Should healthcare, foodstuffs, and shelter be treated as
commodities subject to the buyer’s ability to pay, or designated as rights
because a person’s survival depends on them? In short, is the innate human
drive of self-preservation worthy of being recognized societally as justifying
a right to sustenance? In the E.U., this point of view tends to hold sway,
whereas in the U.S., food, medical care (and medicine), and housing units tend
to be treated as commodities subject to a buyer’s ability to pay. This
difference in political socio-economic ideology is as telling as it is
significant, yet in the U.S. at least the question is rarely debated directly
rather than through ancillary issues.
Here is one American politician’s rather direct articulation
on the campaign trail of the “commodity,” or “non-right” position:
“We’re looking at
Obamacare right now. Once we start with those benefits in January, how are we
going to get people off of those? It’s exponentially harder to remove people
once they’ve already been on those programs…we rely on government for
absolutely everything. And in the years since I was a small girl up until now
into my adulthood with children of my own, we have lost a reliance on not only
our own families, but so much of what our churches and private organizations
used to do. They used to have wonderful food pantries. They used to provide
clothing for those that really needed it. But we have gotten away from that.
Now we’re at a point where the government will just give away anything.”[1]
The dependence
argument and the related perspective that a government gives things away in its
entitlement programs both assume that the beneficiaries do not have a right to
sustenance materials, or that the stuff provided goes beyond necessities. Furthermore,
the “charities” preference over government also assumes that sustenance is not
a right, for charities unlike government are not geared to providing items to
cover each day.
Just as a market
cannot be relied on for a daily provision because procurement depends on having
enough money at the time of purchase, so too charities cannot be relied on to
provide clothing and food for people such they will not go without for even a
day. The possible discontinuity is accepted, according to this view, because
sustenance is not something that people should treat as a given; rather, a
person’s continued day-to-day survival naturally depends the person’s ability
to work. The assumption here is that a lack of work is likely due to some problem
in the person, rather than a macro problem in the political economy.
Individuals are not victims of a feature of societal organization, such as an
economic system, so no right to unconditional compensation is recognized. Besides,
charities can pick up the slack—daily sustenance not being a legitimate demand.
Put another way,
the moral or religious obligation of the well-off to donate part of their
surplus to charities is assumed to cover the occasional short-fall in food and
clothing from being laid off in a recession. The moral obligation extends to
helping even those people who have lost work due to their own fault, but the
expectation is that if they want to survive beyond a temporary period of
job-looking, they should rely on their own means of earning enough money to
provide for themselves.
My point here is
that in not being thwarted by the incendiary “getting free stuff” remark,
readers of Joni Ernst’s remarks can know the assumptions behind her ideology
and evaluate them. If enough people do so, then perhaps those assumptions can
be debated in societal discourse. A societal consensus on the assumptions would
ideally lead to the associated public policy being enacted. In other words, the
assumptions that most people in a geographical region hold can be made
transparent to them such that critical reflection can occur both individually
and societally. From such recognition and thought, greater confidence can be
had that people really do believe as they do regarding the assumptions, which involve
subjective value-judgments rather than being solely based on fact.
1. Jonathan Chait, “Republican Joni Ernst Admits Why Republicans Really Hate
Obamacare,” New York Magazine, October
16, 2014.
