Once again, marijuana legalization is on the agenda at the Minnesota legislature—a proposal that would end the delaying of the inevitable, and unite Minnesota with fifteen other states in giving the drug full legal status. However, once again, Minnesota Republicans are promising to stand in the way—a feat they can accomplish thanks to their slim majority in the Senate. But even though Republican obstruction is hardly surprising on any legislative issue at any level of government, the politics of it still don’t make sense.
On a national level, the Republican Party is a mess. They’ve just wrapped up losing their fifth presidential election in eight contests, and if we lived in a country where we actually elected the popular vote winner, they would’ve lost two more. Also, the way that Republicans lost in 2020 is particularly troublesome for the future of the party, with formerly reliable red states like Arizona and Georgia turning blue, and other Republican strongholds like Texas and the Carolinas not trending too far behind. There might have been reason to believe that Republicans could regroup and regain ground in 2022 or 2024, but that seems more difficult to imagine following the events of January 6th, which exacerbated some already problematic divisions within the party. And when you’re in a party that represents a significant but—by definition—outnumbered minority of the American public, divisions are not something you can afford. Even though they represent the “conservative” wing of American politics, the Republican Party needs to find a way to change with the times if they want to remain relevant in future national elections. In that sense, support for the legalization of marijuana represents an opportunity, and they wouldn’t even need to abandon their principles to take advantage of it.
It’s hard to identify what Republican values even are following the Trumpist takeover of the party, but the GOP is supposed to be the party of limited government and individual liberty. So, why does the Republican Party continue to support policies that allow the government to incarcerate individuals for choices they make about what to put in their bodies? Why shouldn’t people be given the freedom to legally purchase and consume a substance that by almost all measures is less dangerous than alcohol and more healthy than McDonald’s? And as supporters of free markets and entrepreneurship, why wouldn’t Minnesota Republicans support the legalization of an industry that in five years could generate over a billion dollars in sales, 20,000 jobs, and 300 million dollars in tax revenue? The creation of a legal market would by definition reduce criminal activity—a perpetual concern of Republican politicians—and they could even paint the revenue as the product of a stoner sin tax that they could use to address other Republican priorities like paying down the deficit and giving tax breaks to millionaires.
To be sure, even if the Republican Party performed an about face and threw its full weight behind state and national legalization efforts in the name of individual liberty and racial justice, Republican candidates would still struggle to earn my vote. I may have an intellectual respect for libertarian and laissez faire attitudes, but I don’t subscribe to them. What is more, I don’t smoke weed. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve used marijuana in the last half decade, and half of those times were random joints passed my way during live concerts at crowded music venues, and those don’ t even exist anymore (#COVID-19). But even though this issue does not affect me directly, it’s clearly an issue that is moving in one direction, and moving that way for good reason.
I guess what I want more than anything is just a competent second party. In general, while Democrats have been far more supportive of legalization efforts than Republicans, they have hardly been advocates. That’s because, politically speaking, there is no need to be. When the other party is always the party of “no”, there’s no need to be anything other than the party of “maybe”. When the other party is the party of dog whistles, conspiracy theories, and science denialism, there’s no reason to be anything other than the party of anti-racism, truth, and facts—all things that are good to be, but also things that represent a rather low bar for what we should expect from our political parties in the 21st century.
Aside from being a failing party itself, the other big failure of the Republican Party is its inability to challenge its rivals to be better. They’re always the party of regress rather than progress, always the party of yesterday rather than tomorrow, and for that reason, the Democratic Party needs to project nothing more than the most minimal competence to maintain its superior status in a two-party system where the other party is so backwards and unreasonable. The issue of marijuana legalization is an opportunity for Republicans to begin changing that narrative. But they won’t. And we’ll all be worse off for it.
But that’s okay! I’m not here to convince you to vote for Joe Biden. Vote for Independent candidate Brock Pierce! Vote for Libertarian Jo Jorgensen! Vote for Kanye West! Write in Mickey Mouse! Leave all the bubbles in the presidential part of your ballot blank! But, please, just please, don’t vote to re-elect Donald Trump.
I write this post only because I have faith in most conservative people. I firmly believe that Trump’s 2016 electoral victory couldn’t have happened without the support of a significant number of kind-hearted, rational-minded conservatives who—in spite of their skepticism towards Trump—voted for him because he was the only Republican on the ballot. My hope is that after the disaster that was the last four years and the potential reclamation opportunity that lies ahead in the post-Trump Republican Party, those people are willing to consider doing something different in 2020.
I should mention here that if you’re considering voting for Donald Trump not in spite of his racist dog-whistling but because of it, then this blog post isn’t for you. If you truly believe that this country is being destroyed by Mexicans, Muslims, and urban blacks hellbent on burning down suburbia, then give your vote to Trump. He’s certainly worked hard for it.
But if you’re one of the conservatives that’s more representative of the conservatives that I know and respect in my life—the conservatives who believe in things like traditional Christian values and limited government—then I’m here to tell you that Donald Trump not only is not the lesser of two evils, but is instead the gravest threat to the ideals you hold most dear.
I’m not a Christian myself, but I have a lot of Christians in my life, most of whom are better people than I am. They’re kind, compassionate, and committed to living a life modeled on the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. But knowing what I know about Jesus, it’s hard for me to understand how any self-proclaimed Christian can vote for a candidate like Trump.
But even if he has “evolved” to a more staunchly anti-abortion stance, Donald Trump is not pro-life—not for struggling Americans, not for desperate refugees, and not for the unnecessary victims that have died from COVID-19 under Trump’s abysmal leadership during the pandemic. Donald Trump will say what he thinks he needs to say and do what he thinks he needs to do in order to win votes—whether that’s throwing red meat to his racist supporters or tear-gassing protestors to clear the way for a photo op in front of a church that he doesn’t attend. But for these reasons, even if Donald Trump does believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, his words and actions still make him one sorry excuse for a Christian.
But not all Republican voters are devoutly religious. Many are motivated by a secular ideology based on free markets, fiscal responsibility, and limited government. Once again, I’m here to tell you that while Joe Biden may not be your guy (unless you want him to be 😉), Trump is not your guy either.
To be fair, I support both of these stimulus packages, and I’m glad our president does, too. But I’m not a fiscal conservative, and clearly, neither is Trump.
Trump’s expressed admiration for dictators abroad and constitutional abuses at home are far more dangerous than anything coming from the “radical left”. I mean, I have a certain respect for libertarian ideology, but honestly, when it comes to the things threatening our liberty, what should we be more afraid of—Biden using tax dollars to give healthcare to poor people or Trump ordering unsolicited federal troops to invade American cities? As Joe Biden would say, “C’mon!”
And all this stuff barely cracks the surface of the deep trench of terrible that is Donald Trump. I haven’t even got into his incessant lying, his baffling ignorance, his promulgation of conspiracy theories, and his subversive attacks on journalists, scientists, and soldiers. And even though I think most sensible conservatives agree that at the very least Donald Trump has moved the Republican Party in an undesirable direction, I still fear that too many of them will hold their noses for another Trump vote in 2020.
And that would be a huge mistake.
A vote for Donald Trump would solidify the Trumpist takeover of the Republican Party, launching them further down the terrifying path of authoritarian populism and dog-whistle politics. It would also be a potentially lethal blow to the Republican reclamation project that would almost certainly take place in the event of a Biden victory—a project aimed at returning the party to a more honorable brand of politics like those practiced by small-government libertarians and compassionate Christian conservatives. It would be a heck of an opportunity, too, considering the likelihood that Joe Biden would only be a one-term president.
And I would be so happy to see the return of that Republican Party. Not because it would turn me into a regular Republican voter—I’m too big of a “libtard” for that—but because I’d be so happy to return to the days in which both of the dominant parties can at least occasionally feign legitimacy. The days in which, in spite of my differing opinions on certain issues, I can at least claim to have an intellectual and philosophical respect for the leading voices on the other side of the proverbial aisle. But that cannot happen without first getting rid of the man whose illegitimacy makes that impossible.
A third-party candidate or a blank section on a ballot is not a wasted vote—it’s a protest vote. It’s sending a message to the two dominant parties that if they want to earn your support in the future, they need to nominate candidates that better reflect your values. The Republican Party needs to hear that message this year, and they need to hear it from their own. They need to hear it from you. The stronger the disavowal of Trumpism, the more swiftly the Republican reclamation project can begin. I’m going to use my vote to help make that happen, and whether it’s Biden, Brock, Mickey, or Kanye, I hope that Republicans will, too.
“When we think of white supremacy, we picture colored only signs, but we should picture pirate flags.” – Ta-Nehisi Coates
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There is no panacea for American racism—no single policy or protest or legislative proposal that can cure the ills of this deep-seated, multi-layered disease. The killing of George Floyd, and many others before him, has our national attention focused on the issue of police brutality. Calls to defund the police are ringing out in cities across the country.
To this cause, I’m both sympathetic and skeptical. I’m supportive of communities of color who wish to defund or dismantle an institution that has all too often done the opposite of “protect and serve” them, but I also question the ability of such an initiative to make progress towards true racial justice.
Everything is and should be on the table, and reforms to the way we do policing are undoubtedly worth considering. But when it comes to appropriating our limited energy and resources, I think there is an issue that deserves a bigger slice of that pie—an issue that should seize centerstage in this moment of national urgency towards addressing racial injustice. That issue is the enormous economic gulf that divides black and white America.
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Real solutions come from addressing root causes, and economic oppression is a root cause of a lot of problems in black communities, police brutality included. Black people are nearly three times more likely to live in poverty than their white counterparts, and while the caricature of the “black ghetto” is problematic, impoverished communities are more likely to experience crime, and therefore, more likely to experience encounters with police that have the potential to turn violent.
Economic inequality also helps respond to one of the favorite refrains of those who question the Black Lives Matter agenda, “Why are we so worried about blue-on-black crime when the real problem is black-on-black crime?” There is no excuse for police brutality, but black-on-black crime is a problem that plagues many black communities, and makes policing those communities a difficult and dangerous job. But, once again, it’s important to consider root causes. Why are levels of black-on-black crime so disproportionately high? Is it due to the fact that people born with black skin are innately more likely to exhibit violent behavior? If you believe that, you are literally a “racist”. But assuming you don’t, then there needs to be another explanation, something that stems less from biology and more from socialization. That explanation lies within the impoverished communities that black people are more likely to be born into—communities in which socioeconomic conditions leave people more susceptible to participation in criminal activity.
And those conditions are 400 years in the making.
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The black poverty of today did not fall from the sky. It’s a construction of American history that took centuries to build. That history begins with slavery.
Following the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the brief period of Reconstruction offered a glimmer of hope to newly freed blacks that measures would be taken to reduce their economic deprivation. Forty acres and a mule was part of the initial promise made by the American government to help former slaves begin their new lives as free people. It’s amazing to think where our country might be today if this promise had been fulfilled. But it wasn’t. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency and rescinded the order, returning all the land set aside for freed slaves to the white southern planters who had owned it originally, and who had attempted to secede from the Union in order to preserve their “right” to force slaves to work it.
Black people remained free from state-sanctioned bondage, but their undesirable situation showed that freedom without economic security is no freedom at all. They had lost their chains, but what did they have to start their new lives as free people? Without money, without skills, without formal education, what was a free black man to do upon his release from the plantation in a country that, despite his legally recognized humanity, still saw him as something to be disdained? Many ended up back on plantations working as sharecroppers for the same families who owned them in previous decades, and became a part of a system that many historians have referred to as “slavery by another name.”
When Reconstruction came to a close, the South rapidly returned to the project of constructing a society steeped in white supremacy. Legalized segregation, voter suppression, and violent intimidation all collaborated to deny blacks political and economic opportunity. Even when black people were able to overcome all odds and achieve economic prosperity, incidents like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 showed how quickly that wealth could be wiped away.
In an attempt to flee the horrors of the Jim Crow South, many blacks headed North in hopes of finding something better. Unfortunately, better was still bad. Discrimination in employment left blacks with few pathways to upward economic mobility. Those able to succeed still found themselves unwelcomed in emerging wealthy, white suburbs. Instead, black families with wealth were pushed towards poor, black neighborhoods where predatory mortgages torpedoed them back into poverty. This practice, known as redlining, is one of the primary forces that led to the formation of the black ghettos we see across the urban North today.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s made some pretty historic progress towards racial equality, but few of those achievements were centered around economics. Decisions like Brown v. Board of Education and laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 went a long way towards gaining black Americans political equality, but economic equality still remained elusive. While most remember Martin Luther King as the guy with a “Dream” in 1963, not many are aware that, towards the end of his life, King had shifted his focus to much more “radical” causes, including economics. It’s worth quoting from one of his last major interviews at length:
“White America must see that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil…America freed the slaves in 1863, through the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln, but gave the slaves no land, and nothing in reality…to get started on. At the same time, America was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant that there was a willingness to give the white peasants from Europe an economic base. And yet it refused to give its black peasants from Africa, who came here involuntarily in chains and had worked free for two hundred and forty-four years, any kind of economic base. And so, emancipation for the Negro was really freedom to hunger. It was freedom to the winds and rains of Heaven. It was freedom without food to eat or land to cultivate, and therefore, was freedom and famine at the same time. And when white Americans tell the Negro to “lift himself by his own bootstraps”, they don’t look over the legacy of slavery and segregation. I believe we ought to do all we can and seek to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps, but it’s a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. And many Negroes by the thousands and millions have been left bootless as a result of all of these years of oppression, and as a result of a society that deliberately made his color a stigma and something worthless and degrading.”
This is the reason that King was in Memphis in the Spring of 1968. He was there to support striking sanitation workers who were staging a protest against unequal wages and working conditions. King did not leave Memphis alive.
The most powerful piece that I read in preparing this essay was Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations”—a must-read for any American that cares about racial justice and even more of a must-read for any American that doesn’t. In the article, Coates outlines a thorough history on many of the historic injustices that I’ve more briefly discussed here, and his belief that black Americans today must be financially compensated for the wealth that was robbed from their ancestors, and by consequence, them.
There are many forms that these restorative payments could take. They could be checks sent out to individual African-Americans who can demonstrate a legacy of slavery in their lineage. They could be, as Harvard Professor Charles Ogletree suggests, targeted investments in things like job training and public works that operate under the mission of racial justice, but indirectly assist the poor of all races.
What makes the idea of reparations most attractive to me is that they are a systemic response to a systemic problem. The racial economic divide that exists in present day America is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. Americans carefully and intentionally created it. They created it through slavery, segregation, violence, discrimination, Jim Crow, redlining, voter suppression, sharecropping, and the scientifically disprovable belief that skin color determines the superiority or inferiority of persons, or if they are even persons at all. It’s an outcome created by a system, and it will take a system to destroy it.
Reparations are about “repairing”—repairing the economic damage done to black communities throughout the course of American history. But they’re also more than that. They’re also a step towards healing—healing an enormous wound in the flesh of racial harmony that’s led to so much mutual hatred and mistrust between the “races” that we’ve created. As Coates puts it:
“What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal…Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.”
Perhaps defunding the police could play a role. Redirecting police department dollars towards an investment in a struggling community of color could be an important step both practically and symbolically. But that’s not enough. Not even close.
Reparations would be a colossal project, but one of the many lessons that the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us is that if we deem a project to be sufficiently important, we’re willing to commit as many dollars as that project needs. The federal government has already invested trillions of dollars in Covid-19 relief spending, and it’s possible that there are trillions more to come. But as devastating as this pandemic has been for the American economy, it pales in comparison to the economic devastation wrought on black communities over centuries of subjugation.
Reparations don’t need to happen in one fell swoop, but it’s time for the economic divide to take center stage in the national dialogue on racial justice. It’s time for H.R. 40—the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act—to receive serious consideration from our elected leaders. The problem of American racism is much too complicated to be solved simply by throwing money at it, and certainly there is no amount of money that can truly “make up” for the gross injustices of the past. But when racial inequities of all kinds are so deeply rooted in economics, and in a country where financial security is so closely linked to the experience of true freedom, money is a good start.
Constitutionally speaking, Americans do not have a right to healthcare. We have a right to free speech, a right to bear arms, a right to freely practice religion or to be free from religious practice, but we do not have a constitutional right to be cared for when we are sick. Supporters of a single-payer system, myself being one of them, are hoping to change that.
Legislation creating a single-payer healthcare system, aka “universal healthcare”, aka “Medicare for all”, would not change the Constitution, but it would guarantee all Americans publicly funded access to core medical services. Obamacare is not an example of this system, but it is perhaps a move in that direction, in the sense that it uses the federal government as a tool to get healthcare in the hands of people that the private market had previously left behind.
Unfortunately, the American Healthcare Act, supported by Trump and currently being considered by the Republican-controlled Congress, threatens to undo a lot of that progress. Needless to say, this is a pretty disheartening development for single-payer advocates who had viewed Obamacare as a significant step towards their ultimate goal. That’s why Minnesotan supporters of a single-payer system should turn their attention away from Washington and towards creating a single-payer system here in Minnesota.
In the United States, our federalist system of government grants significant leeway to its semi-sovereign states in controlling their own affairs. In terms of power, state governments may be inferior to the federal government, but they are not necessarily subordinate to it. This means that, in the case of healthcare, even though conservative legislators in Washington are fighting for further privatization, progressive state legislators can still fight to enact something more public within their borders. Even though the American Healthcare Act may have dire consequences for the poor, old, unlucky and underprivileged in other U.S. states, that doesn’t have to be the case for anyone in the state of Minnesota.
Trying to pass single-payer legislation at the state level would be an enormous challenge. Aside from the politics, the practicality of such a system is pretty daunting. First and foremost is the cost. In California, the most recent state to seriously consider a single-payer system, a legislative analysis estimated a $400 billion per year price tag. That is more than double the entire state budget proposed for next year.
And then there are the criticisms that we always hear of single-payer systems—the longer lines, the lower quality, and the lack of responsibility shown by citizens once they start to get something for “free”. Some of the criticisms may be exaggerated, but in spite of whatever benefits a single-payer system might bring, I don’t think that there is any doubt that, at least for some patients, these problems would become a reality.
But in order to be a success, a single-payer system doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be better than what we currently got.
A single-payer system would be expensive, but the U.S. already pays more for healthcare than any other country in the world, including the myriad of countries that have already adopted single-payer systems. Even though the California proposal has a price tag of $400 billion, Californians already paid $367 billion for healthcare in 2016, and that doesn’t include the nearly 3 million uninsured residents that didn’t receive coverage, but would under the state plan. The real difference would be that, rather than paying a for-profit middleman like the private insurance and pharmaceutical companies that currently rake in all those dollars, Californians would be paying the government via taxes. And while those estimated costs still leave the price tag of single-payer significantly higher ($33 billion according to the estimates), it would also provide core medical services to EVERYONE.
With everyone being eligible to receive government-sponsored medical care, it would not be surprising to find lines that are a little longer or care that is of slightly lower quality for those accustomed to having the most prestigious of plans. But if this is the case, then the only reason that those lines were so short in the first place is because some people were not allowed to wait in them, and I’m not okay with that. Plus, one would imagine that, even under a single-payer system, the economically empowered would still be able to use their financial wherewithal to purchase goods and services not accessible to most.
Implementing a single-payer system of healthcare in Minnesota would not be easy. Even if the political will were there, inevitable setbacks and complications would surely make the transition process a frustrating one for many. I don’t know if it would be best to try to implement that system in one fell swoop or in a series of steps, but I do know that these are the types of discussions that should be taking place in the halls of the Minnesota State Capitol.
States are the laboratories of democracy, and Minnesota should be the first to experiment with single-payer healthcare at the state level. Minnesota may not be the economic powerhouse that California is, but smaller populations than us have made single-payer work, so there’s no reason that we can’t too. If we can be successful in this endeavor—successful in building a workable, government-funded system that provides quality healthcare to all its citizens—then perhaps Minnesota can serve as a model to other states, and eventually, the federal government. Healthcare is not a right in the United States, but in Minnesota, it can be and it should be. We just need to make it happen.
Imagine that one morning you are on your way to work when you walk by a shallow pond. In that pond you see a small child who is clearly drowning. You can easily save the child, but it will require that you get your clothes and shoes all wet and muddy. What is more, you are running behind schedule, and saving the child will surely make you late for work—perhaps quite late, as you will now need to go home and change your clothes. Do you still save the child?
Of course you do. You do it in a heartbeat. You do it without thinking. The thought of someone who would even stop to consider their shoes or schedule is itself disturbing, let alone the thought of someone that would willfully neglect to save the child for such selfish and petty reasons. That person would be considered a criminal, a sociopath, and a monster. But if you believe renowned ethicist Pete Singer, we may all have a little bit of monster in us.
We have all walked by that pond for exactly those reasons, and many of us do it every single day. We do it every time that we treat ourselves to an overpriced cappuccino, every time that we buy a pair of designer jeans, and every time that we go out to eat, attend a concert, or take a vacation…We do it every time that we choose to spend our spare dollars on our own unnecessary luxuries rather than helping the millions of suffering humans whose lives those dollars could easily help to save.
Of course, the pond in this case is metaphorical. In reality, the children whose lives we could be saving are dying from things like malnutrition, malaria, and civil war. Still, in the case of many of those children, their lives really are savable. There are organizations that are working to provide healthy meals, medicine, and new homes in safe locations, and if those organizations were to receive more money—our money—those dollars would LITERALLY save real humans lives that will not be saved otherwise.
But we don’t do that. I don’t do that.
Just the other night I went out with some friends to the new Surly Brewery in Minneapolis. It’s a fantastic establishment—some of the best beer and Brussels sprouts in town. All in all, I spent about $40 there, tip included, and another $5 on Pokémon GO egg incubators to make all the walking to and fro a little more worthwhile. I had a really great time that night, but if I had passed that shallow pond on my walk to the brewery, would I have jumped in and saved that drowning child, knowing full well that the money in my pocket would surely be lost, that my iPhone would be irreparably damaged, and that my lovely night out at Surly would be effectively ruined? God, I hope so.
So what’s the difference when that struggling child is on the other side of the world, thousands of miles away, but just as easily savable? The obvious answer is “out of sight, out of mind,” but while that is certainly an explanation, it is hardly an excuse.
But these thoughts have been on my mind lately. They’ve been on my mind ever since I first encountered ethical philosopher and all-around great person Will MacAskill on Sam Harris’s Waking Up Podcast. On the podcast, MacAskill describes a movement that he calls “effective altruism.” The movement is based on two assumptions: 1) That most people living in the developed world can and should do more with their time and money to help those who are less fortunate, and 2) that there are more and less effective ways to accomplish that goal. In other words, the good that we do should be strategic. If I am going to donate $50, I should seek out an organization that will use that money effectively and impactfully. Likewise, if I wish to donate my time, there is a cost-benefit analysis that should underlie how I choose to spend it.
That latter part leads to some interesting considerations. For example, one might consider the donating of their Saturday to a charitable cause such as volunteering in a soup kitchen or a children’s hospital to be a greater act of altruism than, say, working eight hours of overtime and earning some extra dough on an upcoming paycheck. But in an “effective” sense, the time-and-a-half wage paid on those eight hours could probably do far more good if donated to the right cause than any one volunteer could do in a day of service. To put it another way, that day of service is not worth the opportunity cost of the money that one could make completing a different task that, in this case, is not itself altruistic. Using this philosophy, I have heard MacAskill argue that one of the most effectively altruistic career paths that one can pursue is actually banking and finance, assuming of course that the person is donating a large percentage of their lucrative earnings to help the world’s least fortunate people.
You can go pretty far down the rabbit hole with this philosophizing about how to best maximize every spare minute and dollar, but while I’d like to get to that point someday, I’m not ready to go there now. Where I am ready to go, and where I think “we” in the developed world might be collectively ready to go, is accepting assumption number one—accepting the argument that we can and should be doing more to help those who are less fortunate than we are and that we should start doing those things now.
There are plenty of excuses that rationalize the pushing off of this responsibility. I know them well because I make them myself. While giving can certainly be intrinsically gratifying, online donations don’t offer the same euphoric spike as diving in that shallow pond and holding that living, breathing child in your arms—living and breathing thanks to you. In that scenario, you can feel the difference that you are making, but that fulfillment is hard to mimic with a credit card, especially when you do not get to witness the impact of your action.
What is more, the difference that your dollars make is, in reality, pretty microscopic when compared to the massive amount of global suffering that tragically plagues our planet. Even if you were to use every spare dollar over the next calendar year to buy bed nets for people in the developing world, there is no doubt that thousands upon thousands of people would still die from mosquito-born illnesses over that time. However, while that truth is sobering, those dollars still would make a difference, and it would be an enormous difference to the real human beings whose lives those bed nets would be saving—real human beings whose lives wouldnot have been saved otherwise.
Another excuse is the burnout factor. Many of us already feel that we are struggling to make ends meet in our own lives. We live paycheck to paycheck, are saddled with mortgages and car payments and student loan debt, and don’t feel that we have a whole lot leftover to give at the end any given pay cycle. This is a real concern considering that, in order to give, people need to be motivated, and if their lives suck, that motivation will be lacking. But while the leaders of the effective altruism movement certainly would not discourage an immediate and dramatic change in lifestyle if someone were up to it, that does not seem to be what they are advocating. Instead, they are encouraging people to dip their toes in the proverbial pool. They are asking us to begin considering our own consumption habits—what’s necessary, what’s not, and where we could sacrifice small comforts and luxuries in order to make someone else’s life a little less terrible. As we begin to adjust to this mode of thought, Singer suggests that we may actually want to dip further into the pool. As one person cited in a Singer Ted Talk put it, he doesn’t even feel that what he is doing is altruistic…He feels that the life he is saving is his own.
With the publication of this blog post, I will simultaneously be dipping my toes in the pool for the first time. I will be donating $20 to the Against Malaria Foundation, which “works to prevent the spread of malaria by distributing long-lasting, insecticide-treated mosquito nets to susceptible populations in developing countries.” This donation is hardly a sacrifice for me. It may cost me some Poké-progress or a bottle of tequila, but I can and should be doing more. Hopefully, in the future, I will work up the willpower to do that, but for now I’m going to allow myself the humble self-satisfaction of taking the first step. Below is a link to Peter Singer’s website, “The Life You Can Save.” This site allows you to identify credible, impactful organizations that will help your dollars to do the most amount of good possible in areas of your choosing, be it children, women and girls, hunger and nutrition, or education. Click around, check stuff out, and if you want to dip your toes in the pool too, consider this your invitation to do so. The water’s warm.
2016 brought minimum wage hikes to 14 states. These increases mean that more than half of U.S. states now have minimum wages that exceed the federal minimum of $7.25. Washington D.C. leads the pack with a minimum wage of $10.50. Not far behind are California and Massachusetts, each with minimum wages of $10. On a city level, Seattle made headlines last year by increasing its minimum wage to $15, and it appears that in 2016 New York City plans to follow suit.
All this has led to an increased national dialogue about the merits surrounding such minimum wage increases. Obviously they increase wages, but do they really help? If they help, do they help enough? Or do they actually do more harm than good?
The cost of labor is not the only thing that becomes inflated as a result of minimum wages. Increased cost of labor means increased cost of whatever it is that that labor is producing. If a restaurant owner needs to increase the hourly wage of his or her workers, you better believe that the prices on the menu will be going up as well.
But while these criticisms are economically accurate, I still think that they ring hollow—hollow because they attempt to place the principles of capitalism and free-market economics above the quality of the human condition.
Minimum wages can kill jobs, but the jobs that they kill shouldn’t exist anyway. They shouldn’t exist because those jobs don’t pay living wages. A living wage is a wage that allows a full-time worker to obtain a normal standard of living. It provides the worker an ability to afford all the basic necessities, things like rent, bills, food, gas, medical care, etc. In other words, a living wage is something that allows a full-time worker the ability to live.
$7.25 is not a living wage. Working a 40-hour week at $7.25 an hour amounts to a pre-tax take-home of $290. That adds up to about $500 a paycheck, $1,000 a month, or just barely over $15,000 a year. Have fun making a decent living out of that. In the United States, those wages might be living in the sense that they’re enough to keep you alive, but you’re certainly not doing much living beyond that.
Minimum wage increases often get cast as “bad for business,” but really they are only bad for bad businesses. If the success of a business and its ability to generate profits directly depends on its ability to exploit its workforce and pay them poverty-level wages, than that is not a good business model—that is not a business worth saving or protecting.
Furthermore, when businesses don’t pay their workers living wages, you know who makes up the difference between what those workers need and what those workers are able to afford? We do. Workers who don’t receive healthcare from their employers and can’t afford their own plan are much more likely to need and qualify for a taxpayer-funded plan from the government. Workers that can’t afford to make rent, to pay bills, or to put food on the table, are much more likely to receive and qualify for taxpayer funded government assistance in order to do so. But if the government just passes a law that makes the minimum wage a living wage, the onerous flips from the government to the employers, saving the government, and its taxpayers, a lot of money.
But if minimum wages work so well, why stop at $10 or $15? Why not make it $50 or $100 or $100,000? This ridiculous question is always mockingly proposed by some free-market fuckface looking to score a few condescending chuckles from his or her conservative counterparts. It’s also a question with an easy rebuttal, as Jon Stewart so eloquently demonstrated back when he was hosting the Daily Show:
That reasonable place to which Stewart refers is the living wage, a wage that allows full-time working people a reasonable degree of comfort and security. I don’t know if that wage is $15, I don’t know that a magic number really exists, but I do know that $7.25 doesn’t seem to be cutting it for most people. And even though $15 an hour may seem pretty high for a minimum, what does that really buy you? That’s barely over $30,000 a year, which is certainly living, but hardly living it up.
One argument I’ve yet to address which has some validity is the negative effects a high minimum wage could have on small businesses, particularly those just starting out. I think most living wage advocates would agree that certain small businesses should be able to play by a slightly different set of rules, that perhaps the size of your company and the amount of profits it generates are factors worthy of consideration in determining the minimum salary a company needs to pay its employees. That being said, when we talk about inadequate minimum wages, small businesses are normally not the problem.
According to the National Employment Law Project, 66% of low-wage employers in 2011 were not small business owners, but large corporations that employed more than 100 workers. These companies, companies like Wal-mart, McDonald’s, and other food service industries, generate enormous profits while paying millions of employees poverty-level wages. The suggestion that these companies can’t afford higher pay for their employees is especially insulting when considering how much they pay the people running the show. In 2011, McDonald’s CEO James Skinner made $8.75 million. Assuming that he works 40 hours a week, that would amount to $4,200 an hour, 580 times more than the average McDonald’s worker. At that salary, James Skinner makes twice as much in one day than most of his full-time employees make in an entire year.
And that is what the minimum wage conversation should be about. Not its non-existent agenda to destroy the American economy or its efforts to provide lazy people with government handouts, but its ability to help address the widening gap between the haves and have-nots in this country—about knocking down the richest among us a peg or two in order to lift up the working poor.
An anti-minimum wage group out of NYC recently purchased some billboard space in the heart of Times Square. Their ad shows a young, white male in basic-bro attire taking a break between jams to incredulously asking the following: “What? I get $30,000 a year with no experience or skills? Who needs an education or hard work when Gov. Cuomo is raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour?” The young man has obviously been cast to portray the stoned, slacker, teet-suckling sector of society that will supposedly benefit from this purportedly senseless piece of legislation.
But despite the billboards’ mocking tone, the answers to its questions are less than obvious. The billboard suggests that someone without “experience or skills” does not deserve $30,000 a year, but why not? Why shouldn’t a full-time worker who shows up to work everyday and has maintained the same employer for a full 12 months be entitled to $30,000 over the course of that year? Isn’t this the attitude we want from “low-skilled,” “undereducated” workers—an attitude to work hard, excel, and contribute despite their lack of opportunities or advantages? These aren’t even the homeless, jobless, welfare queens that people usually bitch about. These are FULL-TIME WORKERS!
Also, the idea that such wage increases will deprive most people of the motivation to go to school, work hard, and better themselves is absolutely ludicrous. $30,000 a year is not a lot of money, especially when you are living in New York-Fucking-City. Making $30,000 just to work at a downtown KFC and live in Brooklyn’s shittiest apartment complex is hardly the endgame for most people. What is more, if you show up to work and don’t work hard, whether you’re a financial advisor or a fry-cook, you’re going to get fired.
What exactly is this billboard trying to say? “Yeah they work 40 hours a week, but do they really deserve to make a living off of that work? I mean, they have no experience, no education, and no skills. Fuck them, right?” No, billboard-makers, fuck you. Fuck you for the suggestion that some people in your imagined occupational hierarchy do not deserve life’s most basic comforts.
But can you really blame the group behind this billboard? Anyone who can afford to buy billboard space in Times Square probably cannot relate all-that well to the daily problems confronted by the working poor. From them we can’t expect more, but for our workers we should.
Living wages are the only wages that we should tolerate for American workers, especially for the essential services the workers in question provide. These are the workers who allow us to get a hot meal in under five minutes without ever leaving our cars. These are the workers that allow us to get groceries and gas at any hour of the day. These are the workers that bring comfort and convenience to so many aspects of American life. Living wages will likely mean that those goods and services will go up a few bucks in price, that $5 footlongs may now cost $6, and that you may get a few less chicken nuggets for $1.49, but those are sacrifices that Americans, especially those at the top of the income brackets, should be willing to make. These are the workers that make our lives a little more easy, and for those who are full-time, who depend on these jobs to make a living, to pay rent and put food on the table and oftentimes raise a family, a living wage is the least we can do for them to hopefully make their lives a little less hard.
We all know these people. Many of us see them everyday. They don’t have a particular race, gender, or age, but we all know them when we see them, usually due to the cardboard signs that they hold in their hands.
The messages on the signs vary. Sometimes they’re simple.
Sometimes they’re more situational.
Sometimes they’re honest.
Sometimes they’re philosophical.
Sometimes they’re a just strange.
But regardless of how they’re worded, the vast majority of these messages all say the same thing: I need money.
And I’m torn about whether or not to give it to them.
I used to never give these people money. I always told myself that if I really wanted to help those in need, and if I really wanted to ensure that my money was going towards the cause that I intended, I could make a tally every time I felt compelled to give, and instead donate that money to a legitimate charity or non-profit organization at a later date.
I still think that this idea holds water, but in my experience, it had a few fatal flaws. The first was that it was intellectual argument. It made sense in my head, but it did little to address the sympathetic urges that I felt every time I was confronted with a real person on a real corner. The second fatal flaw was that I never did it. I never kept a tally, and I never donated a penny to address the plight of the people who so frequently tugged at my heartstrings during my daily commutes.
So I opened up the billfold. I don’t want to make myself sound like Fat Joe at a nightclub, but I was dishing out at least a few dollars a week: a buck to the gal off the 11th Avenue Exit, a buck to the revolving door of faces above the Lowry Tunnel…and it felt good. But while self-fulfilling, this “humanitarian” act also came with its own set of ethical considerations that definitely challenge the notion that my actions were unambiguously good.
I would be an asshole if I assumed that everyone I saw begging on the corner was looking for money to buy drugs and alcohol, but I would also be naïve if I did not acknowledge that drugs and alcohol are exactly what some of those people are looking for. If that were ever the case, my money would not be going towards elevating that person out of their dire situation, but instead would be working to further cement their place in it, lending them money to buy the very substances that are keeping them down. That being said, when it comes to that line of reasoning for denying people a dollar, I also share many of the sentiments of the late Greg Giraldo (who, full-disclosure, died of a drug overdose):
There are also perhaps more troubling situations in which my money could have the reverse effect of that which is desired. One specific example is the case of children, particularly those of school age. The presence of children creates a sympathy spike that make many people feel more compelled to give, and some exploitative parents unfortunately know that. Hence, increased dollars to those parents could lead to increased days spent on the streets for their children, rather than being in school where they belong.
There is also the fear that it could be a scam, that many of these beggars are no more than wolves in sheep’s clothing, looking to cheat us out of our hard-earned cash with a manufactured sob story. A quick Google search will confirm that these fears are not completely unfounded, that there are indeed situations where scams of this nature have been uncovered. Still, most of the folks that I personally see begging on street corners don’t seem to pass the eye test for an elaborate con artist. They’re too normal. Too humble. Too real.
And then there’s me, in my car, my new-used 2013 Ford Fiesta, waiting for the light to turn from red to green. Maybe I’m on my way home from work, a well-paying job that blesses me with a life of relative comfort and stability. Maybe I’m on my way to my martial arts gym. The membership fees are steep, but it’s a lifelong dream that I finally have the ability and opportunity to pursue. Maybe it’s Friday or Saturday, and I’m on my way to blow some money spending time with people that I care about. But even if I’m having a shitty day, if I received an ill-timed parking ticket that will put the squeeze on that week’s budget, or if I’m damn near broke on Tuesday afternoon still three days away from Friday’s paycheck, chances are that things are still far better for me than they are for the person standing outside my car.
And to me that’s the biggest point. There’s a chance that the person is a junkie or a scammer, but there’s also a chance that they’re just a fellow human being in need. I think that most people that stand out begging on street corners don’t want to be there. Some of them are there as a result of bad luck. Many are there as a result of bad choices. Most of them are probably there due to a combination of both. But they all wish that they weren’t.
That’s the reason that I sometimes choose to give. It’s possible that I’m being naïve, that I have a little too much faith in humanity, a little too much faith in the laws of karma and kindness and the truth in paying it forward. But perhaps the fact that I’m in my car and they’re on the corner is a good enough reason in and of itself to give every once in awhile, a good enough reason to roll the dice on a person, to take a buck out of my pocket and release it back out into the world. Because at the end of the day, that world has probably treated me a whole lot nicer than it has treated the person on the other side of my window, and for that I’ve got to owe something to somebody.
I’m not a Bernie Sanders guy. It’s not that I don’t like Bernie. I like him a lot. He’s refreshingly unrefined and seems to be speaking my language on a lot of issues. Although I think it’s highly unlikely that it happens, I’m passionately rooting for him to win the nomination over current Democratic front-runner and political robot Hilary Clinton.
That being said, I tend to subscribe to the Bill Maher notion of political allegiance, of being loyal to political ideals, not political people. Although I haven’t done much research on Bernie to know how closely he does or does not align with my own personal political convictions, the research that I have done through my uber-commie news networks tells me to be skeptical. Although Bernie embraces the label of socialist, which is a big deal, he is still running as a cog of the Democratic, and consequently capitalistic, machine.
But as a guy who has a lot of socialist sympathies, I love that Bernie is in this race. Even if he’s not a dream candidate for the reddest of socialists, Bernie has presented socialism with a tremendous opportunity, a chance to make its case to the American people, to gain some mainstream understanding, and hopefully acceptance.
If my history is correct, this is the first time socialism has had such an opportunity in nearly a century, at least since 1918 when perennial presidential candidate Eugene Debs was tossed in the slammer for speaking out against U.S. participation in WWI. Shortly thereafter, the brutal brand of communism established by Joseph Stalin and the ensuing decades-long Cold War that followed transformed the idea of communism, and consequently socialism, into a four-letter word here in the United States, a word unfit for serious political discourse.
This legacy remains in American politics today. The word “socialism” is loaded with negative assumptions. With the way that some politicians use it, you would think that it was some sort of fucked-up brand of Orwellian autocracy, coined to describe a dystopian future where we all sport one-piece gray jumpsuits, eat flavorless rations, and work menial jobs maintaining the King Obama estate.
The fact that this remains the state of conversation about socialism in many corners of this country is both unintellectual and unfair. You can disagree with socialist principles and ideas, but first you have to acknowledge what those ideas actually are.
Ironically, the United States already has a quasi-socialistic society. Anything provided by the government and paid for with tax dollars is, in essence, socialism. Americans, for the most part, love these things—things like Medicare and Medicaid, minimum wages and 40-hour workweeks, public education, roads, parks, and bridges—things that an unregulated capitalistic market does not and cannot provide.
There are also many other ideas that, while socialistic in nature, are nowhere close to evil, nor even all that radical. The idea that the minimum wage should be a livable wage, or in other words, that your full-time job should pay the rent and put food on the table, is a great example of socialist thinking. Another is the idea that healthcare should not be a commodity to be purchased, but a human right that all people deserve access to, regardless of how much money they make. One more is the idea that vital things like schools, hospitals, and banks should not be businesses established to create profits, but collectively-owned institutions established to provide essential services to human beings who need them.
Many Americans also associate socialism with big government. This is partially true considering that certain human rights need to be enforced on a national level. Discrimination based on race, gender, or sexual orientation should not be tolerated no matter what city or state you call home. But many socialists also advocate for increased authority at the state and local level, a notion that many states-rights republicans can probably identify with. It makes sense, after all, that the aforementioned schools, hospitals, and banks would be better run by the communities that they serve as opposed to some distant federal government. What is more, even if government has proven time and time again that it has an uncanny ability to mix inefficiency and incompetence, I’ll take the democratically elected leaders over the conquering corporate elites any day.
A trend towards socialism would also by definition mean a willingness to depart with capitalism. Just like socialism still exists in a capitalist America, capitalism would still exist in a more socialist America, but to a much lesser degree. Competition and profit-based motives do undoubtedly have power to inspire innovation and create economic prosperity, but they also cause people to do a lot of harm to one another, and that’s a trade-off that most forms of socialism will not accept.
I don’t know if the United States is realistically ready for such a dramatic shift in paradigm, but I do think that we are ready to talk about it. Socialism deserves to be treated as the viable belief set that it indeed is. It deserves a voice in American politics, in the discourse that drives decision-making in this country and in the world. I’m not convinced that Bernie Sanders is that voice, but even if he’s not, maybe he will lend voice to those who are.
Some people are political junkies. They watch the political process with all the fervor and rabidity with which a Vikings fan watches a Teddy touchdown pass. Then there are those who are apolitical. The political process at best disinterests them, and for some even disgusts them. The apoliticians don’t watch CNN, they don’t listen to NPR, and they don’t follow campaigns. Many of them don’t even vote.
I don’t blame the disgusted for their desire to be politically abstinent. Washington is a slimy place. To choose between Republicans and Democrats can feel like choosing between the lesser of two evils—the proverbial Giant Douche vs. Turd Sandwich. No one makes this point better than the current Democratic frontrunner herself, whose best advice to liberals whom are less-than excited about the prospects of having to support her seemingly inevitable anointment as the Democratic nominee was to just “be pragmatic and do it anyway.”
But no matter how politically abstinent a person may claim to be, I don’t agree that their apolitical agenda automatically extracts them from the political process. I challenge the notion that political abstinence allows someone to absolve themselves from the actions of their country. What is more, I challenge the notion that disengagement from what we typically think of as political behavior, things likes voting, signifies political abstinence at all.
Everything is political. We make political decisions every single day, decisions that have significant effects on others whether we choose to think about those effects or not. We also vote everyday, not with ballots, but with dollars.
What we eat, what we wear, where we go for entertainment—these are all political decisions, political decisions that we make with the dollars that we spend. We are voting with our dollars for competing entities in a competitive market, just like we vote between competing candidates for a political office. Every dollar we spend is a vote for what that entity is, what it does, and what it stands for.
The links attached to the above examples are hardly the tip of the iceberg. The shelves of the Walmarts and Targets of the world are stocked front-to-back with human rights violations and environmental catastrophes. But rarely do we think about this when plucking something off of them for purchase.
I’m as guilty of this as anybody. I wonder if I’d even be able to afford the MacBook Pro that I’m typing on right now if it wasn’t produced by cheap, Chinese labor and shipped to me on the fumes of government subsidized, dictator-sponsoring oil.
But even if I were to try to wean myself off these luxuries of privilege, it would take some economic acrobatics. $90 is a lot to pay for a pair of new jeans at American Apparel when I can get two pairs of Wranglers for $30 at Kohl’s. $6 is a lot to pay at my local co-op for a liter of milk from grass-fed, drug fee, happy-go-lucky cattle, when I can get a gallon of the more questionable stuff for half that price at any mainstream gas station or super market.
But then again, maybe that’s just how much this stuff actually costs when so much of the price is not externalized, when we pay people living wages and treat animals with dignity and take care of the environment, when we as consumers actually pay the real price of what it takes to make shit. Maybe that’s just how much it costs when we cast monetary votes that match our values and beliefs, and reflect the vision that we claim to have for what we want our world to look like.
Nevertheless, I know that I’ll continue to use my votes to support things I abhor. I’ll provide funding and support for child labor, animal mistreatment, environmental degradation, and oppressive dictatorships as long as they continue to pump out cheap goods that make my life easier and more enjoyable. Comfort is the greatest benefit of privilege, after all. I just hate that my comfort continues to depend on the discomfort and misery of others.
But no matter how politically abstinent a person may claim to be, I don’t agree that their apolitical agenda automatically extracts them from the political process. I challenge the notion that political abstinence allows someone to absolve themselves from the actions of their country. What is more, I challenge the notion that disengagement from what we typically think of as political behavior, things likes voting, signifies political abstinence at all.
Big Cat's Kitty Shed 