Are My Students Capitalism’s Losers?

Sometimes you just shouldn’t talk politics with your friends. During a recent long drive with an old friend—let’s call her Jen—our conversation, which had been easy and pleasurable to that point, drifted to health care reform and soon I became racked with palpitations.

A little context: Jen and I both grew up in comfortable, two-parent middle-class homes in the same Philadelphia suburb. We both took nice vacations as kids, and attended top-tier colleges on our parents’ dimes. I became a teacher; she is an artist. Politically, I go in for most the leftie package (gay rights, universal health care, the war in Iraq was wrong, assault weapons should be banned, global warming is a crisis…) and Jen skews to the right— though to be fair (and balanced...), she despises George W. Bush.

When health care came up, Jen complained that Obama’s public option would ration care, diminish quality, and that the government can’t be trusted to run anything well. She hit hard on the argument that virtually all important research and development comes from the private sector, citing Fedex as a valuable innovation on the U.S. Postal Service.

I rebutted with the moral argument that health care is a right, the economic argument that having a sick population is an albatross, and then resorted to the logistical argument that the government is the only entity able to take on a project on the grand scope of covering the nation’s uninsured. Like the interstate highways we were driving on at the moment, a massive public investment was needed to make it happen. Interstate highways are now de-politicized; we all use them without complaint of their tax burden. It’ll be the same with healthcare. Plus, Fedex is a fine private alternative to the US Postal Service, but it doesn’t come close to overtaking it in the market. The public option for schools, for mail, for healthcare, is critical...

I had drifted in my argument, unaccustomed to facing off with a peer whose views were so starkly different than mine. At one point, Jen said, in defense of private health insurance, “The thing is, we’re a capitalist country. It works. There are innately winners and losers in the system, but overall it’s worth it.”

We pulled over at a rest stop, queued up at Sbarro, and promptly dropped the conversation.

But I couldn’t stop that “winners and losers” slam-dunk from ricocheting around my mind. She’d said it with ideological certainty, a mirror image of my liberal certainty that everyone deserves a chance at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness regardless of their background. My students at a charter school in Southeast Washington, D.C. definitely fell in her nebulous “losers” category.

Jen’s not at all alone in implicitly writing off so many underserved Americans as frankly deserving of their limited power. As a teacher, I’m working from the bottom-up to prepare my students to go forth in the world and determine their own paths. But the top-down campaign to reach the Jens and build the will to support struggling Americans is one that often confounds me.

I thought about this as we sailed down I-95, chewing the most tasteless pizza I’ve ever eaten. 

Comments

[David Cohen]

In 1948, Alan Paton wrote "Cry, the Beloved Country," and though he was writing about South Africa, I think he summed up an important moral point about capitalism. Paraphrasing here - it is permissible to hire unskilled workers to do unskilled labor. It is impermissible to keep people unskilled to ensure an over-supply of unskilled laborers.

Your students deserve every opportunity to be capitalism's winners.