Fantasy World

The Ownership Society

Kerry says that Bush is living in a fantasy world in Iraq, and I agree; see the post below for more on that. But the post linked above from Kevin Drum makes a point that I've been ruminating on for weeks now, ever since the G.O.P. convention--the ownership society idea is a bad one. Why? Here's Drum:

What [the story Drum tells in his post] is, though, is a cautionary tale about the "ownership society." The problem with privatizing public services is that, in the end, it's the government that picks up the pieces if the private sector fails. If you invest a piece of your Social Security in private mutual funds and your mutual fund company collapses when you're 64, what happens? In theory, it's just tough luck and you're screwed, but we all know perfectly well that's not what would really happen. As with the S&L disaster in the 80s or the LTCM collapse in the 90s, if enough people are affected the government will step in and make them whole.

He closes with this:

Privatization implies private sector levels of risk, but as the charter school story shows, the public is not willing to accept that kind of risk for things they think of as public services. They may like the idea of school choice, but when the charter schools fail it's the local school district that has to put up with the outraged parents.

There's no free lunch. The free market absolutists who are so enamored of privatization ought to know this. But they don't seem to.

Makes sense, no? Imagine it's 2044. You and I are ready to retire after long careers. There's no more Social Security; instead, we all have our money in private accounts because some Bush guy who we vaguely remember thought that would be a better system. Never mind that the national debt is so large now as a result of the transition costs from this scheme that our taxes to pay for the interest are outrageous and we get very little government service in return--in short, that we're living as a nation like a person whose credit cards are maxed out, drowning in minimum payments--you and I have done our part for 40-odd years and we're done now. And it turns out our private accounts are gone. The market crashes, or some kind of fraud is committed, and we're S.O.L. Don't you think the government would be forced to ride in on a white horse and rescue us? Would people stand for all these people, who worked hard all their lives, not being able to retire? Conservatives may be cruel in their theories, but aside from their attitudes about gays and poor women, they're not typically an overtly cruel bunch in actual practice. Would they let us twist in the wind in the name of smaller government?

Besides this problem, I think the ownership society idea exposes a bizarre flaw in the way we think about George W. Bush. We view him as this religious fundamentalist who wants to replace man's law with God's law. His political appeals are made to those who want to create a moral theocracy, where decisions about social issues are made on the basis of Biblical law rather than modern-day science and educated common sense.

Despite this, one of Bush's primary goals seems to be to change our society in a fundamentally opposite way: He wants to get rid of the very laws by which our national understanding of what is right and good are expressed as public policy. In our social programs and in our tax code, the United States has declared that there are minimum standards that we as a people will ensure that all of our people can have. We've done this through Social Security, through Medicare, through Medicaid, and through provisions of our tax code that, while never slipping into socialism, ensure that those who can afford to contribute more (and who, by extension, are benefiting more from the economic environment America provides) are asked to do so, while those who can afford to contribute less are asked for less. This system, while never removing the incentive for hard work, has ensured that the cost of failure here is not impossibly high, given people opportunities to start over, and, in short, has worked to make this something like the country that the Jesus of the Bible might have imagined, in which people care for one another. It hasn't been perfect by any means, but it's been better than the alternative.

Bush doesn't explain, when he talks about his ownership society, how it might impact the ordinary Americans he's so proud to connect with on a spiritual level. But what he's saying, essentially, is that everything in our lives would be subject to the free market. And in the free market, some will succeed beyond their wildest dreams--ask Bill Gates--and some will fail miserably. That's true now, too, but Social Security ensures that those who fail still have something. Bush is promising nothing.

Some things are too important to allow winners and losers. No one should lose when it comes to being able to retire comfortably. No one should lose when it comes to having access to critical health care. These are core tenets of two important faiths: the liberal faith, in their specifics, and the Christian one, in their abstract meaning. Liberals are voting for a man who wants to offer universal health care and they consider it a right; they supported creating Social Security and they support preserving it through fiscal discipline. Christians, at least many of them who take the faith very seriously, are voting for a man who argues against universal health care, wants to expose the most basic human needs to the whims of the marketplace, has exerted so little fiscal discipline that the programs by which our society expresses its moral beliefs are threatened, and basically says, "Every man for himself." Tell me, mama: Which group is betraying its faith?