Unruly Starving Peasants Refuse to Work for Free.
Democrats Plan for 2018: We are Not Trump, Vote for The Lesser Evil! Stop Asking for Economic Freedom. (Guillotines for Sale, 10% off!)
No, wealth isn’t created at the top. It is merely devoured there
Bankers, pharmaceutical giants, Google, Facebook ... a new breed of rentiers are at the very top of the pyramid and they’re sucking the rest of us dry
This piece is about one of the biggest taboos of our times. About a truth that is seldom acknowledged, and yet - on reflection - cannot be denied. The truth that we are living in an inverse welfare state.
These days, politicians from the left to the right assume that most wealth is created at the top. By the visionaries, by the job creators, and by the people who have “made it”. By the go-getters oozing talent and entrepreneurialism that are helping to advance the whole world.
Now, we may disagree about the extent to which success deserves to be rewarded - the philosophy of the left is that the strongest shoulders should bear the heaviest burden, while the right fears high taxes will blunt enterprise - but across the spectrum virtually all agree that wealth is created primarily at the top.
So entrenched is this assumption that it’s even embedded in our language. When economists talk about “productivity”, what they really mean is the size of your paycheck. And when we use terms like “welfare state”, “redistribution” and “solidarity”, we’re implicitly subscribing to the view that there are two strata: the makers and the takers, the producers and the couch potatoes, the hardworking citizens - and everybody else.
In reality, it is precisely the other way around. In reality, it is the waste collectors, the nurses, and the cleaners whose shoulders are supporting the apex of the pyramid. They are the true mechanism of social solidarity. Meanwhile, a growing share of those we hail as “successful” and “innovative” are earning their wealth at the expense of others. The people getting the biggest handouts are not down around the bottom, but at the very top. Yet their perilous dependence on others goes unseen. Almost no one talks about it. Even for politicians on the left, it’s a non-issue.
To understand why, we need to recognise that there are two ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our “human capital” in economic terms) to create something new, whether that’s a takeout app, a wedding cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create. Ergo, to work is to create new wealth.
But there is also a second way to make money. That’s the rentier way: by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase your wealth. You produce nothing, yet profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at others’ expense, using his power to claim economic benefit.
For those who know their history, the term “rentier” conjures associations with heirs to estates, such as the 19th century’s large class of useless rentiers, well-described by the French economist Thomas Piketty. These days, that class is making a comeback. (Ironically, however, conservative politicians adamantly defend the rentier’s right to lounge around, deeming inheritance tax to be the height of unfairness.) But there are also other ways of rent-seeking. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, from big pharma to the lobby machines in Washington and Westminster, zoom in and you’ll see rentiers everywhere.
There is no longer a sharp dividing line between working and rentiering. In fact, the modern-day rentier often works damn hard. Countless people in the financial sector, for example, apply great ingenuity and effort to amass “rent” on their wealth. Even the big innovations of our age - businesses like Facebook and Uber - are interested mainly in expanding the rentier economy. The problem with most rich people therefore is not that they are coach potatoes. Many a CEO toils 80 hours a week to multiply his allowance. It’s hardly surprising, then, that they feel wholly entitled to their wealth.
It may take quite a mental leap to see our economy as a system that shows solidarity with the rich rather than the poor. So I’ll start with the clearest illustration of modern freeloaders at the top: bankers. Studies conducted by the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements - not exactly leftist thinktanks - have revealed that much of the financial sector has become downright parasitic. How instead of creating wealth, they gobble it up whole.
Don’t get me wrong. Banks can help to gauge risks and get money where it is needed, both of which are vital to a well-functioning economy. But consider this: economists tell us that the optimum level of total private-sector debt is 100% of GDP. Based on this equation, if the financial sector only grows, it won’t equal more wealth, but less. So here’s the bad news. In the United Kingdom, private-sector debt is now at 157.5%. In the United States, the figure is 188.8%.
In other words, a big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body. It’s not creating anything new, merely sucking others dry. Bankers have found a hundred and one ways to accomplish this. The basic mechanism, however, is always the same: offer loans like it’s going out of style, which in turn inflates the price of things like houses and shares, then earn a tidy percentage off those overblown prices (in the form of interest, commissions, brokerage fees, or what have you), and if the shit hits the fan, let Uncle Sam mop it up.
The financial innovation concocted by all the math whizzes working in modern banking (instead of at universities or companies that contribute to real prosperity) basically boils down to maximising the total amount of debt. And debt, of course, is a means of earning rent. So for those who believe that pay ought to be proportionate to the value of work, the conclusion we have to draw is that many bankers should be earning a negative salary; a fine, if you will, for destroying more wealth than they create.
Bankers are the most obvious class of closet freeloaders, but they are certainly not alone. Many a lawyer and an accountant wields a similar revenue model. Take tax evasion. Untold hardworking, academically degreed professionals make a good living at the expense of the populations of other countries. Or take the tide of privatisations over the past three decades, which have been all but a carte blanche for rentiers. One of the richest people in the world, Carlos Slim, earned his millions by obtaining a monopoly of the Mexican telecom market and then hiking prices sky high. The same goes for the Russian oligarchs who rose after the Berlin Wall fell, who bought up valuable state-owned assets for song to live off the rent.
But here comes the rub. Most rentiers are not as easily identified as the greedy banker or manager. Many are disguised. On the face of it, they look like industrious folks, because for part of the time they really are doing something worthwhile. Precisely that makes us overlook their massive rent-seeking.
Take the pharmaceutical industry. Companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer regularly unveil new drugs, yet most real medical breakthroughs are made quietly at government-subsidised labs. Private companies mostly manufacture medications that resemble what we’ve already got. They get it patented and, with a hefty dose of marketing, a legion of lawyers, and a strong lobby, can live off the profits for years. In other words, the vast revenues of the pharmaceutical industry are the result of a tiny pinch of innovation and fistfuls of rent.
Even paragons of modern progress like Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber and Airbnb are woven from the fabric of rentierism. Firstly, because they owe their existence to government discoveries and inventions (every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll). And second, because they tie themselves into knots to avoid paying taxes, retaining countless bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists for this very purpose.
Even more important, many of these companies function as “natural monopolies”, operating in a positive feedback loop of increasing growth and value as more and more people contribute free content to their platforms. Companies like this are incredibly difficult to compete with, because as they grow bigger, they only get stronger.
Aptly characterising this “platform capitalism” in an article, Tom Goodwin writes: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.”
So what do these companies own? A platform. A platform that lots and lots of people want to use. Why? First and foremost, because they’re cool and they’re fun - and in that respect, they do offer something of value. However, the main reason why we’re all happy to hand over free content to Facebook is because all of our friends are on Facebook too, because their friends are on Facebook … because their friends are on Facebook.
Most of Mark Zuckerberg’s income is just rent collected off the millions of picture and video posts that we give away daily for free. And sure, we have fun doing it. But we also have no alternative - after all, everybody is on Facebook these days. Zuckerberg has a website that advertisers are clamouring to get onto, and that doesn’t come cheap. Don’t be fooled by endearing pilots with free internet in Zambia. Stripped down to essentials, it’s an ordinary ad agency. In fact, in 2015 Google and Facebook pocketed an astounding 64% of all online ad revenue in the US.
But don’t Google and Facebook make anything useful at all? Sure they do. The irony, however, is that their best innovations only make the rentier economy even bigger. They employ scores of programmers to create new algorithms so that we’ll all click on more and more ads. Uber has usurped the whole taxi sector just as Airbnb has upended the hotel industry and Amazon has overrun the book trade. The bigger such platforms grow the more powerful they become, enabling the lords of these digital feudalities to demand more and more rent.
Think back a minute to the definition of a rentier: someone who uses their control over something that already exists in order to increase their own wealth. The feudal lord of medieval times did that by building a tollgate along a road and making everybody who passed by pay. Today’s tech giants are doing basically the same thing, but transposed to the digital highway. Using technology funded by taxpayers, they build tollgates between you and other people’s free content and all the while pay almost no tax on their earnings.
This is the so-called innovation that has Silicon Valley gurus in raptures: ever bigger platforms that claim ever bigger handouts. So why do we accept this? Why does most of the population work itself to the bone to support these rentiers?
I think there are two answers. Firstly, the modern rentier knows to keep a low profile. There was a time when everybody knew who was freeloading. The king, the church, and the aristocrats controlled almost all the land and made peasants pay dearly to farm it. But in the modern economy, making rentierism work is a great deal more complicated. How many people can explain a credit default swap, or a collateralised debt obligation? Or the revenue model behind those cute Google Doodles? And don’t the folks on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley work themselves to the bone, too? Well then, they must be doing something useful, right?
Maybe not. The typical workday of Goldman Sachs’ CEO may be worlds away from that of King Louis XIV, but their revenue models both essentially revolve around obtaining the biggest possible handouts. “The world’s most powerful investment bank,” wrote the journalist Matt Taibbi about Goldman Sachs, “is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
But far from squids and vampires, the average rich freeloader manages to masquerade quite successfully as a decent hard worker. He goes to great lengths to present himself as a “job creator” and an “investor” who “earns” his income by virtue of his high “productivity”. Most economists, journalists, and politicians from left to right are quite happy to swallow this story. Time and again language is twisted around to cloak funneling and exploitation as creation and generation.
However, it would be wrong to think that all this is part of some ingenious conspiracy. Many modern rentiers have convinced even themselves that they are bona fide value creators. When current Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein was asked about the purpose of his job, his straight-faced answer was that he is “doing God’s work”. The Sun King would have approved.
The second thing that keeps rentiers safe is even more insidious. We’re all wannabe rentiers. They have made millions of people complicit in their revenue model. Consider this: What are our financial sector’s two biggest cash cows? Answer: the housing market and pensions. Both are markets in which many of us are deeply invested.
Recent decades have seen more and more people contract debts to buy a home, and naturally it’s in their interest if house prices continue to scale new heights (read: burst bubble upon bubble). The same goes for pensions. Over the past few decades we’ve all scrimped and saved up a mountainous pension piggy bank. Now pension funds are under immense pressure to ally with the biggest exploiters in order to ensure they pay out enough to please their investors.
The fact of the matter is that feudalism has been democratised. To a lesser or greater extent, we are all depending on handouts. En masse, we have been made complicit in this exploitation by the rentier elite, resulting in a political covenant between the rich rent-seekers and the homeowners and retirees.
Don’t get me wrong, most homeowners and retirees are not benefiting from this situation. On the contrary, the banks are bleeding them far beyond the extent to which they themselves profit from their houses and pensions. Still, it’s hard to point fingers at a kleptomaniac when you have sticky fingers too.
So why is this happening? The answer can be summed up in three little words: Because it can.
Rentierism is, in essence, a question of power. That the Sun King Louis XIV was able to exploit millions was purely because he had the biggest army in Europe. It’s no different for the modern rentier. He’s got the law, politicians and journalists squarely in his court. That’s why bankers get fined peanuts for preposterous fraud, while a mother on government assistance gets penalised within an inch of her life if she checks the wrong box.
The biggest tragedy of all, however, is that the rentier economy is gobbling up society’s best and brightest. Where once upon a time Ivy League graduates chose careers in science, public service or education, these days they are more likely to opt for banks, law firms, or trumped up ad agencies like Google and Facebook. When you think about it, it’s insane. We are forking over billions in taxes to help our brightest minds on and up the corporate ladder so they can learn how to score ever more outrageous handouts.
One thing is certain: countries where rentiers gain the upper hand gradually fall into decline. Just look at the Roman Empire. Or Venice in the 15th century. Look at the Dutch Republic in the 18th century. Like a parasite stunts a child’s growth, so the rentier drains a country of its vitality.
What innovation remains in a rentier economy is mostly just concerned with further bolstering that very same economy. This may explain why the big dreams of the 1970s, like flying cars, curing cancer, and colonising Mars, have yet to be realised, while bankers and ad-makers have at their fingertips technologies a thousand times more powerful.
Yet it doesn’t have to be this way. Tollgates can be torn down, financial products can be banned, tax havens dismantled, lobbies tamed, and patents rejected. Higher taxes on the ultra-rich can make rentierism less attractive, precisely because society’s biggest freeloaders are at the very top of the pyramid. And we can more fairly distribute our earnings on land, oil, and innovation through a system of, say, employee shares, or a universal basic income.
But such a revolution will require a wholly different narrative about the origins of our wealth. It will require ditching the old-fashioned faith in “solidarity” with a miserable underclass that deserves to be borne aloft on the market-level salaried shoulders of society’s strongest. All we need to do is to give real hard-working people what they deserve.
And, yes, by that I mean the waste collectors, the nurses, the cleaners - theirs are the shoulders that carry us all.
No, wealth isn’t created at the top. It is merely devoured there
Democrats Against Single Payer
Single-payer health care has always been a goal of the Left. But Democrats have turned it into a punching bag.
Establishing some sort of universal health care in America has been a cherished goal of the broad left since at least as far back as Harry Truman’s administration, when a proposal for a single-payer national health insurance system was buried under a barrage of right-wing, red-baiting attacks. Since then, while president after president has tried and failed (or, more recently, simply abandoned) similar efforts, most liberals and Democrats have persisted, at least rhetorically, in fulfilling Truman’s now-seventy-two-year-old promise.
That is, apparently, until now.
The possibility of achieving single payer is “a bigger problem” than America’s already broken health-care system, according to one Democratic governor; it’s a boondoggle that would require a “massive tax increase,” says a Colorado senator; one liberal commentator charges that it “doesn’t make sense,” and shows an “indifference to real-world consequences.”
The push for “Medicare for All,” one high-profile liberal pundit tells us, is simply based in “outrage that private insurers get to play any role,” and aims to “punish or demonize insurance companies.” Oh and by the way, it’ll “never, ever come to pass” anyway, according to the Democratic Party’s former standard-bearer. How times have changed.
Hearts and Minds
To be sure, the attempt by some Democrats to “triangulate” on health-care reform isn’t exactly new. When Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition challenged the Democratic establishment back in the 1980s, with a single-payer system one of their chief demands, the center-right Democratic Leadership Council used its new influence to push the Democratic Party rightward.
Virginia Democratic senator Chuck Robb, one of the DLC’s founders, warned in 1989 that “policies forged in the economic crisis of the 1930s and the social and cultural schisms of the 1960s” were irrelevant to most Americans. Two years later, Bill Clinton’s issue director Bruce Reed, who doubled as policy director for the DLC, made sure to distance Clinton from single payer.
The issue flared up again during the 2008 Democratic primary fight, where both Obama and Hillary Clinton tried hedging their bets. Clinton put forward a plan that was basically Obamacare while insisting that “Medicare for All” could still be on the cards under the right circumstances. Meanwhile Obama repeatedly flip-flopped, at one point telling an audience that “the Canadian model won’t work in the United States” and that “we’ve got to develop a uniquely American approach,” and nine days later hinting to a different audience that over time single payer may be on the table.
DLC leaders felt reassured however, telling the New York Times they were “pleased that none of the Democratic candidates supports a single-payer health-care system.”
So Democrats’ attempts to quell their base’s clamoring for a comprehensive, public health-care system isn’t new. What is new is the open, public disparagement of such a goal - not just by Democratic leaders, but by leading liberal commentators, too.
Ironically, this appears largely to have been due to the Sanders campaign - or rather, the challenge it posed to Hillary Clinton’s previously wide-open road to the White House. Needing to differentiate herself from Sanders’s unabashed progressivism, and to dampen popular enthusiasm for his message, Clinton began attacking his policies, despite her historic sympathy toward single payer.
Sanders’s proposals were “ideas that sound good on paper but will never make it in real life,” she told crowds; for good measure, she insisted that single-payer health care “will never, ever come to pass.”
Two years earlier, she explained her opposition to the policy on the basis that “we don’t have a one size fits all; our country is quite diverse.” In January 2016, she warned breathlessly that Sanders’s plan would “end all the kinds of health care we know” and claimed it would “send health insurance to the states,” while her daughter warned that it would “dismantle Obamacare” and “strip millions and millions and millions of people off their health insurance.”
As late as October, Clinton’s team was still trying to distance herself from Trump’s accusation that she - heaven forbid! - “wants to go to a single-payer plan,” with her spokesman directing Politifact to an earlier fact-check confirming her lack of support for the policy. (Lest we mistake this for mere expediency, we can rest assured that at least some of the Clinton camp really felt this way: campaign manager John Podesta declared in an email to ThinkProgress editor-in-chief Judd Legum that Sanders’s “actual proposal sucks, but we live in a leftie alternative universe.”)
These doomsday warnings didn’t seem to sway the public. By May 2016, Gallup polling found that more than half of Americans favored replacing Obamacare with a single-payer system, including a whole 41 percent of Republicans.
The same can’t be said for well-placed liberal columnists and Democratic lawmakers, who during -and since - the Clinton campaign have followed her lead and continued pouring cold water on the idea.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s about-face on the issue, for instance, is well-documented. Krugman went from regularly writing screeds about the superiority of entirely government-controlled health care to insisting that “single payer just isn’t a political possibility” and running column after column attacking Sanders’s policy.
To be fair, Krugman had always been wary of the political feasibility of single payer, writing in 2007: “In an ideal world, I’d be a single-payer guy. But I see the chance of getting universal care, imperfect but fixable . . . And I want to grab that chance.” But by 2016, Krugman’s criticisms of single payer went beyond this, at one point cautioning that “switching to single payer would impose a lot of disruption on tens of millions of families who currently have good coverage through their employers” and warning of tax hikes on the middle class.
The same man who once called an anti-health-care reform editorial “vile and stupid” and charged that the “greed of the medical-industrial complex” was the only thing standing in the way of universal health care in the United States began complaining about “demonization” from the Sanders campaign, accusing it of painting “anyone raising questions about the senator’s proposals” as “a corrupt tool of vested interests.”
Krugman wasn’t as concerned about civility back when Obama abandoned the public option element of his health-care plan in 2009, complaining that “the inspiring figure progressives thought they had elected comes across, far too often, as a dry technocrat,” calling him “weirdly reluctant to make the moral case for universal care” and defending the “progressive backlash” over his falling short. (Puzzlingly, seven years later, Krugman praised Clinton as being “pretty good” on policy for having a proposal that was identical to the final version of Obamacare that 2009-era Krugman appears so disappointed with).
Krugman was by no means the only one. In January 2016, the centrist Brookings Institution called single payer an “impossible (pipe) dream,” something that “was, is, and will remain a dream,” because “it is radical in a way that no legislation has ever been in the United States.” A month later, New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait complained with respect to Sanders’s single-payer proposal that Sanders was “not merely pushing the envelope of policy imagination,” but had a platform “predicated on completely ignoring mainstream economic analysis.” (Curiously, nearly half a year earlier, Chait had lamented that “socialized medicine” had “never caught on in the United States.”)
Vox’s Ezra Klein labeled Sanders’s plan “vague and unrealistic.” The American Prospect’s Paul Starr, who helped work on Bill Clinton’s original unsuccessful health-care reform, wrote two separate columns that warned in part that Sanders’s single-payer plan would lead to a scary and unprecedented centralization of power in Washington.
Even when single-payer reform appears to dodge such concerns, powerful Democratic and liberal interests can’t bring themselves to get behind it. Nancy Pelosi recently told frustrated town hall attendees that “if you want to move to single payer, what you should do . . . is support state options,” referring to state-level campaigns for single payer.
She should tell her own party. When a ballot initiative popped up in Colorado in the middle of the presidential campaign that would have encoded a single-payer health-care system in the state’s constitution, Democrats fell over themselves to discourage the initiative, echoing Clinton’s rhetoric in the process.
The state’s Democratic governor John Hickenlooper said that “it would be premature to dramatically remake our health-care system at this time” while existing reforms were “just beginning to bear fruit.” He complained behind closed doors to a powerful lobby of business leaders and political operatives that the “cost [is] going to be huge.”
The state’s Democratic senator Michael Bennett told a local paper that single payer wasn’t “the right approach to solving our health-care problems,” partly due to the “massive tax increase” involved. (Incidentally, both politicians received a ton of money from the health-care, insurance, and pharmaceutical industries).
Other Colorado Democrats opposing the measure were the state’s previous governor, Bill Ritter, state House majority leader Crisanta Duran, and Kelly Brough, president of the Denver Chamber of Commerce. Coloradans for Coloradans, a group that fought the measure, cited Democrats’ opposition to it to defend their efforts, and even bragged that they had “Democratic consultants running the campaign.”
Meanwhile, liberal group ProgressNow Colorado also came out against the measure, which was ultimately defeated - likely in part because high-profile Democrats fought it. (In a perfect feedback loop, one liberal commentator has recently used the Colorado example to dampen renewed calls for Medicare for All).
Liberals’ newfound antipathy to one of the Democrats’ traditionally long-coveted goals survived the end of Sanders’s primary campaign. In July, the Clinton campaign’s appointees on the Democratic Party’s platform-drafting committee united to vote down a plank advocating for a single-payer system - particularly galling given the plank’s merely symbolic status.
Most recently, as California considered instituting a state-wide single-payer system on the eve of a possible GOP repeal of Obamacare, the state’s Democratic governor Jerry Brown rubbished the idea, asking: “Where do you get the extra money? . . . How do you do that?” He compared it to solving a problem “by something that’s . . . a bigger problem,” which “makes no sense.”
With the GOP repeal having devolved into utter failure, Clinton confidante and Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden - who as late as January this year seemed to be suggesting that progressives should get on board with a future Sanders push for single payer - recently penned a USA Today op-ed about what was next for health-care reform. Single payer wasn’t in it. (Tanden happened to have been one of the Clinton delegates on the platform drafting committee who voted against the single-payer plank last year).
The particularly bizarre thing about many of these attacks on single payer from prominent liberals and Democrats is that they’re fundamentally conservative arguments: single payer is too radical and far-reaching a change; it’s too expensive; it’ll mean raising taxes; it’ll involve giving the federal government too much power.
Do Democrats and liberals really want to be making these arguments? After all, they can be (and have been) used against virtually any policy favored by progressives and the Left more broadly, which typically do cost a lot of money, necessitate extra taxes to pay for them, require a great deal of government involvement to successfully implement, and tend to temporarily disrupt people’s lives as new rules, regulations, and systems are put in place. Go ahead and look up conservatives’ attacks on Obamacare as it was cobbled together - virtually every liberal complaint now made about single payer was launched by the Right against Obamacare.
There Is a Season
Meanwhile, while liberals and Democrats attack single payer on “practical” grounds, they appear to have forgotten the importance of the moral case for such policies.
In their haste to defend Obamacare (and, by extension, a former president’s legacy) from often dishonest right-wing attacks, they ignore the very real and painful flaws and inadequacies of the law as it stands, which, for all the good it’s done, continues to leave people trapped in impossible, heart-rending situations and forces them to beg for money online in the hopes of paying their exorbitant medical bills.
What makes this steadfast opposition even more puzzling is the fact that the moment is ripe for making the push for single payer. It’s not just that the GOP has spectacularly failed to gut Obamacare. Polling suggests Americans are more amenable to the idea than ever (even if not all polls are as rosy as Gallup’s).
Meanwhile, the last few months have been a spate of editorials in local newspapers extolling the virtues of single payer and necessitating the need to pass it. The long list includes the: Redding Record Searchlight, Berkshire Eagle, Reno Gazette-Journal, Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, Grass Valley and Nevada County’s Union, Winston-Salem Journal, Eugene, Oregon’s Register-Guard, Napa Valley Register, and the Florida Times-Union. Similar editorials have also appeared in major papers like USA Today, the LA Times, and the Baltimore Sun.
Even Mark Cuban has come out in favor of the policy. Do Democrats really want to be outflanked on the left by Mark Cuban?
The party should thank its lucky stars President Trump remains tethered to a radically anti-government GOP which hates the thought of the government stepping in to help people in need. Were Trump allowed to run free - and were his commitment to economic populism authentic and not just a cynical appropriation of a few slogans - he might actually adopt some form of single-payer proposal himself (no doubt with some pointed, Roosevelt-style “tactical” exclusions of certain marginalized groups), shoring up his standing as the self-proclaimed champion of the “forgotten man.” After all, such policies tend to be quite popular once ordinary Americans start receiving their benefits.
The Trump administration has been unwilling to launch the challenge to corporate interests that would be needed to make such an effort a success, perhaps because the Ayn Rand-worshiping GOP he has thrown his lot in with won’t entertain the thought. But the Democrats should be wary of leaving a space on their left open for a cynical right-wing populist to fill, whether now or down the line. After all, that’s a big part of what got them into their current predicament.
The good news is that the same popular, grassroots pressure that ordinary people successfully put on Republican lawmakers who were preparing to strip Americans of even the meager protections afforded by Obamacare can also be used to push Democrats to support single payer. As much as numerous pundits and politicians mocked Sanders’s concept of getting things done through a “political revolution,” the past few months of widespread activism by ordinary Americans have shown this was far from the out-of-touch fantasy many dismissed it as.
After all, it was years of grassroots organizing and agitation from the labor movement that forced Harry Truman to cite these simple moral imperatives while proposing a single-payer system all those decades ago: “that the health of this Nation is a national concern; that financial barriers in the way of attaining health shall be removed; that the health of all its citizens deserves the help of all the Nation.” There’s no reason those forces can’t force today’s reluctant Democrats to do the same.
Democrats Against Single Payer
Why Is This Progressive Millennial Running for Congress as a Republican?
She’s a bold progressive, a millennial, and someone Tom Perez needs to pay attention to. Lindsay Brown is running for Congress in New Jersey’s 7th District…as a Republican.
Her big goals include checking the influence money has in politics, fixing gerrymandering with nonpartisan redistricting, passing single-payer health care or, at the very least, a public option, addressing man-made global warming, raising the minimum wage so it keeps up with inflation and making sure cost-of-living increases from companies do the same, breaking up the banks, tackling student debt, taking in and welcoming Syrian refugees, and, of course, seeing more women and millennials represented in government. On top of that, she is socially progressive-a strong supporter of LGBTQIA, gender, and racial equality. What’s more, she plans to win by taking only small donations.
Yet the Democratic Party, she says, has lost her, which has left her only one place to turn.
“I’m actually planning to run in the Republican primary because-especially in NJ-the Democrats and the way the Democratic Party establishment is run is not supportive of young people who don’t have deep, deep political experience or a lot of money to fund their own race,” the familiar voice on the other end of the phone tells me, betraying a slight hint of exasperation. “We shouldn’t all have to be millionaires or deeply politically connected to represent constituents.”
When last I spoke with Brown, we were in college together in upstate New York. She was a peer advocate, and I wanted to be an artist. When she explains her plan, I am floored, but not entirely surprised.
At first blush, the idea that the left would abandon the Democratic Party for the GOP might appear absurd, but Brown’s plan is actually one that has been kicked around for some time. She joins a chorus of progressives, including writer for The Intercept Zaid Jilani.
@WalkerBragman if you are in a deep red state where their base of the is no Democratic Party I don't see the conflict
- Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) February 18, 2017
The argument goes that the Democratic Party is too heavily focused on patronage and raising capital for grassroots efforts to succeed-a sentiment rooted in the fact that since November, the Democrats have doubled down on the same establishment that shoehorned Clinton into the nomination and most recently selected Tom Perez for the position of DNC Chair, who has done little to win over progressives.
New Jersey Democratic Party politics are a machine in which “you’d better be putting in the money or the sweat equity” to earn the support of “party bosses,” Brown tells me. “It’s everything I’m running against.” Though personally a fan of Hillary Clinton, Brown reminds me that her nomination was essentially shoehorned by the establishment-a way to illustrate that the problem is not isolated to her state. However, she does caution that the New Jersey Republicans are also an insider club.
Still, Brown and progressives like her see the GOP, which has proven more susceptible to outside efforts like the Tea Party Movement and Donald Trump’s meteoric campaign, as the inevitable path. That’s because, in addition to holding a permanent majority in the House due to its 2010 redistricting efforts, the party controls 33 of 50 governorships and 32 of 50 state legislatures. With the 2020 Census around the corner, and the Democrats doubling down against the grassroots, the Republicans may further cement their hegemony in 2020 following the Census.
“It’s a numbers game,” Brown tells me. “With NJ’s version of ‘fair districting’, a Dem will never be elected in my district, regardless of platform or message.”
So she’s taking her chances in a party that would appear to be her ideological opposite. Brown’s departure should worry establishment Democrats because millennials like her are about to be America’s largest voting bloc. Their realignment could very well mean the end of the party.
I point this out to her, and she sighs knowingly, explaining that while she appreciates what President Obama and his Democrats tried to do, she does not believe the party is able to change fast enough to deal with the issues facing her generation.
“We had a really hard time after graduation launching into adulthood,” she says, recounting her own experience having spent two full years after graduating college looking for a salaried position. “Millennials put off a lot of big decisions like having children or buying houses. . .We’re the first generation that’s not going to do better than our parents!”
She has a point. Of course, a question remains as to how viable the path is that she has chosen: what are a progressive’s chances of winning in a Republican primary?
I bring this up, and the immediacy of her response suggests it has been a question she has weighed heavily. She tells me that win or lose, this will not be her last political campaign.
Of course, her odds of winning in 2018 depend at least partially on how many progressives in her district she can convince to make the switch. But there is no reason to believe that those voters are her only hope.
“I think my message has broad appeal,” she says. “I am trying to focus on issues that unite us.”
There is validity in this approach. Attitudes on social issues like same-sex marriage have changed over the years and continue to move in a progressive direction. As they evolve, those issues are being eclipsed by more general concerns about political and economic inequality. Donald Trump’s populist campaign rhetoric on the economy and political corruption gave him the edge in 2016, while on the left, Bernie Sanders’ message started a movement with broad support. A New York Times/CBS News poll from May of 2015 found that 62 percent of Republicans feel that large corporations have too much influence in our political system. Today, Sanders is the most popular politician in the country.
This is where the opening for young populists like Brown exists. While there are sure to be some positions of hers Republican base voters take issue with, Brown’s simple message does reach across party lines: the system is “very” broken, and is unable to be fixed by an establishment with its hands deep in the pockets of special interests.
Brown’s opponent, the 64-year-old, seasoned five-term incumbent, Leonard Lance, who is sitting in a district that went for Clinton over Trump, may also be the perfect foil for the millennial upstart.
Although relatively moderate, Lance is a quintessential establishment politician, sporting one of the lowest effectiveness ratings in Congress according to JT Aregood of The Observer, as well as heavy ties to special interests which are often reflected in his voting record.
Besides his ties to industry, Lance is also vulnerable to attacks on his ethics. The smell of impropriety has been hanging over his office since 2015 when he and eight of his colleagues came under fire for taking a trip to Azerbaijan which was funded by its state-owned oil company. Following a House ethics probe, which ultimately cleared him, Lance ended up returning a rug and a pair of earrings he had received as gifts. Then in 2016, Lance received $26,000 in unrecorded donations according to NJToday.net.
Despite these incidents, he now sits on the House Ethics Committee. No chain of events better embodies the culture of cronyism and tolerated corruption Brown is positioning herself to run against.
The race for New Jersey’s 7th District will test the limits of Donald Trump’s populism on the right, and provide the left with insight as to which path to take going forward to 2020. Should Brown win, she would strike a blow for progressives nationwide. More importantly, however, it would suggest that the unlikely unity between the left and Trump supporters in their opposition to Clinton was no fluke, but rather a broader realignment occurring in American politics.
Why Is This Progressive Millennial Running for Congress as a Republican?
No, wealth isn’t created at the top. It is merely devoured there
Bankers, pharmaceutical giants, Google, Facebook ... a new breed of rentiers are at the very top of the pyramid and they’re sucking the rest of us dry
This piece is about one of the biggest taboos of our times. About a truth that is seldom acknowledged, and yet - on reflection - cannot be denied. The truth that we are living in an inverse welfare state.
These days, politicians from the left to the right assume that most wealth is created at the top. By the visionaries, by the job creators, and by the people who have “made it”. By the go-getters oozing talent and entrepreneurialism that are helping to advance the whole world.
Now, we may disagree about the extent to which success deserves to be rewarded - the philosophy of the left is that the strongest shoulders should bear the heaviest burden, while the right fears high taxes will blunt enterprise - but across the spectrum virtually all agree that wealth is created primarily at the top.
So entrenched is this assumption that it’s even embedded in our language. When economists talk about “productivity”, what they really mean is the size of your paycheck. And when we use terms like “welfare state”, “redistribution” and “solidarity”, we’re implicitly subscribing to the view that there are two strata: the makers and the takers, the producers and the couch potatoes, the hardworking citizens - and everybody else.
In reality, it is precisely the other way around. In reality, it is the waste collectors, the nurses, and the cleaners whose shoulders are supporting the apex of the pyramid. They are the true mechanism of social solidarity. Meanwhile, a growing share of those we hail as “successful” and “innovative” are earning their wealth at the expense of others. The people getting the biggest handouts are not down around the bottom, but at the very top. Yet their perilous dependence on others goes unseen. Almost no one talks about it. Even for politicians on the left, it’s a non-issue.
To understand why, we need to recognise that there are two ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our “human capital” in economic terms) to create something new, whether that’s a takeout app, a wedding cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create. Ergo, to work is to create new wealth.
But there is also a second way to make money. That’s the rentier way: by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase your wealth. You produce nothing, yet profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at others’ expense, using his power to claim economic benefit.
For those who know their history, the term “rentier” conjures associations with heirs to estates, such as the 19th century’s large class of useless rentiers, well-described by the French economist Thomas Piketty. These days, that class is making a comeback. (Ironically, however, conservative politicians adamantly defend the rentier’s right to lounge around, deeming inheritance tax to be the height of unfairness.) But there are also other ways of rent-seeking. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, from big pharma to the lobby machines in Washington and Westminster, zoom in and you’ll see rentiers everywhere.
There is no longer a sharp dividing line between working and rentiering. In fact, the modern-day rentier often works damn hard. Countless people in the financial sector, for example, apply great ingenuity and effort to amass “rent” on their wealth. Even the big innovations of our age - businesses like Facebook and Uber - are interested mainly in expanding the rentier economy. The problem with most rich people therefore is not that they are coach potatoes. Many a CEO toils 80 hours a week to multiply his allowance. It’s hardly surprising, then, that they feel wholly entitled to their wealth.
It may take quite a mental leap to see our economy as a system that shows solidarity with the rich rather than the poor. So I’ll start with the clearest illustration of modern freeloaders at the top: bankers. Studies conducted by the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements - not exactly leftist thinktanks - have revealed that much of the financial sector has become downright parasitic. How instead of creating wealth, they gobble it up whole.
Don’t get me wrong. Banks can help to gauge risks and get money where it is needed, both of which are vital to a well-functioning economy. But consider this: economists tell us that the optimum level of total private-sector debt is 100% of GDP. Based on this equation, if the financial sector only grows, it won’t equal more wealth, but less. So here’s the bad news. In the United Kingdom, private-sector debt is now at 157.5%. In the United States, the figure is 188.8%.
In other words, a big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body. It’s not creating anything new, merely sucking others dry. Bankers have found a hundred and one ways to accomplish this. The basic mechanism, however, is always the same: offer loans like it’s going out of style, which in turn inflates the price of things like houses and shares, then earn a tidy percentage off those overblown prices (in the form of interest, commissions, brokerage fees, or what have you), and if the shit hits the fan, let Uncle Sam mop it up.
The financial innovation concocted by all the math whizzes working in modern banking (instead of at universities or companies that contribute to real prosperity) basically boils down to maximising the total amount of debt. And debt, of course, is a means of earning rent. So for those who believe that pay ought to be proportionate to the value of work, the conclusion we have to draw is that many bankers should be earning a negative salary; a fine, if you will, for destroying more wealth than they create.
Bankers are the most obvious class of closet freeloaders, but they are certainly not alone. Many a lawyer and an accountant wields a similar revenue model. Take tax evasion. Untold hardworking, academically degreed professionals make a good living at the expense of the populations of other countries. Or take the tide of privatisations over the past three decades, which have been all but a carte blanche for rentiers. One of the richest people in the world, Carlos Slim, earned his millions by obtaining a monopoly of the Mexican telecom market and then hiking prices sky high. The same goes for the Russian oligarchs who rose after the Berlin Wall fell, who bought up valuable state-owned assets for song to live off the rent.
But here comes the rub. Most rentiers are not as easily identified as the greedy banker or manager. Many are disguised. On the face of it, they look like industrious folks, because for part of the time they really are doing something worthwhile. Precisely that makes us overlook their massive rent-seeking.
Take the pharmaceutical industry. Companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer regularly unveil new drugs, yet most real medical breakthroughs are made quietly at government-subsidised labs. Private companies mostly manufacture medications that resemble what we’ve already got. They get it patented and, with a hefty dose of marketing, a legion of lawyers, and a strong lobby, can live off the profits for years. In other words, the vast revenues of the pharmaceutical industry are the result of a tiny pinch of innovation and fistfuls of rent.
Even paragons of modern progress like Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber and Airbnb are woven from the fabric of rentierism. Firstly, because they owe their existence to government discoveries and inventions (every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll). And second, because they tie themselves into knots to avoid paying taxes, retaining countless bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists for this very purpose.
Even more important, many of these companies function as “natural monopolies”, operating in a positive feedback loop of increasing growth and value as more and more people contribute free content to their platforms. Companies like this are incredibly difficult to compete with, because as they grow bigger, they only get stronger.
Aptly characterising this “platform capitalism” in an article, Tom Goodwin writes: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.”
So what do these companies own? A platform. A platform that lots and lots of people want to use. Why? First and foremost, because they’re cool and they’re fun - and in that respect, they do offer something of value. However, the main reason why we’re all happy to hand over free content to Facebook is because all of our friends are on Facebook too, because their friends are on Facebook … because their friends are on Facebook.
Most of Mark Zuckerberg’s income is just rent collected off the millions of picture and video posts that we give away daily for free. And sure, we have fun doing it. But we also have no alternative - after all, everybody is on Facebook these days. Zuckerberg has a website that advertisers are clamouring to get onto, and that doesn’t come cheap. Don’t be fooled by endearing pilots with free internet in Zambia. Stripped down to essentials, it’s an ordinary ad agency. In fact, in 2015 Google and Facebook pocketed an astounding 64% of all online ad revenue in the US.
But don’t Google and Facebook make anything useful at all? Sure they do. The irony, however, is that their best innovations only make the rentier economy even bigger. They employ scores of programmers to create new algorithms so that we’ll all click on more and more ads. Uber has usurped the whole taxi sector just as Airbnb has upended the hotel industry and Amazon has overrun the book trade. The bigger such platforms grow the more powerful they become, enabling the lords of these digital feudalities to demand more and more rent.
Think back a minute to the definition of a rentier: someone who uses their control over something that already exists in order to increase their own wealth. The feudal lord of medieval times did that by building a tollgate along a road and making everybody who passed by pay. Today’s tech giants are doing basically the same thing, but transposed to the digital highway. Using technology funded by taxpayers, they build tollgates between you and other people’s free content and all the while pay almost no tax on their earnings.
This is the so-called innovation that has Silicon Valley gurus in raptures: ever bigger platforms that claim ever bigger handouts. So why do we accept this? Why does most of the population work itself to the bone to support these rentiers?
I think there are two answers. Firstly, the modern rentier knows to keep a low profile. There was a time when everybody knew who was freeloading. The king, the church, and the aristocrats controlled almost all the land and made peasants pay dearly to farm it. But in the modern economy, making rentierism work is a great deal more complicated. How many people can explain a credit default swap, or a collateralised debt obligation? Or the revenue model behind those cute Google Doodles? And don’t the folks on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley work themselves to the bone, too? Well then, they must be doing something useful, right?
Maybe not. The typical workday of Goldman Sachs’ CEO may be worlds away from that of King Louis XIV, but their revenue models both essentially revolve around obtaining the biggest possible handouts. “The world’s most powerful investment bank,” wrote the journalist Matt Taibbi about Goldman Sachs, “is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
But far from squids and vampires, the average rich freeloader manages to masquerade quite successfully as a decent hard worker. He goes to great lengths to present himself as a “job creator” and an “investor” who “earns” his income by virtue of his high “productivity”. Most economists, journalists, and politicians from left to right are quite happy to swallow this story. Time and again language is twisted around to cloak funneling and exploitation as creation and generation.
However, it would be wrong to think that all this is part of some ingenious conspiracy. Many modern rentiers have convinced even themselves that they are bona fide value creators. When current Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein was asked about the purpose of his job, his straight-faced answer was that he is “doing God’s work”. The Sun King would have approved.
The second thing that keeps rentiers safe is even more insidious. We’re all wannabe rentiers. They have made millions of people complicit in their revenue model. Consider this: What are our financial sector’s two biggest cash cows? Answer: the housing market and pensions. Both are markets in which many of us are deeply invested.
Recent decades have seen more and more people contract debts to buy a home, and naturally it’s in their interest if house prices continue to scale new heights (read: burst bubble upon bubble). The same goes for pensions. Over the past few decades we’ve all scrimped and saved up a mountainous pension piggy bank. Now pension funds are under immense pressure to ally with the biggest exploiters in order to ensure they pay out enough to please their investors.
The fact of the matter is that feudalism has been democratised. To a lesser or greater extent, we are all depending on handouts. En masse, we have been made complicit in this exploitation by the rentier elite, resulting in a political covenant between the rich rent-seekers and the homeowners and retirees.
Don’t get me wrong, most homeowners and retirees are not benefiting from this situation. On the contrary, the banks are bleeding them far beyond the extent to which they themselves profit from their houses and pensions. Still, it’s hard to point fingers at a kleptomaniac when you have sticky fingers too.
So why is this happening? The answer can be summed up in three little words: Because it can.
Rentierism is, in essence, a question of power. That the Sun King Louis XIV was able to exploit millions was purely because he had the biggest army in Europe. It’s no different for the modern rentier. He’s got the law, politicians and journalists squarely in his court. That’s why bankers get fined peanuts for preposterous fraud, while a mother on government assistance gets penalised within an inch of her life if she checks the wrong box.
The biggest tragedy of all, however, is that the rentier economy is gobbling up society’s best and brightest. Where once upon a time Ivy League graduates chose careers in science, public service or education, these days they are more likely to opt for banks, law firms, or trumped up ad agencies like Google and Facebook. When you think about it, it’s insane. We are forking over billions in taxes to help our brightest minds on and up the corporate ladder so they can learn how to score ever more outrageous handouts.
One thing is certain: countries where rentiers gain the upper hand gradually fall into decline. Just look at the Roman Empire. Or Venice in the 15th century. Look at the Dutch Republic in the 18th century. Like a parasite stunts a child’s growth, so the rentier drains a country of its vitality.
What innovation remains in a rentier economy is mostly just concerned with further bolstering that very same economy. This may explain why the big dreams of the 1970s, like flying cars, curing cancer, and colonising Mars, have yet to be realised, while bankers and ad-makers have at their fingertips technologies a thousand times more powerful.
Yet it doesn’t have to be this way. Tollgates can be torn down, financial products can be banned, tax havens dismantled, lobbies tamed, and patents rejected. Higher taxes on the ultra-rich can make rentierism less attractive, precisely because society’s biggest freeloaders are at the very top of the pyramid. And we can more fairly distribute our earnings on land, oil, and innovation through a system of, say, employee shares, or a universal basic income.
But such a revolution will require a wholly different narrative about the origins of our wealth. It will require ditching the old-fashioned faith in “solidarity” with a miserable underclass that deserves to be borne aloft on the market-level salaried shoulders of society’s strongest. All we need to do is to give real hard-working people what they deserve.
And, yes, by that I mean the waste collectors, the nurses, the cleaners - theirs are the shoulders that carry us all.
No, wealth isn’t created at the top. It is merely devoured there
Democrats Against Single Payer
Single-payer health care has always been a goal of the Left. But Democrats have turned it into a punching bag.
Establishing some sort of universal health care in America has been a cherished goal of the broad left since at least as far back as Harry Truman’s administration, when a proposal for a single-payer national health insurance system was buried under a barrage of right-wing, red-baiting attacks. Since then, while president after president has tried and failed (or, more recently, simply abandoned) similar efforts, most liberals and Democrats have persisted, at least rhetorically, in fulfilling Truman’s now-seventy-two-year-old promise.
That is, apparently, until now.
The possibility of achieving single payer is “a bigger problem” than America’s already broken health-care system, according to one Democratic governor; it’s a boondoggle that would require a “massive tax increase,” says a Colorado senator; one liberal commentator charges that it “doesn’t make sense,” and shows an “indifference to real-world consequences.”
The push for “Medicare for All,” one high-profile liberal pundit tells us, is simply based in “outrage that private insurers get to play any role,” and aims to “punish or demonize insurance companies.” Oh and by the way, it’ll “never, ever come to pass” anyway, according to the Democratic Party’s former standard-bearer. How times have changed.
Hearts and Minds
To be sure, the attempt by some Democrats to “triangulate” on health-care reform isn’t exactly new. When Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition challenged the Democratic establishment back in the 1980s, with a single-payer system one of their chief demands, the center-right Democratic Leadership Council used its new influence to push the Democratic Party rightward.
Virginia Democratic senator Chuck Robb, one of the DLC’s founders, warned in 1989 that “policies forged in the economic crisis of the 1930s and the social and cultural schisms of the 1960s” were irrelevant to most Americans. Two years later, Bill Clinton’s issue director Bruce Reed, who doubled as policy director for the DLC, made sure to distance Clinton from single payer.
The issue flared up again during the 2008 Democratic primary fight, where both Obama and Hillary Clinton tried hedging their bets. Clinton put forward a plan that was basically Obamacare while insisting that “Medicare for All” could still be on the cards under the right circumstances. Meanwhile Obama repeatedly flip-flopped, at one point telling an audience that “the Canadian model won’t work in the United States” and that “we’ve got to develop a uniquely American approach,” and nine days later hinting to a different audience that over time single payer may be on the table.
DLC leaders felt reassured however, telling the New York Times they were “pleased that none of the Democratic candidates supports a single-payer health-care system.”
So Democrats’ attempts to quell their base’s clamoring for a comprehensive, public health-care system isn’t new. What is new is the open, public disparagement of such a goal - not just by Democratic leaders, but by leading liberal commentators, too.
Ironically, this appears largely to have been due to the Sanders campaign - or rather, the challenge it posed to Hillary Clinton’s previously wide-open road to the White House. Needing to differentiate herself from Sanders’s unabashed progressivism, and to dampen popular enthusiasm for his message, Clinton began attacking his policies, despite her historic sympathy toward single payer.
Sanders’s proposals were “ideas that sound good on paper but will never make it in real life,” she told crowds; for good measure, she insisted that single-payer health care “will never, ever come to pass.”
Two years earlier, she explained her opposition to the policy on the basis that “we don’t have a one size fits all; our country is quite diverse.” In January 2016, she warned breathlessly that Sanders’s plan would “end all the kinds of health care we know” and claimed it would “send health insurance to the states,” while her daughter warned that it would “dismantle Obamacare” and “strip millions and millions and millions of people off their health insurance.”
As late as October, Clinton’s team was still trying to distance herself from Trump’s accusation that she - heaven forbid! - “wants to go to a single-payer plan,” with her spokesman directing Politifact to an earlier fact-check confirming her lack of support for the policy. (Lest we mistake this for mere expediency, we can rest assured that at least some of the Clinton camp really felt this way: campaign manager John Podesta declared in an email to ThinkProgress editor-in-chief Judd Legum that Sanders’s “actual proposal sucks, but we live in a leftie alternative universe.”)
These doomsday warnings didn’t seem to sway the public. By May 2016, Gallup polling found that more than half of Americans favored replacing Obamacare with a single-payer system, including a whole 41 percent of Republicans.
The same can’t be said for well-placed liberal columnists and Democratic lawmakers, who during -and since - the Clinton campaign have followed her lead and continued pouring cold water on the idea.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s about-face on the issue, for instance, is well-documented. Krugman went from regularly writing screeds about the superiority of entirely government-controlled health care to insisting that “single payer just isn’t a political possibility” and running column after column attacking Sanders’s policy.
To be fair, Krugman had always been wary of the political feasibility of single payer, writing in 2007: “In an ideal world, I’d be a single-payer guy. But I see the chance of getting universal care, imperfect but fixable . . . And I want to grab that chance.” But by 2016, Krugman’s criticisms of single payer went beyond this, at one point cautioning that “switching to single payer would impose a lot of disruption on tens of millions of families who currently have good coverage through their employers” and warning of tax hikes on the middle class.
The same man who once called an anti-health-care reform editorial “vile and stupid” and charged that the “greed of the medical-industrial complex” was the only thing standing in the way of universal health care in the United States began complaining about “demonization” from the Sanders campaign, accusing it of painting “anyone raising questions about the senator’s proposals” as “a corrupt tool of vested interests.”
Krugman wasn’t as concerned about civility back when Obama abandoned the public option element of his health-care plan in 2009, complaining that “the inspiring figure progressives thought they had elected comes across, far too often, as a dry technocrat,” calling him “weirdly reluctant to make the moral case for universal care” and defending the “progressive backlash” over his falling short. (Puzzlingly, seven years later, Krugman praised Clinton as being “pretty good” on policy for having a proposal that was identical to the final version of Obamacare that 2009-era Krugman appears so disappointed with).
Krugman was by no means the only one. In January 2016, the centrist Brookings Institution called single payer an “impossible (pipe) dream,” something that “was, is, and will remain a dream,” because “it is radical in a way that no legislation has ever been in the United States.” A month later, New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait complained with respect to Sanders’s single-payer proposal that Sanders was “not merely pushing the envelope of policy imagination,” but had a platform “predicated on completely ignoring mainstream economic analysis.” (Curiously, nearly half a year earlier, Chait had lamented that “socialized medicine” had “never caught on in the United States.”)
Vox’s Ezra Klein labeled Sanders’s plan “vague and unrealistic.” The American Prospect’s Paul Starr, who helped work on Bill Clinton’s original unsuccessful health-care reform, wrote two separate columns that warned in part that Sanders’s single-payer plan would lead to a scary and unprecedented centralization of power in Washington.
Even when single-payer reform appears to dodge such concerns, powerful Democratic and liberal interests can’t bring themselves to get behind it. Nancy Pelosi recently told frustrated town hall attendees that “if you want to move to single payer, what you should do . . . is support state options,” referring to state-level campaigns for single payer.
She should tell her own party. When a ballot initiative popped up in Colorado in the middle of the presidential campaign that would have encoded a single-payer health-care system in the state’s constitution, Democrats fell over themselves to discourage the initiative, echoing Clinton’s rhetoric in the process.
The state’s Democratic governor John Hickenlooper said that “it would be premature to dramatically remake our health-care system at this time” while existing reforms were “just beginning to bear fruit.” He complained behind closed doors to a powerful lobby of business leaders and political operatives that the “cost [is] going to be huge.”
The state’s Democratic senator Michael Bennett told a local paper that single payer wasn’t “the right approach to solving our health-care problems,” partly due to the “massive tax increase” involved. (Incidentally, both politicians received a ton of money from the health-care, insurance, and pharmaceutical industries).
Other Colorado Democrats opposing the measure were the state’s previous governor, Bill Ritter, state House majority leader Crisanta Duran, and Kelly Brough, president of the Denver Chamber of Commerce. Coloradans for Coloradans, a group that fought the measure, cited Democrats’ opposition to it to defend their efforts, and even bragged that they had “Democratic consultants running the campaign.”
Meanwhile, liberal group ProgressNow Colorado also came out against the measure, which was ultimately defeated - likely in part because high-profile Democrats fought it. (In a perfect feedback loop, one liberal commentator has recently used the Colorado example to dampen renewed calls for Medicare for All).
Liberals’ newfound antipathy to one of the Democrats’ traditionally long-coveted goals survived the end of Sanders’s primary campaign. In July, the Clinton campaign’s appointees on the Democratic Party’s platform-drafting committee united to vote down a plank advocating for a single-payer system - particularly galling given the plank’s merely symbolic status.
Most recently, as California considered instituting a state-wide single-payer system on the eve of a possible GOP repeal of Obamacare, the state’s Democratic governor Jerry Brown rubbished the idea, asking: “Where do you get the extra money? . . . How do you do that?” He compared it to solving a problem “by something that’s . . . a bigger problem,” which “makes no sense.”
With the GOP repeal having devolved into utter failure, Clinton confidante and Center for American Progress president Neera Tanden - who as late as January this year seemed to be suggesting that progressives should get on board with a future Sanders push for single payer - recently penned a USA Today op-ed about what was next for health-care reform. Single payer wasn’t in it. (Tanden happened to have been one of the Clinton delegates on the platform drafting committee who voted against the single-payer plank last year).
The particularly bizarre thing about many of these attacks on single payer from prominent liberals and Democrats is that they’re fundamentally conservative arguments: single payer is too radical and far-reaching a change; it’s too expensive; it’ll mean raising taxes; it’ll involve giving the federal government too much power.
Do Democrats and liberals really want to be making these arguments? After all, they can be (and have been) used against virtually any policy favored by progressives and the Left more broadly, which typically do cost a lot of money, necessitate extra taxes to pay for them, require a great deal of government involvement to successfully implement, and tend to temporarily disrupt people’s lives as new rules, regulations, and systems are put in place. Go ahead and look up conservatives’ attacks on Obamacare as it was cobbled together - virtually every liberal complaint now made about single payer was launched by the Right against Obamacare.
There Is a Season
Meanwhile, while liberals and Democrats attack single payer on “practical” grounds, they appear to have forgotten the importance of the moral case for such policies.
In their haste to defend Obamacare (and, by extension, a former president’s legacy) from often dishonest right-wing attacks, they ignore the very real and painful flaws and inadequacies of the law as it stands, which, for all the good it’s done, continues to leave people trapped in impossible, heart-rending situations and forces them to beg for money online in the hopes of paying their exorbitant medical bills.
What makes this steadfast opposition even more puzzling is the fact that the moment is ripe for making the push for single payer. It’s not just that the GOP has spectacularly failed to gut Obamacare. Polling suggests Americans are more amenable to the idea than ever (even if not all polls are as rosy as Gallup’s).
Meanwhile, the last few months have been a spate of editorials in local newspapers extolling the virtues of single payer and necessitating the need to pass it. The long list includes the: Redding Record Searchlight, Berkshire Eagle, Reno Gazette-Journal, Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, Grass Valley and Nevada County’s Union, Winston-Salem Journal, Eugene, Oregon’s Register-Guard, Napa Valley Register, and the Florida Times-Union. Similar editorials have also appeared in major papers like USA Today, the LA Times, and the Baltimore Sun.
Even Mark Cuban has come out in favor of the policy. Do Democrats really want to be outflanked on the left by Mark Cuban?
The party should thank its lucky stars President Trump remains tethered to a radically anti-government GOP which hates the thought of the government stepping in to help people in need. Were Trump allowed to run free - and were his commitment to economic populism authentic and not just a cynical appropriation of a few slogans - he might actually adopt some form of single-payer proposal himself (no doubt with some pointed, Roosevelt-style “tactical” exclusions of certain marginalized groups), shoring up his standing as the self-proclaimed champion of the “forgotten man.” After all, such policies tend to be quite popular once ordinary Americans start receiving their benefits.
The Trump administration has been unwilling to launch the challenge to corporate interests that would be needed to make such an effort a success, perhaps because the Ayn Rand-worshiping GOP he has thrown his lot in with won’t entertain the thought. But the Democrats should be wary of leaving a space on their left open for a cynical right-wing populist to fill, whether now or down the line. After all, that’s a big part of what got them into their current predicament.
The good news is that the same popular, grassroots pressure that ordinary people successfully put on Republican lawmakers who were preparing to strip Americans of even the meager protections afforded by Obamacare can also be used to push Democrats to support single payer. As much as numerous pundits and politicians mocked Sanders’s concept of getting things done through a “political revolution,” the past few months of widespread activism by ordinary Americans have shown this was far from the out-of-touch fantasy many dismissed it as.
After all, it was years of grassroots organizing and agitation from the labor movement that forced Harry Truman to cite these simple moral imperatives while proposing a single-payer system all those decades ago: “that the health of this Nation is a national concern; that financial barriers in the way of attaining health shall be removed; that the health of all its citizens deserves the help of all the Nation.” There’s no reason those forces can’t force today’s reluctant Democrats to do the same.
Democrats Against Single Payer
Why Is This Progressive Millennial Running for Congress as a Republican?
She’s a bold progressive, a millennial, and someone Tom Perez needs to pay attention to. Lindsay Brown is running for Congress in New Jersey’s 7th District…as a Republican.
Her big goals include checking the influence money has in politics, fixing gerrymandering with nonpartisan redistricting, passing single-payer health care or, at the very least, a public option, addressing man-made global warming, raising the minimum wage so it keeps up with inflation and making sure cost-of-living increases from companies do the same, breaking up the banks, tackling student debt, taking in and welcoming Syrian refugees, and, of course, seeing more women and millennials represented in government. On top of that, she is socially progressive-a strong supporter of LGBTQIA, gender, and racial equality. What’s more, she plans to win by taking only small donations.
Yet the Democratic Party, she says, has lost her, which has left her only one place to turn.
“I’m actually planning to run in the Republican primary because-especially in NJ-the Democrats and the way the Democratic Party establishment is run is not supportive of young people who don’t have deep, deep political experience or a lot of money to fund their own race,” the familiar voice on the other end of the phone tells me, betraying a slight hint of exasperation. “We shouldn’t all have to be millionaires or deeply politically connected to represent constituents.”
When last I spoke with Brown, we were in college together in upstate New York. She was a peer advocate, and I wanted to be an artist. When she explains her plan, I am floored, but not entirely surprised.
At first blush, the idea that the left would abandon the Democratic Party for the GOP might appear absurd, but Brown’s plan is actually one that has been kicked around for some time. She joins a chorus of progressives, including writer for The Intercept Zaid Jilani.
@WalkerBragman if you are in a deep red state where their base of the is no Democratic Party I don't see the conflict
- Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) February 18, 2017
The argument goes that the Democratic Party is too heavily focused on patronage and raising capital for grassroots efforts to succeed-a sentiment rooted in the fact that since November, the Democrats have doubled down on the same establishment that shoehorned Clinton into the nomination and most recently selected Tom Perez for the position of DNC Chair, who has done little to win over progressives.
New Jersey Democratic Party politics are a machine in which “you’d better be putting in the money or the sweat equity” to earn the support of “party bosses,” Brown tells me. “It’s everything I’m running against.” Though personally a fan of Hillary Clinton, Brown reminds me that her nomination was essentially shoehorned by the establishment-a way to illustrate that the problem is not isolated to her state. However, she does caution that the New Jersey Republicans are also an insider club.
Still, Brown and progressives like her see the GOP, which has proven more susceptible to outside efforts like the Tea Party Movement and Donald Trump’s meteoric campaign, as the inevitable path. That’s because, in addition to holding a permanent majority in the House due to its 2010 redistricting efforts, the party controls 33 of 50 governorships and 32 of 50 state legislatures. With the 2020 Census around the corner, and the Democrats doubling down against the grassroots, the Republicans may further cement their hegemony in 2020 following the Census.
“It’s a numbers game,” Brown tells me. “With NJ’s version of ‘fair districting’, a Dem will never be elected in my district, regardless of platform or message.”
So she’s taking her chances in a party that would appear to be her ideological opposite. Brown’s departure should worry establishment Democrats because millennials like her are about to be America’s largest voting bloc. Their realignment could very well mean the end of the party.
I point this out to her, and she sighs knowingly, explaining that while she appreciates what President Obama and his Democrats tried to do, she does not believe the party is able to change fast enough to deal with the issues facing her generation.
“We had a really hard time after graduation launching into adulthood,” she says, recounting her own experience having spent two full years after graduating college looking for a salaried position. “Millennials put off a lot of big decisions like having children or buying houses. . .We’re the first generation that’s not going to do better than our parents!”
She has a point. Of course, a question remains as to how viable the path is that she has chosen: what are a progressive’s chances of winning in a Republican primary?
I bring this up, and the immediacy of her response suggests it has been a question she has weighed heavily. She tells me that win or lose, this will not be her last political campaign.
Of course, her odds of winning in 2018 depend at least partially on how many progressives in her district she can convince to make the switch. But there is no reason to believe that those voters are her only hope.
“I think my message has broad appeal,” she says. “I am trying to focus on issues that unite us.”
There is validity in this approach. Attitudes on social issues like same-sex marriage have changed over the years and continue to move in a progressive direction. As they evolve, those issues are being eclipsed by more general concerns about political and economic inequality. Donald Trump’s populist campaign rhetoric on the economy and political corruption gave him the edge in 2016, while on the left, Bernie Sanders’ message started a movement with broad support. A New York Times/CBS News poll from May of 2015 found that 62 percent of Republicans feel that large corporations have too much influence in our political system. Today, Sanders is the most popular politician in the country.
This is where the opening for young populists like Brown exists. While there are sure to be some positions of hers Republican base voters take issue with, Brown’s simple message does reach across party lines: the system is “very” broken, and is unable to be fixed by an establishment with its hands deep in the pockets of special interests.
Brown’s opponent, the 64-year-old, seasoned five-term incumbent, Leonard Lance, who is sitting in a district that went for Clinton over Trump, may also be the perfect foil for the millennial upstart.
Although relatively moderate, Lance is a quintessential establishment politician, sporting one of the lowest effectiveness ratings in Congress according to JT Aregood of The Observer, as well as heavy ties to special interests which are often reflected in his voting record.
Besides his ties to industry, Lance is also vulnerable to attacks on his ethics. The smell of impropriety has been hanging over his office since 2015 when he and eight of his colleagues came under fire for taking a trip to Azerbaijan which was funded by its state-owned oil company. Following a House ethics probe, which ultimately cleared him, Lance ended up returning a rug and a pair of earrings he had received as gifts. Then in 2016, Lance received $26,000 in unrecorded donations according to NJToday.net.
Despite these incidents, he now sits on the House Ethics Committee. No chain of events better embodies the culture of cronyism and tolerated corruption Brown is positioning herself to run against.
The race for New Jersey’s 7th District will test the limits of Donald Trump’s populism on the right, and provide the left with insight as to which path to take going forward to 2020. Should Brown win, she would strike a blow for progressives nationwide. More importantly, however, it would suggest that the unlikely unity between the left and Trump supporters in their opposition to Clinton was no fluke, but rather a broader realignment occurring in American politics.
Why Is This Progressive Millennial Running for Congress as a Republican?
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