Who Can We Trust?

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

-Luke 12: 34

I've been reading all about this college admissions scandal involving celebrities and rich people buying their kids way into Yale and other prestigious schools, and I have to say, I'm not really shocked.  Actually I'm not even mildly surprised.  The only surprise in the whole thing is that our legal system is actually doing something about it.  I have known for a long time that you can't trust rich people, because "love of money is the root of all kinds of evil," (1 Timothy 6:10).  For the same reasons, unfettered corporations, also pretty dangerous.  If you scan through the Acts of the Apostles and pastoral letters of the New Testament, you will get the distinct impression that money caused even those blessed early believers no end of trouble.

I have been feeling a bit like a man without a country lately, because as much as I detest the Trump phenomenon, which I believe to be cynical greed masked with a reactionary form of populism, I am also rather unimpressed with the left handed counter-punch.  My firm belief is that for a society to flourish the center must hold.  This is true of empires and democracies alike, but it is especially true of this American experiment of ours. I have come to something of a realization that our government is now functioning entirely too much like a business to be trusted (see above money, root of evil).  Thus the hybrid socialist-capitalism that Bernie Sanders and the left wing of the Democratic party envision is a disaster waiting to happen, because it doesn't actually solve the problem that pure socialism (in theory, it never actually worked in practice) was meant to solve: the unequal and/or inefficient distribution of resources.  Income inequality is the reason why some people can pay $40K for a "college consultant" for their teenagers and other people send their kids to schools with metal detectors and armed guards.  That's not a problem that can be fixed via the tax code, it would take basically the installation of an authoritarian state, and I don't think any of the Bernie Bros really want to go there.  That's kind of why I'm not at all as tuned up about Sanders 2020 as I was about 2016.  We need the center to hold and start to function again.

I had a conversation with my Doctor yesterday, in which we discussed that pretty much all the solutions to the rather broken state of healthcare in our country rest upon a rather flawed assumption: that healthcare should be a business, whether it is run by the state or by insurance companies (because let's face it, they're the ones in charge right now).  Either way the near fatal flaw is that health should be governed by the economic assumption of scarcity, which means, in short, there is not enough of it to go around, just like there are not enough enrollments at Yale.  Even in countries with socialized medicine, it is still rather common for people with the cash to be able to purchase better, faster, more advanced care, and from a certain perspective people, most people, figure that this is just the way it should be.

The college admission thing has actually helped me clarify some of my emotions about this.  Ink has been spilled in outrage, and ink has been spilled in the direction of "duh, of course it's not fair, open your eyes you stooge."  Indeed, education in another one of those things that sits on the line between a good that should be available for purchase and a right that should be available to all.  In an ideal world (even according to ancient Greeks) education would be available to all as they have need and aptitude.  Our public school system (Socialism!) uses our taxes to fund the education of children, but even something with very egalitarian roots still favors wealthy neighborhoods with better resources than poorer ones.  So obviously even a highly socialist premise doesn't exactly condemn the well off to Stalin's Gulags. Let's face it Lori Laughlin's daughter always stood a better chance of getting into USC than the average kid from Watts, even if she scored poorly on the SATs. She had a better (probably private school) primary and secondary education, she has money to pay tuition regardless of scholarship offers, and she has the resources and connections of Aunt Becky from Full House.  The fact that these folks still had to resort to extra-legal activity to earn admission just seems strange, how dumb are these kids?

Now take out the idea that you should have to earn healthcare, because you shouldn't.  If you're sick, you should be able to get better.  For all of our sake, everyone should have access to decent preventive care like I had with my Doctor (along with a philosophical discussion) yesterday.  Does making education available to all mean everyone gets to go to Yale? No.  Does making healthcare a right mean everyone get's to see Dr. James Andrews (NFL knee guy) for their arthritis? No. That's a stupid straw man argument, in other words a thing that is not ever going to happen in the real world.

If the center is going to hold, we're going to have to start dealing with reality.  The Green New Deal is a ridiculous thing, but it doesn't mean that we don't need to take drastic measures to reduce climate change.  The Wall is an abomination to everything America stands for, but that does not magically fix our very broken immigration system.  I would maintain that the extremists have nothing to offer us but stupid ideas that are only going to allow more crooked folks to get rich enough to buy their kids a spot at Yale.

They say money cannot buy love or happiness, but right now it can buy healthcare, education and political influence, all three of which are things that we need to struggle against as we seek to become a more perfect union. The increasing polarization and the formation of informational ghettos is not helpful in this difficult evolution.  We need to be more skeptical of money, rich people, corporations and the place it occupies in politics.  We also need to remember that we cannot serve two masters and that... nevermind just go read the New Testament, you'll get the idea.