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Turns out all that happened was the rich benefitted and the poor suffered. Who'da thought?
(media.kbin.social)
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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It’s the illusion of freedom that Americans are obsessed with. The idea is that we are free to choose our insurance provider, doctor, utility provider, etc.
The reality is we are stuck with the insurance plan our employer provides or that we get on the healthcare marketplace and we go to the doctor that our insurance company partners with. Utility providers are restricted to whoever provides service at our address.
Add to that, Americans as a whole are extremely selfish. My Uber-conservative parents and in-laws would give us their last dollar but thumb their nose at the idea of helping someone they don’t know.
None of us have the actual numbers, but I would bet a hefty amount that if we just socialized everything that we already pay for, the bill each month would not be much different.
From everything I've seen, the bill would be cheaper.
You see that a lot with people on the right (it drives a lot of their opinions that put them on that side of things.) Fundamentally it is an inability to meaningfully experience people outside of their bubble as real people like the ones inside of it and rather than work to rationally overcome that limitation they simply treat everyone outside of that bubble like an object. Almost nothing the right does to others is an unreasonable or unacceptable way to treat an object and is usually something they would never do to someone they actually intuitively perceive as a real person.
While we can (and should) hold people responsible for working to rationally overcome those limitations, the reality is that we all have them to a greater or lesser degree and there will always be people who aren't able to do better than they do now.
Not only is it unfair to them to maintain an environment wherein they are expected to have empathic abilities well beyond what they are able to manage (and to have them, fairly, be treated as though they are cruel and heartless for it, when if they only had to deal with situations within their grasp they'd actually be very kind and caring people) but pragmatically we just cannot expect to overcome the issues caused by that without making changes. Sociatally we cannot keep setting people up for failure and then being mad at them for the issues that failure causes.
NB it's also important to acknowledge that none of us are able to perfectly experience strangers as exactly the same thing as people we know and love and that while people can suck more or less at this, all of us are being asked to be better at it than we reasonably can be.