“Medicare for all,” the universal single-payer healthcare system increasingly popular among Democrats, would cost taxpayers an extra $32 trillion over a decade under the most optimistic scenario, it was estimated this week. Debate ensued over whether that means “Medicare for all,” as drafted by Sen. Bernie Sanders, would cut overall healthcare spending, or whether the assumptions that produced the $32 trillion figure involved unrealistic assumptions about cuts in payments to doctors and providers.
The Left has also been debating ideas such as government offering a job at $15 an hour plus benefits to anyone who asks for it. Some say this would cost half-a-trillion a year. Others say it will massively reduce Medicaid and food stamp payments, and thus partially pay for itself.
In short, socialism is surging in the Democratic Party. The revved-up base is nominating card-carrying socialists in New York, Maryland, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere. “Socialism is good now,” ran a Huffington Post headline.
Credible economists point out that socialism’s free stuff ends up costing a lot. But price isn’t the biggest reason to oppose socialism. Its biggest problem — aside from the fact that it ends in death, ruin, and misery everywhere it is tried — is cultural.
America lacks the unity of purpose that socialism requires. It is too big and too fractious, with too few common values to carry off any such thing without massive strife, coercion, and oppression.
What one slice of the population holds most dear, another holds intolerable. Abortion is a seen as fundamental freedom to the secular Left, but a grave sin and an abomination to most of the religious Right. What some consider the free exercise of religion — participating only in ceremonies to which you don’t object — others consider “imposing religion” and cursed “discrimination.”
These culture war issues are divisive today. I place the blame on a cultural Left, still bloodthirsty after major wins on gay marriage. Others believe it’s the Right that is aggressing by waving the flag of religious liberty. Regardless of how you see the culture wars, it should be obvious that socialism will make them much uglier.
Consider the Jobs Guarantee. What sort of jobs would the federal government fund with a Jobs Guarantee? Advocate Pavilina Tcherneva wants “to design the JG as a ‘National Care Act’ that addresses the urgent environmental and care needs of communities across the United States.” Her examples: manning community gardens, staffing artist collectives.
My brother John Carney, who lives in Park Slope in Brooklyn, asked his friends what sort of jobs the government should fund with such a guarantee. The answers he got:
“[P]roviding legal assistance to accused criminals, making use of the skills of unemployed attorneys. Helping ‘undocumented aliens’ navigate through the U.S. immigration system. Advising clients on how to keep government benefits that an administrator has denied them. Providing safety for women seeking abortions.”
Needless to say, some taxpayers might object to their money going to usher women and their in utero babies to an abortion. But if a law were to prohibit guaranteed job recipients from helping out at a Planned Parenthood or counseling pregnant women to abort their babies, the Left and the media would surely cry “censorship!” or “gag rule!” or “discrimination!”, as they do already when money is cut off.
On the flip side, my brother asked whether Jobs Guarantee workers couldn’t build hunting blinds or coach baseball for homeschool collectives. Could federally funded workers be put to work weeding the infield at my Catholic parish’s school baseball field? How about helping at a crisis pregnancy center that actually helps mothers who choose not to abort their babies? What about cantoring at Mass? Would the Department of Labor have to approve the hymns?
You can see how one man’s “community service” quickly becomes another man’s “imposing your values.”
I believe the greatest need in poor and working-class communities is church. If I were given massive resources to helping crumbling communities, I would use those resources to fix up churches, synagogues, and mosques, staff them, and help the congregants get housing within walking distance of a church — and then spur these houses of worship to start community meals that include the poor. Any chance the Left would stand for the government funding that? What conditions would they impose?
If you think that such ideas would incite opposition, just imagine how much greater the problems with socialized health insurance would be. The Left is currently on a steady, organized crusade against Catholic hospitals, suing them (so far unsuccessfully) for failing to perform abortions and other procedures at odds with Catholic values. Five Thirty Eight, of all outlets, ran a piece lamenting the fact that Catholic hospitals care for their patients according to what Catholic hospitals believe is best for their patients, which doesn’t include killing the very sick or very young.
The ACLU has argued in court that Catholic hospitals must be willing to abort the babies that come through their doors in utero. Their legal grounds? The hospitals get Medicaid funding. If every dollar paid to Holy Cross Hospital came from Uncle Sam, the leverage would only grow for government to force abortions and euthanasia, both of which explicitly violate the original Hippocratic Oath, and sex-change procedures that the Left considers “healthcare” but which many of us do not.
And that’s the problem. We don’t agree, as a society, about what constitutes healthcare. We also don’t agree as a society about what counts as community service.
A free society, in which private organizations and the free market carry out the needed functions, allows for a sort of pluralism: Only get your hands dirty in the causes you agree with. Localism and federalism provides another such layer.
Socialism levels everything — and that’s the point. There becomes only one acceptable way of doing or thinking about things, and those who dissent must be punished, through prison, fines, and economic discrimination, until they finally submit. Once that’s the case, the culture war really will go to 11.
