Think of it as Yoga for the brain, we are going to stretch a bit.
HOW TO PAY FOR THE HOMELESS AND HEALTHCARE FOR THE NEEDY — WITHOUT TURNING SOCIALIST
America Does Not Have a Money Problem. Maybe We Have a Priority Problem. --YNOT!
Let me start with the part that will probably surprise some people who know my politics:
Yes, I think we should do more for the homeless.
I think poor people should be able to receive basic healthcare.
I think people suffering from serious mental illness should be treated instead of abandoned underneath bridges.
I think people who fall on hard times should have a way to get back on their feet.
And no—
I am not turning socialist.
In fact, the argument I am about to make is fundamentally capitalist.
I am not suggesting that government seize industries.
I am not suggesting that everyone should receive the same income.
I am not suggesting that successful people should be punished for being successful.
I am certainly not suggesting that Washington should control the economy.
What I am suggesting is something much simpler.
We need to put the size of our economy—and the amount of money we routinely spend on things we don’t actually need—into perspective.
Because once you start looking at the numbers, the sentence:
“We can’t afford it.”
starts sounding a little less convincing.
Let’s Start With Video Games
The global video-game industry generates roughly $200 billion a year.
Think about what that actually means.
That works out to more than half a billion dollars every day.
Approximately a billion dollars every two days.
And what are we buying?
Video games. Console games. PC games. Mobile games. Subscriptions. Expansion packs. Downloadable content. Virtual weapons. Virtual clothing. Battle passes. Skins. Loot boxes. Coins. Gems. Gold. Credits. Characters.
And countless other things that exist entirely inside computer servers.
There is nothing wrong with that. I am not attacking video games. I play with technology myself. Entertainment has value.
People work hard and they have every right to spend their money on something they enjoy.
But consider what that spending tells us.
Human civilization has become wealthy enough that we can support an industry approaching $200 billion every year whose primary purpose is amusement.
That is extraordinary. In fact, it is something we should celebrate.
It means our economic system has become productive enough that enormous amounts of human labor are no longer required simply to keep everyone alive.
We have surplus. A lot of surplus.
And yet we simultaneously tell ourselves that providing basic services to some of the most desperate people in society is financially impossible.
That’s where I start having questions.
A BILLION DOLLARS EVERY TWO DAYS
Put the gaming number another way.
Roughly every 48 hours, humanity spends another billion dollars playing games.
Imagine standing beside a conveyor belt.
Every two days another billion dollars rolls past you.
Then another billion.
Then another.
Then another.
By the end of the year, you’ve watched almost $200 billion go by.
Again:
I am not suggesting that we take it.
That money belongs to the people who earned it and the companies that produced products consumers wanted.
The important thing is what the number reveals.
The money exists.
The productive capacity exists.
The technology exists.
The workers exist.
The buildings exist.
The transportation systems exist.
The medical knowledge exists.
The communications infrastructure exists.
The problem isn’t that modern civilization is destitute.
Our problem is deciding how much of our enormous productive capacity we want to direct toward particular problems.
That is a very different question.
“BUT THAT’S PRIVATE MONEY”
Correct.
And this is an important distinction.
Someone will inevitably say:
“Tony, that’s private money. You can’t compare private consumer spending to government spending.”
Yes, I can.
Not because government should confiscate the gaming industry’s revenue.
It shouldn’t.
The comparison is useful because money represents something underneath it:
economic capacity.
The real economy isn’t pieces of paper with presidents printed on them.
The real economy is:
doctors,
nurses,
construction workers,
engineers,
factories,
land,
materials,
hospitals,
medications,
food,
electricity,
technology,
housing,
transportation,
and human labor.
Money is how we organize access to those resources.
When an economy can support hundreds of billions of dollars of discretionary entertainment every year, that tells us there is substantial productive capacity beyond mere survival.
So the argument isn’t:
“Take the video-game money.”
The argument is:
“Stop telling me that the richest societies in human history lack the economic resources to address relatively small populations experiencing catastrophic conditions.”
Those are completely different arguments.
HOMELESSNESS IS A PERFECT EXAMPLE
Look around virtually any major American city.
You will see people living underneath bridges.
In tents.
In parking lots.
In abandoned buildings.
On sidewalks.
In cars.
Some are temporarily homeless.
Some lost jobs.
Some went through divorces.
Some were evicted.
Some escaped abusive relationships.
Some aged out of systems that had previously supported them.
But we also have another population that everyone can plainly see.
People suffering from serious mental illness. People addicted to drugs.
People who cannot realistically function independently.
And our current solution is often essentially: leave them outside. That isn’t capitalism. That isn’t conservatism. That isn’t personal responsibility.
That’s just a system that doesn’t know what else to do.
If a man is schizophrenic and screaming at traffic at three o’clock in the morning, telling him to “get a job” isn’t an economic philosophy.
And yes, that costs money. But so does leaving him on the street. Emergency rooms cost money. Police calls cost money. Ambulance trips cost money. Jail costs money. Court appearances cost money. Property damage costs money. Public sanitation costs money.
We are already paying. We’re simply paying in one of the least organized ways imaginable.
THE CHEAPEST SOLUTION ISN’T ALWAYS DOING NOTHING
This is something conservatives should understand particularly well.
There is a difference between: spending money and wasting money.
They are not synonymous.
Sometimes refusing to spend $1 today creates a $10 bill tomorrow.
Businesses understand this. If a factory has a machine that requires $5,000 in preventive maintenance, management doesn’t say: “Maintenance is socialism.”
They ask: “What happens if we don’t maintain it?”
If the answer is: “The machine could fail and cost us $250,000,”
then spending the $5,000 is the capitalist thing to do.
It protects the asset.
Government programs should face exactly the same economic analysis.
If providing supervised housing and treatment for a chronically homeless mentally ill person costs less than years of policing, emergency-room visits, incarceration and crisis management, then providing treatment might actually be the more fiscally conservative solution.
Don’t ask: “Does this program spend money?”
Ask: “What does the alternative cost?”
HEALTHCARE HAS THE SAME PROBLEM
Healthcare generates even more emotional political arguments.
Someone says poor people should receive healthcare and immediately one side screams:
SOCIALISM!
Why?
Suppose a low-income person has an infection. They don’t have insurance. They don’t see a doctor. They can’t afford the medication. The infection becomes worse. Eventually they go to an emergency room.
Now the simple medical problem that might have been addressed cheaply has become an expensive medical emergency.
Who pays? Somebody does. The hospital absorbs some of it. Insurance premiums absorb some. Government programs absorb some. Paying patients absorb some.
Employers absorb some. Taxpayers absorb some.
There is no magical economic universe where the treatment became free because we waited.
We simply moved the bill somewhere else. And usually made it larger.
BASIC HEALTHCARE IS NOT THE SAME THING AS UNLIMITED HEALTHCARE
This is where both political sides often deliberately misunderstand each other.
When I say poor people should have access to healthcare, I am not saying every American should have unlimited access to every medical treatment ever invented at taxpayer expense.
Those are not the same proposition. There is an enormous space between:
“Government should completely control American medicine.” and
There are interventions that can prevent vastly more expensive medical problems.
The capitalist question should be: What provides the greatest result for each dollar spent?
Not: Which political tribe gets credit?
THIS IS WHERE MMT BECOMES INTERESTING
Modern Monetary Theory gets caricatured constantly.
People hear MMT and assume it means: “Government can print unlimited money and buy everything.”
That isn’t a serious description of the idea.
One of the more useful insights associated with MMT is that a sovereign government issuing its own currency is not financially constrained in exactly the same way as a household.
A household has to obtain dollars before it can spend dollars.
The federal government creates dollars through the monetary and banking system.
That does not mean the government possesses unlimited resources.
This distinction is crucial. The United States can create additional dollars.
It cannot instantly create: another million nurses, another hundred thousand doctors, five million apartments, twenty thousand hospitals, a billion pounds of concrete, or ten million skilled construction workers.
The true limitation is not ultimately the number of dollars.
The limitation is real resources and productive capacity.
And when government spending tries to purchase more goods and services than the economy can actually produce, prices rise.
That is where inflation enters the picture. That is the constraint.
Not some giant national checking account somewhere in Washington.
ASK THE RIGHT QUESTION
Instead of asking: “Where will we find the money?”
MMT encourages us to ask a much more useful question: “Do we have the resources?”
Do we have enough doctors?
Enough nurses?
Enough medications?
Enough hospital capacity?
Enough housing?
Enough construction workers?
Enough land?
Enough building materials?
Enough treatment facilities?
If the answer is yes, then the question of financing becomes fundamentally different.
We aren’t asking whether the United States possesses enough pieces of green paper.
We are asking whether redirecting some productive capacity toward solving the problem would cause unacceptable tradeoffs elsewhere in the economy.
That is the mature question.
THE VIDEO-GAME INDUSTRY PROVES SOMETHING IMPORTANT
Now return to our $200-billion gaming industry.
What does it demonstrate?
It demonstrates that humanity has a tremendous amount of discretionary economic capacity.
Millions of programmers can write entertainment software. Artists can design imaginary worlds. Companies can manufacture gaming consoles. Factories can manufacture graphics processors. Data centers can operate game servers. Payment networks can process billions of tiny transactions. Advertising companies can promote games. Professional gamers can compete in tournaments.
Millions of people can spend thousands of hours consuming entertainment.
Again:
That is not bad. It is evidence of prosperity. A society that is literally struggling for survival doesn’t build Candy Crush. A medieval village experiencing famine doesn’t develop Fortnite.
A civilization must first produce tremendous economic surplus before enormous entertainment industries can exist.
That’s why this comparison matters.
POVERTY IN A RICH SOCIETY IS DIFFERENT FROM POVERTY IN A POOR SOCIETY
Imagine a village with 100 people. Everyone works producing food.
Even then, there is barely enough food for everyone.
One villager becomes sick. The village may genuinely lack the resources to care for him.
That is scarcity. Now imagine another village.
One hundred people live there. Twenty produce all the food everyone needs.
Ten build houses. Ten provide healthcare. Ten maintain infrastructure.
And fifty spend their time producing entertainment, art, luxury products and other nonessential goods.
Now somebody becomes sick. The villagers can’t honestly say: “We don’t possess enough economic capacity to help him.”
They may decide not to. But that’s different.
That becomes a question of allocation rather than absolute scarcity.
Modern America resembles the second village far more than the first.
NO, THIS DOESN’T MEAN WE CAN SPEND WITHOUT LIMIT
This is where MMT advocates sometimes lose people because opponents hear: “Deficits don’t matter.”
That statement is too simplistic. Resources matter. Inflation matters. Productivity matters.
If Washington suddenly spent another $5 trillion buying houses while America already had a housing shortage, government would not magically create houses.
It would compete against everyone else for the houses that already exist.
Prices would explode. That would be stupid. MMT doesn’t repeal supply and demand.
In fact, properly understood, it makes supply and demand even more important.
The relevant question becomes: Can we increase supply?
Can we build more housing?
Can we train more nurses?
Can we expand medical schools?
Can we create treatment centers?
Can we convert unused commercial property?
Can we increase construction productivity?
Can we manufacture medications more cheaply?
Can we streamline regulations?
Can private companies compete to provide services?
Now we are talking about economic engineering instead of political slogans.
BUILD CAPACITY BEFORE THROWING MONEY AT THE PROBLEM
Suppose America wants to reduce homelessness dramatically.
Don’t simply create a $100-billion program and dump money into cities.
First determine what is actually missing.
Housing?
Then build housing capacity.
Mental-health beds?
Build facilities.
Psychiatrists?
Expand training.
Addiction-treatment capacity?
Fund facilities while creating outcome standards.
Case managers?
Train them.
Temporary transitional housing?
Create it.
Employment programs?
Partner with businesses.
Then spending creates additional capacity rather than merely bidding up the price of existing capacity.
That distinction is enormous.
USE CAPITALISM
This is where my solution probably separates from traditional liberal proposals.
I don’t want the federal government operating everything.
Government is frequently terrible at operating things.
Its role should often be to establish the objective, provide financing where necessary, establish safeguards and then let competing institutions figure out the best way to deliver results.
Use: private companies, nonprofits, churches, hospitals, universities, local governments, charities, community groups, social entrepreneurs, and whoever else can demonstrate results.
Suppose Organization A receives $20 million and successfully transitions 2,000 chronically homeless people into stable housing.
Organization B receives $20 million and successfully transitions 200.
Guess what?
Next year Organization A gets more money.
Organization B doesn’t.
That’s how markets work.
Reward success. Punish failure.
MEASURE EVERYTHING
Government programs should have measurable outputs.
If we fund homelessness reduction, I want to know:
How many people were placed into housing?
How many remained housed after six months? After one year? After three years?
How many entered employment? How many completed addiction treatment?
How many psychiatric hospitalizations were avoided?
How many emergency-room visits declined?
How many arrests declined? How much did each successful outcome cost?
Publish it.
Let everyone see it. Then compare cities. Compare nonprofits. Compare treatment models. Compare states.
Turn social services into something resembling competitive performance.
That’s capitalism.
AND CLOSE PROGRAMS THAT FAIL
This is the part Washington almost never wants to do.
Programs become permanent. Agencies become permanent.
Budgets become permanent. Employees become permanent.
Whether they solve the original problem sometimes becomes almost irrelevant.
That has to change. Every major social program should contain performance targets.
If the targets are repeatedly missed: change management,
change contractors, change methods, or shut the program down.
Helping people should not become an excuse for creating another immortal bureaucracy.
The goal isn’t to fund homelessness programs. The goal is to reduce homelessness.
Those are not the same thing.
LIBERALS SHOULD AGREE WITH HALF OF THIS
Liberals are correct about something conservatives occasionally refuse to admit:
Some people genuinely need help.
Not theoretically. Not because society turned them into victims.
Some human beings are simply in terrible situations.
A severely mentally ill person may genuinely be incapable of solving his own situation.
A disabled person may genuinely be incapable of supporting himself.
A child born into poverty did not choose poverty.
A woman escaping an abusive husband may genuinely need temporary shelter.
A person with cancer who loses his job may genuinely need medical help.
Pretending these situations don’t exist isn’t conservative. It’s just denial.
CONSERVATIVES SHOULD AGREE WITH THE OTHER HALF
Conservatives are also correct about something liberals sometimes refuse to admit:
Government programs can create dependency. Incentives matter. Fraud exists.
Bureaucracies protect themselves. Programs can spend enormous amounts of money while producing poor results.
Not every homeless person wants help. Not every addict wants treatment.
Not every dollar spent helping somebody actually helps them.
Personal responsibility still matters. Work still matters. Family still matters. Community still matters.
And sometimes saying “no” is necessary.
Acknowledging compassion does not require abandoning accountability.
SO WHY ARE WE STILL ARGUING LIKE IT’S 1935?
Our political vocabulary is ancient. One person says:“We should help poor people.”
Someone responds: “Socialist.”
Someone says: “Programs should require accountability.”
Someone responds: “Heartless conservative.”
Neither response requires thought.
We should be able to hold two ideas in our heads simultaneously:
Capitalism is extraordinarily good at creating wealth.
And: A wealthy capitalist society can choose to prevent some forms of catastrophic suffering.
Those statements do not contradict each other.
CAPITALISM CREATED THE SURPLUS
This is the part of the argument I actually consider pro-capitalist.
Who created a society where we can even discuss this?
Capitalism did a pretty damn good job. Entrepreneurs. Investors. Inventors. Workers. Businesses. Competition. Technology. Industrialization. Automation. Productivity. Global trade. Capital accumulation.
All of those things created the enormous economic surplus modern Americans enjoy.
Our grandparents spent much larger percentages of their income simply obtaining necessities.
Modern Americans spend money on: streaming services, video games, restaurants, vacations, smartphones, boats, sports, concerts, pets, designer clothing, subscriptions, electronics, and countless other things people throughout most of human history could never have imagined.
That’s wealth. And capitalism helped create it.
So why would I want to destroy the system that generated it?
I don’t.
I WANT CAPITALISM TO CREATE EVEN MORE
I hope the video-game industry eventually becomes a $500-billion industry.
If people want the games, build them. I hope entrepreneurs become billionaires.
Invent something people want. Take risks. Build companies. Create jobs.
Become wealthy. I don’t resent success. I want more success.
Because the richer and more productive society becomes, the easier it becomes to deal with genuine hardship.
Growth is one of the greatest anti-poverty programs ever invented.
But growth and compassion are not mutually exclusive.
THE REAL MMT QUESTION
MMT ultimately forces us to confront a question that politicians often avoid.
Not: “Can we find the dollars?”
But: “What should our productive economy be doing?”
Should we manufacture another million virtual swords? Sure If people want them.
Should we simultaneously be able to manufacture insulin? Probably.
Should we be able to build another luxury condominium? Absolutely.
Should we also be able to construct basic housing for someone transitioning off the streets? Probably.
Should someone be permitted to own three Ferraris? Yes.
Should a ten-year-old with appendicitis receive surgery regardless of his parents’ bank account? I think most Americans would also say yes.
You don’t have to abolish the first to accomplish the second.
TAXES STILL HAVE A PURPOSE
Another misunderstanding about MMT is that if government creates currency, taxes supposedly become unnecessary.
That isn’t the conclusion.
Taxes still perform important functions.
Taxes can reduce private-sector purchasing power.
That can help control inflation when government is increasing spending.
Taxes create demand for the national currency.
Taxes can discourage certain activities.
Taxes can redistribute some purchasing power.
And taxes help determine how much of society’s productive resources remain available to the private sector versus the public sector.
But that is different from imagining federal taxes as coins being collected in a giant piggy bank before Congress can buy something.
At the federal level, the monetary mechanics are considerably more complicated.
And understanding that difference allows us to have a better discussion about what government can and cannot realistically do.
THE CONSTRAINT IS INFLATION
If America has unemployed construction workers, available land, available materials and idle manufacturing capacity, government-supported construction can potentially activate those resources without dramatically competing with private demand.
But if every construction company is already booked for two years and materials are scarce, suddenly injecting billions of dollars into construction will mostly increase prices.
That is the constraint.
The same is true for healthcare.
Writing bigger government checks doesn’t automatically create doctors.
We need to increase supply.
More doctors.
More nurses.
More physician assistants.
More nurse practitioners.
More clinics.
More treatment facilities.
More medical technology.
More generic drugs.
More automation.
More competition.
Government finance can potentially help create that capacity.
But money alone doesn’t create it.
WHAT I WOULD ACTUALLY DO
If I were designing the system, I would divide the problem into categories instead of pretending “the homeless” are one homogeneous group.
Group One: Temporary Economic Homelessness
People who lost jobs, faced eviction, escaped domestic violence or experienced another temporary crisis.
Give them short-term housing assistance.
Help them find employment.
Provide transportation.
Provide childcare where necessary.
Then taper assistance as income returns.
The goal is rapid reintegration.
Group Two: Substance Abuse
Housing alone may not solve the problem.
Treatment needs to be part of the solution.
Provide residential treatment where appropriate.
Combine housing assistance with recovery programs.
Measure outcomes.
Group Three: Serious Mental Illness
This is the politically uncomfortable category.
Some people genuinely cannot safely care for themselves.
America needs to reconsider long-term psychiatric care.
Not the abusive institutions of seventy years ago.
Modern, humane, medically supervised facilities with legal safeguards.
Leaving a profoundly mentally ill person hallucinating underneath an overpass is not more compassionate than institutional treatment simply because we call him “free.”
Group Four: Chronic Disability
Some people will need permanent assistance.
Fine.
Accept reality.
Design efficient long-term supportive housing.
Group Five: People Who Can Work but Refuse
This is also real.
Assistance should come with expectations whenever the person is physically and mentally capable.
Training.
Employment.
Community participation.
Treatment.
Something.
Compassion should not become permanent subsidization of destructive behavior.
APPLY THE SAME THINKING TO HEALTHCARE
Guarantee a basic floor.
Not unlimited everything.
A floor.
Preventive medicine.
Primary care.
Emergency care.
Essential medications.
Mental-health treatment.
Maternal care.
Treatment for serious diseases.
Then allow private insurance and private medicine to operate above that floor.
Want a private room?
Buy premium insurance.
Want an elective procedure?
Pay for it.
Want concierge medicine?
Fine.
Capitalism survives.
Competition survives.
Private medicine survives.
Innovation survives.
But society decides that there is a basic level below which we don’t allow citizens to fall.
I don’t see that as socialism.
I see it as civilization.
HERE’S THE PERSPECTIVE I WANT PEOPLE TO UNDERSTAND
Tomorrow, humanity will spend roughly another half-billion dollars on video games.
And the next day.
And the next.
And nobody will hold congressional hearings asking:
“How are we going to pay for Candy Crush?”
Nobody will ask whether the nation has enough fiscal capacity for Fortnite skins.
Nobody will worry about society collapsing because somebody bought a virtual sword.
Those purchases simply happen because millions of individual people decide they are worth making.
Again, that’s fine.
But it should give us perspective.
We have built an economy with an incredible capacity to satisfy human wants.
The next stage of economic maturity should be figuring out how to satisfy a few essential human needs without destroying the machine that created that prosperity.
THAT IS THE BALANCE
I do not want socialism.
I don’t want bureaucrats running grocery stores.
I don’t want government deciding how many shoes Nike should manufacture.
I don’t want government running Apple.
I don’t want politicians designing automobiles.
I don’t want Washington determining restaurant menus.
Markets are spectacularly good at doing those things.
Let them.
But there are certain areas where pure market allocation produces outcomes society may decide are unacceptable.
Serious mental illness.
Children’s healthcare.
Catastrophic disease.
Extreme disability.
Temporary homelessness.
These represent a relatively small portion of the economy.
A rich capitalist civilization can address them.
WE ARE NOT POOR
That may be the most important sentence in this entire discussion.
America is not poor.
Modern civilization is not poor.
We sometimes talk as though every public expenditure requires choosing between feeding children and bankrupting the country.
Meanwhile enormous sectors of our economy exist entirely around discretionary consumption.
That doesn’t mean we should raid those sectors.
It means we should recognize what they tell us.
They tell us that society produces an enormous surplus.
The question becomes:
What do we want to do with some of that surplus?
WE SHOULD STOP SAYING “WE CAN’T AFFORD IT”
Sometimes we genuinely cannot afford something.
Resources can be scarce.
Labor can be scarce.
Materials can be scarce.
Inflation can become dangerous.
Those are legitimate constraints.
But politicians use “we can’t afford it” far too casually.
Sometimes what they actually mean is:
“We have decided not to allocate resources toward that.”
Fine.
Then say that.
That is a political decision.
But don’t pretend that a civilization spending almost $200 billion a year on video games lacks the technological, industrial and human capability to build psychiatric treatment centers.
It obviously doesn’t.
THE ANSWER ISN’T MORE GOVERNMENT OR LESS GOVERNMENT
It is better government.
Government should do the things markets cannot efficiently solve alone.
Markets should do almost everything else.
And where the two intersect, use competition and measurable outcomes.
Government financing.
Private execution.
Transparent metrics.
Local experimentation.
National standards where necessary.
Reward success.
Kill failures.
That combination could solve problems far more effectively than either pure government bureaucracy or simply pretending the problems will disappear by themselves.
CAPITALISM WITH A FLOOR
Perhaps that’s the simplest description of what I’m advocating.
Not socialism.
Capitalism with a floor.
Above that floor:
Compete.
Invent.
Work.
Invest.
Build.
Fail.
Try again.
Get rich.
Become a billionaire if you can.
Buy the Ferrari.
Buy the yacht.
Buy the mansion.
Build a company.
Create a video game.
Sell $50 billion worth of virtual dragons.
God bless you.
But underneath that economic competition there is a floor.
A profoundly mentally ill person doesn’t die beneath a bridge.
A poor child doesn’t die because his parents couldn’t buy antibiotics.
A temporarily homeless family gets a chance to recover.
A disabled person gets basic support.
Then capitalism continues doing what capitalism does best:
creating wealth.
MAYBE THAT IS SOMETHING BOTH SIDES COULD LIVE WITH
Liberals get a society that doesn’t simply abandon people experiencing genuine hardship.
Conservatives get accountability, competition, work requirements where appropriate, private-sector participation and strict measurement of results.
Entrepreneurs keep entrepreneurship.
Investors keep investing.
Businesses keep competing.
Consumers keep choosing.
We don’t nationalize industries.
We don’t abolish wealth.
We don’t pretend everyone deserves identical outcomes.
And we don’t pretend letting mentally ill people live in tents is somehow a sacred principle of capitalism.
That sounds like a fairly reasonable bargain.
AND NO, I STILL HAVEN’T TURNED SOCIALIST
I still want capitalism.
I just want us to understand what capitalism has accomplished.
It has made us astonishingly wealthy.
We are wealthy enough to spend roughly a billion dollars every couple of days entertaining ourselves with video games.
Good.
Let’s keep doing it.
Let’s create even more wealth.
But let’s also stop pretending that solving certain forms of extreme suffering is economically unimaginable.
The money isn’t really the interesting part.
The resources are.
The productive capacity is.
The management is.
The incentives are.
And perhaps most importantly:
The priorities are.
The question isn’t whether we should become socialist.
The question is whether a successful capitalist society can become intelligent enough to use a tiny portion of the enormous prosperity it creates to make sure there is a floor beneath its citizens.
I think it can. And if we can spend a billion dollars every two days buying imaginary swords— I think we can at least afford to have the conversation.
