THE CORONAVIRUS AND THE LIE OF LIBERTARIANISM

 

Just yesterday, the House of Representatives passed a recovery bill to help out Americans citizens and businesses hurt by the coronavirus.  This is only the second such bill to be passed in the months since the pandemic officially began.  For most people, the bill will bring them a one time check for six hundred dollars plus more for the unemployed.  The bill was passed at the last minute before millions of Americans faced evictions, and there are reports that the only reason it will pass the Senate is because Mitch McConnell thought that failing to pass such a bill would hurt the Republican candidates in the upcoming Senate election in the state of Georgia.

The fact that there was such a battle over the passage of a bill that will provide only a modicum of relief to most Americans shows how misguided our priorities are in this country.   While there are a number of reasons why America has done such a poor job of dealing with the pandemic as compared to other industrialized nations (President Trump's chaotic response and continued denials are a big a part), our government's fear of "big government handouts" has played a big part.  While other countries have paid citizens money to stay home (in Canada some workers got as much as two thousand dollars a month) poor and middle class workers who can't work from home  in America have basically been given the choice to go to work and risk catching and spreading the virus, or wind up homeless.  Putting it  bluntly, the same congress that a few years ago passed  a trillion and half dollar tax bill that mostly favored the rich, has fought tooth and nail to pass a similar bill to help people affected by what may be the worst health crisis in American history.  And even within a bill aimed at helping ordinary Americans and small businesses, there is a provision that  would let companies deduct one hundred percent of business meals with clients, up from the current fifty percent amount; which is essentially another hand out to the rich.

Our anemic response to the pandemic's affects beyond the infected seems to be based on the American myth of libertarianism, that notion that rugged individualism without government interference (and low tax rates, even on the rich) is the best way to run a country.  This belief really started to catch on in the nineteen eighties, when then president Ronald Reagan passed steep tax cuts for the rich under the wrongful belief that somehow they increased economic growth enough to pay for themselves (it didn't work then, and it still didn't work when both George W Bush and Donald Trump tried the same thing years later).

The truth of the matter is that the romantic notion of people taking care of themselves may have had an appeal in the early days of this country, when people tended to live in isolated communities, but today, as the pandemic shows, it's essentially ridiculous.  People are always going to need roads and bridges, law enforcement and firefighters, health departments and safety regulators, not to mention government workers risking their lives to help others in natural disasters.   And all of these things have to be paid for with tax dollars.  

This gets even more hypocritical when you look at the national trends of federal government spending; every year, blue states like New York and New Jersey pay more in federal taxes than they receive in federal spending, while red states like Kentucky and Mississippi get more in federal spending than they pay in taxes.  Really, the economies of some red states are basically kept afloat by the money paid to the government by blue states.  So much for rugged individualism!  Oh sure, the Republican leaders of those states rail against big government, but try taking Social Security and Medicare payments to their states and see how much they hate big government then.

Really, the pandemic has laid bare the problems of the American system of capitalism: even as the coronavirus has raged through the country, and  shutdowns have caused unemployment rates to skyrocket,  the wealthiest Americans have actually seen their wealth increase in the past nine months.  And because we have a crazy, free market system of healthcare in which most people receive it through an employer, many of the millions of people that have lost their jobs have also lost their healthcare.  During a pandemic.  So, even for the millions of Americans lucky enough not to be directly affected by the virus, many of them will be poorer and less healthy.

If there is a silver lining to this, it that's America may finally get over the notion that the rich paying their fair share of taxes is "Socialism"and that when the effects of the pandemic wind up hitting the poor and middle class far more than the rich, perhaps there will be  support for a wealth tax, or some kind of increase in the upper income tax rate to somewhat even the huge gap between the rich and the poor in this country.  At the very least, the millions of Americans who will be without healthcare may finally drive this country into adapting the same kind of national healthcare programs that every other industrialized nation has.   But, given that the Republican party has not been given the kind of stinging rebuke they deserved for supporting Trump for the past five years, it may not happen soon.