[img]7|left|||no_popup[/img]As the American Medical Assn. waffles on the so-called “public option,” which for some reason is made to sound ominously like “nuclear option,” and Republicans dig trenches so deep, one thing has become clear: There’s a lot of philosophical cowardice around here. All those free enterprisers, all those who want to shrink government and keep it out of healthcare or financial regulation or anything of public interest – cowards. If they were truly brave in their political philosophy they would be anarchists.

Because the anarchist, at least, begins from an honest, outright position of no government. For the no-public-option crowd, “antipublicans” to coin a word, the solution is the status quo with tweaks. Corporate, for-profit healthcare. And with this transfer of power from government, which ostensibly exists to serve its citizens, to corporations who ultimately answer to their bottom lines and shareholders, the full weight of history comes to bear on antipublicans who would flirt with anarcho-capitalism. It’s an oxymoron, quite frankly. The history of anarchism as a political philosophy is a history of pursuing social justice, though the means to achieving that social justice differ from flavour to flavour of anarchist thinker. Even the individual anarchists, precursors to today’s libertarians and “anarcho-capitalists,” opposed some of capitalism’s instruments of exploitations such as a rent and interest. For the most part, anarchist movements have been focused on the oppressed, the workers, the vulnerable, the subjects of authority. From here it’s easy to get lost in the minutiae of internecine ideological debates that began over a century ago. So let’s just say that anarchism as a political philosophy, with all its variations, is explicitly geared towards answering the question, how do people self-organize to solve particular problems without resorting to government? So we could very well ask: How do we feed ourselves? How do we get the healthcare we need? How do we achieve the creature comforts we’ve become accustomed to?

Making a Closer Inspection

We could consider the Anarchist Test as the political science equivalent of a Turing test; take away government from the equation and figure out a solution. The catch is that the notion of the public good can never be eliminated. From agriculture to roads and sewage, from automobiles and high-tech gadgets – all of this is only possible through the cooperative work of a number of people. Critically, there is a distinction between those luxuries, and those things – food, medicine, housing – that we all need. Setting aside the luxuries we have now – the cinemas, the museums, the sporting events, the spas – it is clear that just to be able to eat and take shelter, though possible on an individual basis, is considerably easier when multiple individuals pool resources. As an example, consider the farming subsidies – paid for from our tax dollars – that make our food so cheap.

To be fair, antipublicans aren’t necessarily denying these necessities, merely saying that the private sector can address them better than government. However, when government has the notion of the public built-in while corporations only have their own interests (read: profit), this is precisely what we’re struggling to deal with. The recent history of healthcare in the U.S. is a history of privatized medicine. Public healthcare on a universal scale has not been tried. From this alone, we should question how privatized medicine helps the 50 million uninsured Americans. As I argued last week, whether the system is private or public, we’ll have to pay for our healthcare somehow. And in fact, public healthcare might afford more individual freedom than the private HMO system where you always have to ask for permission and jump through all these hoops to get anything.

So if we want to talk about healthcare without government, that’s fine. I’m all for it. But let’s do it by drawing on the tradition of anarchism instead of this selfish corporatism that forgets that money is a means to an end not an end in itself. Since most people aren’t willing to make even the theoretical leap to anarchist political philosophy, however, let’s work with what we have now and consider  — at least consider! — all the options, including publicly-funded and managed healthcare. To do otherwise is truly to indulge, with an unfortunate intellectual bankruptcy, the politics of reactionary cowardice.

Frédérik Sisa invites you to visit www.inkandashes.net.