It’s been a moment since I sat down and recorded something, so today is a bit more rant than news.
I start off talking about the issue of running “government like a business,” namely that businesses are not homogeneous and are profit-seeking entities, not service providers. For a business, providing service is simply a thing they do to create profit.
But more than that, the type of business they’re actually running America like is called “private equity.”
They’re behaving exactly like the private equity firms that acquired and then demolished Toys R Us, Sears, Bed, Bath and Beyond, and countless other businesses that have been dismantled and liquidated to pursue easy profit for private equity firms.
Now they’re taking clear aim at the USPS (the creation of which is an enumerated power to Congress in the Constitution before the entire Executive Branch), Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Amtrak, SNAP, WIC… go down the line, they see a failing business instead of an essential service provider. And they’re gonna dismantle and privatize each and every service that working people rely on in America.
Segueing from there, I then read extensively from this speech by Otto von Bismarck, delivered March 15, 1884 (141 years ago, this weekend) in support of Germany’s world-first Worker’s Compensation program.
The whole problem is rooted in the question: does the state have the responsibility to care for its helpless fellow citizens, or does it not?
[…]
The question is, where do the justifiable limits of state socialism lie? Without such a boundary we could not manage our affairs. Each law for poor relief is socialism. There are states that distance themselves so far from socialism that poor laws do not exist at all. I remind you of France. From these conditions in France the theories of the remarkable social politician, Léon Say, whom Herr Bamberger referred to, are quite naturally accounted for. This man expresses the French view that every French citizen has the right to starve and that the state has no responsibility to hinder him in the exercise of his right.
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