providing the king with what he needed by way of taxes and armed forces. In turn, the serfs were responsible for working the actual land and providing the nobles with what they needed. Not only did they work the land owned by another, they didn’t actually get any of the goods or food they produced. That was all the property of the king, managed by the nobles. What they got in return was protection. Well ... not really. What they got was the right to be a soldier offered up for protection of land that wasn’t theirs that they don’t reap the benefits from. What they got was a sword, but they were told it was protection.
With the ongoing debate over a public option for health care, the words socialism and capitalism are being thrown around quite a bit. Feudalism is more applicable to the debate regarding health care, because what this is really about is The People versus The Corporations. Large corporations stand to lose the most if a strong public option passes. The people stand to gain the most if it does.
We don’t go to work solely for our paycheck. We can make money in any number of ways. In a lot of cases, we could make more money on our own than we do working at our jobs. So why is it that we keep going to work? We tell ourselves things like "it is too risky to open a small business" or "the pay for being a self employed contractor is unreliable." But these are not our true concerns. Our true concern is that we are afraid we won’t survive without Corporate America "protecting" us.
Healthcare is one of the tools the ruling class (read: Corporate American) is using to keep their serfs (that’s us) in check. It’s what binds us to them and ensures that we will keep coming to work and turning them a profit. Without it, they have nothing to hold over our heads. It is illegal for them to behead us for sedition or whip us to make us work. Civilization has evolved beyond that point. However, they can refuse to give us a path to life saving medications.
Additionally, to keep and attract new employees if a mass exit from Corporate America results from actual healthcare being readily available, companies will need to raise wages. Corporations generate massive profits off of the work of the people, but do not raise wages to reflect it. The cost of living rises every year and wages do not rise to meet it. Even more important is who gets the money for the increased price of goods and services. We are paying the companies more money for the goods we, as a people, produce. And they are not, in turn, paying us more to produce them. Currently, they don’t have to, because we can’t get medicine without them.
Our government is owned by the large corporations. This is how things like Bush’s bank bailout, which the majority of the country was against, get passed. This is how things like affordable and fair healthcare, which the majority of the country is for, do not happen. Politicians love to say that if we had not passed the bank bailout, we would have undergone an economic collapse. That is probably true. However, it is wise to think long and hard about whom that really would have hurt the most. It was not the common citizens that the corporations and government were worried about.
Capitalism can and does work. But what we have is not capitalism. In capitalism the market is free and unrestricted. The consumers have ultimate power because they can buy, or not buy. However, in our current system the marketers are stacking the deck against the consumers. They own the guys who make the rules. There is no recourse for the common man. In this case, the American citizen is the serf. The corporations are king. And our elected representatives are their vassals.
So, how important is healthcare? It’s so important that corporate lobbyists are spending untold sums on advertising against it. It’s important because it could be our first step down the long road to freedom from the tyranny and oppression that has been mislabeled capitalism.