Sneering at "free stuff" is a vicious Repuke attack on the very idea of public goods.

[eridani]

There should not be such a thing as public education. If you grow up in a house with a library and your parents can afford tutors, then you get an education. Otherwise not. If you want retired people with no kids at home to pay for school bonds, you are just shilling for "free stuff" College tuition used to be free. If you want it to be so again, you are just a parasite shilling for "free stuff"

I like my Marxist fire department quite a bit. It is paid for by the government stealing a lot of money from people who have never had fires. The more your property is worth, the more property taxes you have to pay. That would be "From each according to his abilities." But they don't send a truck out unless you have a fire. That would be "to each according to his need."

Every single industrialized country in the world treats health care as a public good, with lots of different ways of paying the bills. Here it's like an iPod. If you have money or good insurance you get it. Otherwise you can fuck off and die, which is nothing but what parasites deserve.

And then there's all that physical infrastructure--roads, airports, dams. Be grateful for our interstate highway system. Ike paid for it with a 90% top marginal tax rate, so if we ever had to replace it, we couldn't. If you don't have a car, why should you pay?

It is the nature of public goods that
1. Everyone pays, regardless of usage.
2. They are usually free at the point of service.

[Jefferson23]

1. Bernie's campaign was not ever about free stuff, but always about corruption. Those sneering at

it do not want to examine the influence in our party, the current administration nor the
candidate they are advocating for, Clinton. I understand their dilemma.

[eridani]

37. I know. But I wish he and other Dems would talk more about public goods.

[Jefferson23]

42. I hear you, he talks primarily about what blocks our efforts. A constant uphill battle

we often lose in DC.

[Doctor_J]

2. I think we all know by now that the Clinton wing of the party

are practically republicans in their ideology. So republican memes and campaign tactics should not be a surprise.

[Maedhros]

32. They are essentially pro-choice Republicans. [n/t]

[Hydra]

35. And barely that

She's open to options selling out to the anti-abortion peeps, she was (and probably still is) against LBGT equality, she hasn't paid any of her social justice IOUs...

[PonyUp]

3. It's bizarro world when you're attacked with repug words. n/t

[eridani]

5. The Repub policies are even more worriisome. n/t

[winter is coming]

4. It's weird that it's "free stuff" when the money goes to the general public

and "strengthening our economy" when it goes to corporations.

[-none]

6. ^^^This^^^

It's weird that it's "free stuff" when the money goes to the general public and "strengthening our economy" when it goes to corporations.

But it's not really weird though. It is a fact of life now, from both the conservatives on the other side of the aisle and the conservatives in the Democratic party. Conservatives often get things backwards.

[AllyCat]

9. Good point!

[daleanime]

12. +1

[PatrickforO]

24. Fantastic! Great expose of corporate propaganda.

[KansDem]

25. Free stuff for corporations

More Free Stuff for Corporations

--excerpt--

This rich guy, Peter Georgescu, chairman emeritus of the PR firm Young & Rubicam, said in a New York Times op-ed in August that he feared the current grotesque level of income inequality would provoke major social unrest or oppressive tax levies on the rich – unless the rich did something about it right away. To avert restoration of the higher income tax levels that the rich paid from 1935 to 1985, Georgescu recommended that the federal government give money to businesses to raise the wages of workers earning less than $80,000 a year.

That’s right. He says the government should subsidize corporations. The government should give them free stuff. Welfare. The government, in his estimation, should pay corporations rather than simply requiring them to use some of their massive profits, now at the highest level in 85 years, to adequately compensate the workers whose labor created those profits.

Making the government pay is a popular position among Georgescu’s wealthy peers and GOP politicians. They don’t want the government to protect the environment or negotiate for lower pharmaceutical prices for senior citizens on Medicare or provide 16 million Americans with insurance through the Affordable Care Act. They do want the government to hand money to corporations, though.

Just weeks ago, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a candidate for the Republican nomination for president, announced he’d use this corporate freebie scheme to provide paid sick and maternity leave. The United States is the only major industrial country in the world without a federal policy requiring paid sick and maternity leave. Rubio called the absence of paid leave “one of the greatest threats to family today.”

Even so, he wouldn’t actually require corporations to provide it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-w-gerard/more-free-stuff-for-corpo_b_8240520.html

[Arugula Latte]

30. Exactly

[HereSince1628]

7. If your house catches fire, a capitalist wouldn't care, if it ignites his, he does.

That protection of private investment promotes shared/public interest.

You might think everyone would want to live in a safely built and well maintained homes that wouldn't catch fire. But not everyone can afford to and not every landowner would consider it a profitable investment to make investments to protect against fires. So, we have to erect laws and enforce those laws to collectively protect private assets.

Consequently, fire-fighting goes way deeper into public interest than fire-trucks and fire-fighters. It's about zoning, and building codes, and building inspection and maintenance, it's about planning, distributing fire-hydrants and parking regulations, snow removal from streets, etc.

Boring, over long argument, right? You wanted to keep it on socialist fire-fighting, etc. But you see, that really is tone of the issue. How far will individual awareness and concern be allowed to be stretched? Lots of people can't see the good of all that regulatory stuff that interferes with their freedoms. Large numbers of people really place the boundaries of their concern about providing for the welfare of their neighbors' lives/property and even opportunity in different places.

Public enterprises, whatever they are, are all subject to the balance of where those boundaries are placed. I can without hesitation say that centralized government control of all productivity is a bad thing. Likewise I can without hesitation say that private ownership of all productivity is a bad thing. I'm less able to tell you where the optimum placement of the limits of social and capital control should be.

[maddiemom]

10. Excellent arguement and NOT boriing.

[CrispyQ]

20. "I'm less able to tell you ..."

"I'm less able to tell you where the optimum placement of the limits of social and capital control should be."

We could start with things that absolutely should never be done for profit. Elections, basic health care, education K-college, locking fellow citizens up in prisons.

[HereSince1628]

34. IMO wherever market incentives don't work private enterprise/free markets shouldn't

I basically agree with what you've said, although I'm not real certain about elections being wholly publicly funded.

But by nature I'm sort of like Bernie Sanders, a person that doesn't want to get lost pursuing details in the tall grass at the start. I sort of like contemplating general rules.

Most generally I don't think free market capitalism should be allowed to work where it causes harm to individuals and or communities/states/nations.

Government exists to protect us from bad things. Mostly that's from things that other people (foreign and domestic) intentionally (and often with malice/selfishness but sometimes with indifference or negligence) do to the rest of us.

One of those places that markets don't work is where there are monopolies, or where there are incentives for collusion to reduce competition and to get into price gouging/price setting. Just because consumer traffic will unhappily bear a cost, doesn't mean that it's good for the community that a capitalist/investor should make the price as high as possible. The only way monopolies should exist is a public enterprises, where any push for profit puts the profit in the hands of the investor/tax-payer. Where communities allow monopolies (such as in utilities) pricing has to be tightly regulated.

Another place where things don't work is where circumstance compromises consumers' capacity to be discerning purchasers. One of those places is healthcare. People will always get very sick, sooner or later deathly sick and people who care for them are going to be in awful places where their reasoning defaults to "do everything" rather than doing what's reasonable. Sick children especially, but sick intimates and sick close relatives create these circumstances and in that circumstance Having consumers in that tight spot isn't an excuse to over-charge but it certainly is in the capitalist model.

Another place where things don't work is where 'insider clubs' are created that give some "member' consumers a break and then grossly price gouge others... mostly to create the illusion of a discount to the insiders. These circumstances incentivize gouging because the service provider needs a very high 'regular sticker price' so that a 'discounted' price can be offered to people who become members. This promotes upward pressure on prices because it creates 'innate value' that should be harvested by business. This clubbing thing is done in relatively small ways for most retail, but it's done in huge ways with health insurance and health-care. It's perverse for an emergency room to charge more for a poor, jobless person. It's as perverse for anyone to pay $20 dollars for a days plastic ware or a day's facial and toilet tissue as it is to pay $5000 for an MRI that could reasonably be priced at $500 (including typical profit margin). It's perverse to lie about discounts while raking in profits from the money students borrow. But it's especially perverse that these inflated prices are used to mostly to have a circumstance where fake discounts still yield inflated prices.

I can go on, but you get the idea. In circumstances where free market incentives produce perverse, unwanted, commonly harmful outcomes, the market shouldn't be free at all. In the same way, where insistence on public enterprise would result in perverse, unwanted, commonly harmful outcomes, private ownership and private markets shouldn't be excluded.

There are perfectly good places for private enterprises which really can promote some 'good'' within communities. In particular, circumstances wherein high risk that tax-dollars would yield benefits to too few is a great place for private ownership and open-markets. And in this, I'm thinking about things such as sports/entertainment venues. And that doesn't mean that there aren't circumstances in which a community may want to incentivize private investment in order to provide to the community a product that would otherwise be unavailable.

[AllyCat]

8. I had a conservative tell me today that taxes pay for roads and schools and that is not

Socialism, but social security and Medicare is socialism because well, he didn't know.

[griloco]

11. I don't know about youse guys....

but I'm getting a free wall ...

[TheUndecider]

29. Thanks Mexico!

[bigbrother05]

13. The folks with jobs pay taxes to educate kids that will become folks with jobs

Nothing free in that scenario, you just change the mechanism for payment

[UglyGreed]

14. Yet we have some

saying asking for transcripts is a GOP type of attack......

[jillan]

15. Not one word when the free stuff was going to the 1%

Not one word when the "free stuff" was going to the 1% but everyone is kicking and screaming now that Bernie is making voters aware who in society is really receiving free stuff.

Sorry. Not playing politics as usual anymore. Enough is enough!

[kairos12]

16. Privatize profit, socialize losses. The 1% anthem.

[CrispyQ]

19. And yet they manage to call it capitalism without laughing out loud. -nt

[DirkGently]

17. It's a successful Big Lie.

Somehow we've been convinced not to frame trillions in spending on wars or tax breaks or deregulation as "free stuff" given to lazy people.

But that's where our money goes. Listen to the "small government" Republicans demand we expand the military that already costs as much as the next nine countries' combined.

We'd collectively benefit exponentially more from a better educated populace not drowning in debt or filing bankruptcy to escape medical bills -- a problem not at all solved by the ACA, by the way -- but spending on those things funnels benefits outward and downward, whereas things like war and loose banking laws conveniently enrich campaign donors.

It's really as simple as that, but an amazing number of people fail to grasp it.

It's all our money to begin with. The only question is how we prioritize our needs. A few more wars? Or roads that work and people free to go to school or the hospital without being financially ruined?

[CrispyQ]

18. We don't teach civics in school anymore so the concept of The Commons is being lost.

Then along came Ronnie Raygun who convinced Americans that government is bad & big business is good & that if we just privatized everything it would be so much more efficient. We didn't stop to think that when one's only purpose is profit, things like consumer safety or the good of The People go out the window.

I have called a few friends out on the free stuff meme, but I really like your paragraph about the Marxist fire department. Very nicely stated!

on edit: This is such an excellent thread. Thanks for posting.

[PatrickforO]

21. The free stuff meme just bugs the heck out of me.

I pay lots of taxes and this 'free stuff' is the government giving me services I need after having been paid with tax dollars. Single payer is a great example. It isn't free. It's paid for with taxes. But it frees us from lots of economic stress we have now.

Nothing is free, but if we begin using the tax money WE'VE paid to give ourselves better lives, then we can get back on track and pull the fangs of Wall Street and the MIC. Because they are the ones who have been sucking up our tax dollars, leaving us high and dry.

Our government is SUPPOSED to be of, by and for the people. OK. Let's run it that way.

[CharlotteVale]

22. It makes me loathe Clinton even more than I already did that she inspires

such Republican sentiments.

[TBF]

23. It's interesting how they understand the "spread the risk" and "spread the benefit" concepts

when they are making money off them. Evidence: Repug approval of private insurance.

They need to be called out for what they are - greedy f***ers using an inherently unequal system in order to maximize their own wealth.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

26. It isn't just the GOPers. It's some of the Clinton supporters, too, right here

on DU. And I've asked them: When you drive to work tomorrow, (assuming you do have a job and don't just sit by the pool clipping bond coupons), will you be driving to work on a private road you bought yourself? No? OMG, free stuff! A free road! And on that drive you might encounter traffic semaphores. You bought those, too, for your own safety, right? Or maybe you feed quarters into them to make them work? No? You mean they are just there? OMG, free stuff! Free stoplights! So then if you drive home after dark, will you you feed quarters into the street lights so they turn on? Or did you purchase them yourself, to adorn your very own private road? No? You mean they just appeared? OMG, free stuff! Free street lights!

And then maybe you want to read a certain book but you don't want to buy it, so you head for the library, where, oddly enough, you can sit there and read that book for nothing! More free stuff! Later, you decide to go on vacation. You buy a plane ticket and head for the airport on the private road you built for yourself, lined with your very own street lights and controlled by your very own stoplights, and you are allowed to enter the airport and use it absolutely free! Or did you buy your own airport, too?

What about the kids? Maybe you want little Chad and Muffy to attend a posh private school so they can play squash and polo and don't have to rub shoulders with the cootie-infested, ill-mannered children of those people. But you certainly have the option to send them to a school that's - OMG - free!

Of course, you know very well that the "free stuff" provided by various governmental bodies for public use is paid for by taxes and isn't free at all. There is no "free stuff." There are, however, goods and services that are paid for by all of us together so all of our lives will suck a bit less. But maybe it doesn't bother you (or the GOP) to let the people whose lives already suck be even more miserable so you can save the equivalent of a BMW payment in taxes.

Oddly, none of them has ever answered the question of why they accept and use all that free stuff from the government.

[Arugula Latte]

31. And the trillions we've spent slaughtering and maiming tens and tens of thousands of Iraqis?

Nary a peep about that from Team Hillary! Move along, don't question that. The grown ups will tell you what is acceptable to expect in their society. You hippies and peons who expect the basics of affordable healthcare and education are wanting pie-in-the-sky shit, so STFU.

[myrna minx]

40. Thank you. The contempt some here have toward educating our young people is appalling.

Also, we always find the money to feel the maw of the military - but we can't educate our young people?

[Orsino]

27. ...And is a distraction for the big-ass freebies wingers love handing out. n/t

[guillaumeb]

28. Recommended and very well said. eom

[ALago1]

33. Well, not really

The poor and those who produce little output are the only people that use those services.

The productive classes are the ones funding the usage of these programs for others (since they will likely never use them).

So it is a free rider problem, in that those that use the services don't actually pay for it.

If they were able to pay for them via tax revenue, that would indicate they are capable of taking care of themselves.

[eridani]

39. The parasites are the rich who confiscate everyone else's labor.

[white_wolf]

44. There is so much wrong with this post...

So the "productive classes" don't benefit from police protection, fire fighters, public education, roads and infrastructure?

[SoLeftIAmRight]

36. We the People of the United States

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.


promote the general Welfare

[coyote]

38. Free stuff indeed

[Jefferson23]

41. +1. n/t

[eridani]

43. Excellent graphic==thx for aharing n/t

[Live and Learn]

45. K&R nt

[Kentonio]

46. People sneering about 'Free stuff'

Is exactly how I gauge whether DU posters are people I even want to be in the same party as. It's pure GOP rhetoric.

[eridani]

47. Public goods are socialist, period. n/t