Every American Should Have Basic Needs Guaranteed

The United States of America has long been a nation of free enterprise and personal freedoms, the land of opportunity and protector of huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Yet, America is also a nation founded largely upon stolen land, much of it built by enslaved peoples and exploited immigrant laborers, where industrialists, tech tycoons and wealthy folks of all shapes and sizes have wielded huge and corrupting levels of power and influence for most of our history. Greed and exploitation has defined America just as much as freedom and prosperity has, yet the powers-that-be overwhelmingly push to remind us of the latter traits over the former. In fact, if one points out the rampant corruption and greed inherent in our current system, or makes an effort to discuss our history in its truer form, they are often labeled 'un-American', 'unpatriotic', 'socialist', 'woke' and any number of other politicized slurs used over the years to dampen dissent and promote only an unadulterated pro-America message.

This messaging has over the decades led to a nation convinced of its own superiority and excellence, an America wherein many of its citizens are convinced the US is the greatest country on Earth despite ample evidence to the contrary. Aside from having the most expensive military, the largest overall economy and highest number of incarcerated people per capita, America is sadly far from the greatest nation on the planet. Even more unfortunate, is this American reality didn't occur accidentally nor in a vacuum, it is the result of a powerful and sustained pro-America advertising campaign combined with a concentrated push to deregulate markets and dismantle public protections, allowing the consistent siphoning of funds from the lower and middle rungs of the income and wealth ladders towards corporate executives and board members alongside other wealthy members of society. This Neoliberal reality is one we've been living in for the last half century or so, and it's crippling the American Dream for the vast majority of us.

Back in the bygone era of New Deal-style politics in the US, 1952 to be more precise, President Harry Truman stated: "Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years. Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security. Socialism is what they called farm price supports. Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people. When the Republican candidate inscribes the slogan "Down With Socialism" on the banner of his "great crusade," that is really not what he means at all. What he really means is "Down with Progress--down with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal," and "down with Harry Truman's fair Deal." That's all he means."

This one-two punch of pro-America, anti-Socialism rhetoric President Truman described has proven to work remarkably well up to the modern day in US politics. The problem is, at least in its current form, its largely a lie. Socialism describes the public ownership of the means of production and distribution (factories, farmland, fulfillment centers etc.), and America is still very firmly in the private-ownership camp within all of those industries. The US is not in any way, shape or form a socialist nation, yet it does make some attempt at softening the harsher impacts of industrial capitalism by providing social welfare programs, which fulfill the Preamble of our Constitution's requirement of our government to 'promote the general welfare'. Nonetheless, these and many other programs which benefit the people-at-large have been vilified and demonized for much of our nation's history, all to keep the working classes dependent on the ownership class of our country and prevent the wealthy from paying a truly fair share of taxes.

To combat these lies and hold the wealthy and greedy accountable, we must begin to change our system from the inside out. Fortunately, the Constitution of the US gives the People a phenomenal amount of power, if we're willing and able to use it. At this point in our history, the wealthy and political elite of our nation have been more than content to keep us divided and bickering amongst ourselves over every social ill imaginable, even to the point of stoking political violence. This must change; we must reclaim our clarity of thought, our focus and our power. While government restructuring, campaign finance reform, restoring a progressive tax code, empowering voting rights for every citizen and more could all help move America in a more free and egalitarian direction, there remains one concept which would help the middle and working classes above all: guaranteeing our basic needs.

While the concept of ensuring every US citizen has access to housing, medical care, education, jobs programs, public utilities, collective bargaining, a basic income and more may sound radical to many Americans today, social democracies in nations around the world from Norway, Finland, and Denmark to Iceland, Switzerland and New Zealand are increasingly proving the concept is not only viable, it sets your nation up for success. Would you like lower crime rates, fewer people in prison and less poverty? Would you like less homelessness, drug use and alcoholism? Perhaps you'd like a more educated, skilled and robust workforce? Or might you like a healthier, more politically engaged and self-sufficient citizenry? All of this and more is possible if we move our national focus away from greed and corporate profits and instead promote the general welfare of the American People as we never have before. This isn't socialism, it's capitalism reinvested into itself, and it can be ours if we demand it.

One of the most popular rebuttals to the arguments for universal healthcare, basic income programs and similar ideas is that such programs would promote a "dependence on the government". Yet the reality of modern American is: we're already collectively dependent on the corporate class of this country, and they've lorded their expensive healthcare plans, artificially low wages (for those not in unions or associations, anyway), and myopic focus on bottom-line returns for shareholders for far too long. Even for those without a typical W-2 job, corporate America and their allied politicians have made success more difficult for us all. Independent farmers often face artificially low prices for their goods due to corporate goliaths undercutting the market so they can continue to consolidate it. Small business owners regularly face regulations and licensing requirements put in place by politicians bought off by larger business interests to reduce competition in their industry. W-9 independent contractors have few protections and are increasingly used in place of regular employees to allow companies to stick their workers with the entirety of their employment-related tax bill. It's time we demand the institution created to protect the American People, our government, finally steps up and provides the services necessary to collectively free us from the greed and unaccountable whims of corporate boards and CEOs.

Challenging the power and greed of corporate America is good for all of us, even if it's not always immediately clear how it impacts us individually. The wealthy in America have held so much power for so long that we often don't realize the brainwashing and exploitation we've been subjected to due to its presence seeming so commonplace. From massive anti-union campaigns to scare tactics about a 'government takeover of healthcare' to blaming immigrants for 'taking our jobs' to faulting low-income Americans for being below the poverty line in the first place to mindless rants of 'Make America Great Again', there has been a concerted effort to turn America's working classes against each other. It's time we show corporate America that we're smarter than they realize. It's beyond time we prove to them we won't accept their assault on our freedoms, rights and wellbeing any longer. They will call our pushback 'class warfare', yet warfare is what they've been waging against us for much of our history without most of us even being aware of it. It's time we demanded our crony-capitalist system begin to reinvest in its citizens again, bringing the true free-market feedback loop into balance for the first time in (at least) decades.

America is a nation of dichotomies and contradictions, yet it's fundamentally a great country. This is our home, and the vast majority of us want to see it become better over time. We want to leave our children and grandchildren better off, living in a more free world than we had. Guaranteeing all American citizen's basic needs are met is one of the most powerful tools we possess to ensure our desires are realized and to create a more equitable, safe, fair, free and dynamic nation moving forward.

As President Franklin Roosevelt said in 1936: "The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live. Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place."

If America is to become the greatest nation in the world again, or perhaps for the first time, we must embrace this prescient wisdom and apply it vigorously. There are powerful foes arrayed against us, yet we are very capable. We must act, and do so now. All of our futures depend on it.

References:

1) https://historyhub.history.gov/thread/8516

2) https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/285839/sanders-goal-provide-basic-necessities.aspx

3) https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/08/martin-luther-kings-economic-dream-a-guaranteed-income-for-all-americans/279147/

4) https://lwvc.org/position/meeting-basic-human-needs

5) https://www.povertylaw.org/article/guaranteed-income/

6) https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2018-08-28/study-40-percent-of-americans-struggle-to-afford-basic-needs

7) https://www.aei.org/articles/a-guaranteed-income-for-every-american/

8) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/almost-half-of-americans-cant-pay-for-basic-needs/

9) https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1511