People form societies so that the collective can achieve more than a simple group of individuals. This means that we have to be willing to “give” rights to others so we can be assured of realizing them ourselves. The collective decides that none of its citizens will suffer a lack of basic life-sustaining necessities. By keeping the lowest members of the society secure in their right to life the collective gains from their work and their economic contribution as consumers.
In modern economies, we use the power of the government to create and manage its currency to achieve this bottom which we guarantee to everyone. America even stamped this in legal stone in its Constitution when it mandated that its Congress create the currency for the common welfare. However, this means that the government can, should it become corrupted, decide who is “deserving” and who should receive a larger share. When the issuing of the currency needed to exchange for basic necessities is not administered fairly the people must turn to banks and business to secure those necessities.
This mismanagement creates competition for jobs that can only benefit the employers and ruling class who own the means of production. If they are allowed to influence the currency-issuing government a condition of scarcity can be created by withholding the people’s currency and threatening the workers with poverty if they can’t satisfy their employer’s desire for profit. While this creates “markets” it can hardly be described as a “free market” system when the only available choice for workers is poverty.
As the basic necessities, food, water, shelter, healthcare, etc. are turned into capitalistic markets life itself becomes a luxury to be meted out by those who control those markets. Such a condition will only be tolerated by the people if they can be convinced that their government is “funded” by the taxes the people are forced to pay, originally intended only to give value to the currency and as a means of inflation control. Once people believe that they fund their government, that actually needs no funding, they can be made to act as watchdogs for anyone that is “undeserving”, such as brown or disabled people, who may be benefiting from the government.
This perversion of perspective took decades to affect in America, but it has a lot of willing participants. It has been so extremely effective in reversing the popularity of FDR’s more socialistic New Deal economy that it is now hard to find anyone who actually understands what a “sovereign currency issuer” is, or how it differs from the gold standard we are mired in, in spite of not officially using the method since ’71. This was largely due to how well the neoliberal propaganda resonates with how the people must budget their own spending as “users” of the currency.
This perversion was also enabled by a deep distrust of the federal government that was instilled in the people by politicians who are quite adept at shifting the blame for their own failure onto the faceless entity of “big gubmint” as a catchall for their own corruptions. Those politicians, and their parasitic donors, are the most dependent upon government but portray themselves as the guardians of the people’s money. This has assured that the people will remain in servitude to “markets” and the (treasonous?) politicians who are first to ask “How will we pay for it?” at the slightest mention of spending on the public purpose that might benefit the people in any way.
Those same “guardians” of the public purse will never show any opposition to spending on the military or tax cuts to their donors, who are the “real” beneficiaries of the government. As people see business as the “source” of the money and the government as a competing “user” of that money, extreme costs of extraction and pollution can be excused as “externalities” that are necessary to create the “jobs” that everyone must have to live. The people become willing participants in their own demise, and that of their planet.
