Robert Reich.

If the name doesn’t ring a bell, he was the Secretary of Labor for five years under President Clinton. These days, he’s a college professor, writer, and political commentator in any number of media (he shows up frequently on the Sunday morning talking-head shows). He’s a damn smart guy with a knack for saying stuff I agree with… or at least stuff I find interesting and/or enlightening. Of course, he’s also unabashedly, fiercely liberal, which means a significant portion of my Loyal Readers will reflexively sneer at anything he says and then change the channel. And that’s a shame, because so much of what he says is really just common sense. Like this, for instance, which I pulled from Reich’s Facebook page:

Several of you think we “consume” enough already. You’re right if you think of consumption in the narrow sense of just more “stuff.” But consumption can also be thought of more broadly, in terms of the things the richest nation on the earth should be able to afford — what we could obtain if our society had different priorities, if we used all our productive resources, and we were more equitable. Those things presumably would include more and better education, better healthcare, a cleaner environment, more of the arts, better public health, more protection from violence, more economic security, more leisure time. It could also include more natural beauty, better conservation of our wilderness, and innovations that saved on energy and natural resources.

 

Many of these are public goods; some are purchased privately; some are a mix of public and private. All improve our standard of living and quality of life. The real question is whether we have the political will and the values necessary to obtain them.

I think the question about political will has already been answered, sadly. Far too many Americans (especially among the population of my home state) believe the items he ticks off  are “socialism,” or otherwise ideologically suspect, rather than seeing them as having any inherent value regardless of one’s politics. Leisure, the arts, and conservation, in particular, seem to be frequently dismissed as purely liberal concerns, rather than something that everyone ought to care about. The thinking seems to be that anyone who values leisure time more than work is lazy; that art-for-art’s-sake isn’t worth pursuing because everything ought to generate a profit, or it shouldn’t exist; and that conservation is some kind of smokescreen for restricting individual freedoms.

The thing that baffles and frustrates me is that people are constantly saying that this is the wealthiest county on Earth, the best country on Earth, that anything is possible here. I don’t dispute any of that. (Believe it or not, I am patriotic, in my own way.) But I do wonder why, if those things are true, these quality-of-life issues seem to be so impossible for America to resolve, at least on an equitable basis that benefits everyone instead of only the wealthiest… especially when you consider how many other industrialized Western nations do a better job of this stuff than we do. Especially when it comes to healthcare. There is no reason why a country as rich and inventive as ours can’t figure out a way to ensure that all our citizens have access to quality care when they need it — care that won’t bankrupt them, and won’t bankrupt society either. Except of course for this mindset that everybody paying taxes to support a common good is somehow immoral, and that the federal government should never be allowed to dictate to free enterprise how much it’s allowed to charge. Because that somehow deprives Americans of their liberty. And that includes their liberty to struggle and live in constant fear of an illness or accident, I guess.

But hey, as Reich said, priorities…