British economist Umair Haque asks: “What does America not have that the rest of the rich world does? Public healthcare, transport, education, and so on. Every single rich nation in the world has sophisticated, broad, and expansive public goods, that improve by the year. Today, even many medium income and even poor nations are building public healthcare, transport, etc. America is the only one that never developed any — not on the national level, something that every person receives or can access, broadly. Public goods protect societies in deep, profound, invisible ways (we’ll get to that). And America is in fact losing the most basic public goods by the day — they are no longer safe from mass shootings in public places.”
Umair Haque
“Working societies — if they are to endure, grow, and cohere, if they are to prosper, hang together, and really mature — need moral universals. Moral universals are simply things that people believe everyone should have.”
“Moral universals anchor a society in a genuinely shared prosperity. Not just because they ‘spread the wealth,’ though they do: because, more deeply, moral universals civilize people. They are what let people grow to become sane, humane, intelligent human beings. A person that is desperate for a meal will resort to whatever they must to feed their kids. A person constantly fed a stream of nonsense by Fox News will end up believing the earth is flat. Moral universals let people act morally, and acting morally is what the process of civilization is.
“Democracy therefore depends on moral universals. It is fairly hard, in the scope of human history, to establish a democracy. But it is harder still to keep it going. A democracy requires, before it demands votes, sane, humane, civilized people to vote. A society that cannot create sane, humane, civilized people can therefore no more reasonably stay a democracy than a global economy can be powered by fossil fuels forever.”
“American leaders are pretending like the relationship above is a great, confounding mystery. Like dumbfounded dinosaurs watching the mushroom cloud engulf the land, never in American mainstream media will you read a column, hear a voice, or see a face discussing the above relationship, making it part of the national conversation. Yes, figures like Liz Warren promote public goods. But in the mainstream, this connection is not made.”
Editor’s note: Umair Haque is the author of The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business and Betterness: Economics for Humans.
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