By Mike Appleton, Guest Blogger
“We pledge ourselves to use all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision which is contrary to the Constitution and to prevent the use of force in its implementation.
-The Southern Manifesto, Cong. Rec., 84th Cong. 2d Session, Vol. 102, part 4 (March 12, 1956)
‘This was an activist court that you saw today. Anytime the Supreme Court renders something constitutional that is clearly unconstitutional, that undermines the credibility of the Supreme Court. I do believe the court’s credibility was undermined severely today.”
-Michele Bachmann (R. Minn.), June 26 2012
Most people are familiar with the opinion in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, et al., 349 U.S. 483 (1954), in which a unanimous Supreme Court summarily outlawed public school segregation by tersely declaring, “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” 349 U.S. at 495. But many people do not know that Brown involved a consolidation of cases from four states. The “et al.” in the style refers to decisions on similar facts in Delaware, South Carolina and Virginia. And the response of Virginia to the ruling in Brown provides an interesting comparison with the actions leading to the current government shutdown.
In 1951 the population of Prince Edward County, Virginia was approximately 15,000, more than half of whom were African-American. The county maintained two high schools to accommodate 386 black students and 346 white students. Robert R. Moton High School lacked adequate science facilities and offered a more restricted curriculum than the high school reserved for white students. It had no gym, showers or dressing rooms, no cafeteria and no restrooms for teachers. Students at Moton High were even required to ride in older school buses.
Suit was filed in federal district court challenging the Virginia constitutional and statutory provisions mandating segregated public schools. Although the trial court agreed that the school board had failed to provide a substantially equal education for African-American students, it declined to invalidate the Virginia laws, concluding that segregation was not based “upon prejudice, on caprice, nor upon any other measureless foundation,” but reflected “ways of life in Virginia” which “has for generations been a part of the mores of the people.” Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, 103 F. Supp. 337, 339 (E.D. Va. 1952). Instead, the court ordered the school board to proceed with the completion of existing plans to upgrade the curriculum, physical plant and buses at Moton High School. When the plaintiffs took an appeal from the decision, the Democratic machine that had for many years controlled Virginia politics under the firm hand of Sen. Harry Byrd had little reason to believe that “ways of life” that had prevailed since the end of the Reconstruction era would soon be declared illegal.
When the Brown decision was announced, the reaction in Virginia was shock, disbelief and anger. Reflecting the prevailing attitudes, the Richmond News Leader railed against “the encroachment of the Federal government, through judicial legislation, upon the reserved powers of the States.” The Virginia legislature adopted a resolution of “interposition” asserting its right to “interpose” between unconstitutional federal mandates and local authorities under principles of state sovereignty. And Sen. Byrd organized a campaign of opposition that came to be known as “Massive Resistance.”
In August of 1954 a commission was appointed to formulate a plan to preserve segregated schools. Late in 1955, it presented its recommendations, including eliminating mandatory school attendance, empowering local school boards to assign students to schools and creating special tuition grants to enable white students to attend private schools. Enabling legislation was quickly adopted and “segregation academies” began forming around the state. Subsequent legislation went even further by prohibiting state funding of schools that chose to integrate.
In March of 1956, 19 senators and 77 house members from 11 southern states signed what is popularly known as “The Southern Manifesto,” in which they declared, “Even though we constitute a minority in the present Congress, we have full faith that a majority of the American people believe in the dual system of government which has enabled us to achieve our greatness and will in time demand that the reserved rights of the States and of the people be made secure against judicial usurpation.”
Throughout this period the Prince Edward County schools remained segregated, but when various court rulings invalidated Virginia’s various attempts to avoid integration, the school board took its final stand. It refused to authorize funds to operate any schools in the district, and all public schools in the county were simply closed, and remained closed from 1959 to 1964.
There are striking similarities between Sen. Byrd’s failed plan of Massive Resistance and Republican efforts to prevent implementation of the Affordable Care Act. There was widespread confidence among conservatives that the Supreme Court would declare the Act unconstitutional. When that did not occur, legislators such as Michele Bachmann, quoted above, attempted to deny the legitimacy of the Court’s ruling. Brent Bozell went further, denouncing Chief Justice Roberts as “a traitor to his own philosophy,” hearkening back to the days when southern roadsides were replete with billboards demanding the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren.
The House of Representatives has taken over 40 votes to repeal the ACA, quixotic efforts pursued for reasons known only to John Boehner and his colleagues. And in accordance with the Virginia legislative model, the House has attempted to starve the ACA by eliminating it from funding bills. Following the failure of these efforts, Republicans have elected to pursue the path ultimately taken by the school board of Prince Edward County and have shut down the government.
Even the strategy followed by Republicans is largely a southern effort. Approximately 60% of the Tea Party Caucus is from the South. Nineteen of the 32 Republican members of the House who have been instrumental in orchestrating the shutdown are from southern states. It is hardly surprising therefore, that the current impasse is characterized by the time-honored southern belief in nullification theory as a proper antidote to disfavored decisions by a congressional majority.
In reflecting upon the experience of Virginia many years later, former Gov. Linwood Holton noted, “Massive resistance … served mostly to exacerbate emotions arrayed in a lost cause.” Republicans would do well to ponder the wisdom in that observation.
gbk,
I don’t know what sehka is; I don’t have gmail and never will; and it’s there’s nothing I can do to fix that, even it if were my problem. Which is to say, if I cared.
Next time, be sure to copyright your precious rantings.
gbk,
Phuk you!! I don’t give a shit what you think I made you look like. I didn’t cut and paste anything I would not have written myself. My intention was to respond to david’s equivocating.
Get over it and don’t be such a phukwad. You’re capable of making yourself look stupid all on your own.
RTC,
And your “foxfire” link, tied into sekha through gmail.
RTC,
F****k you.
RTC, or SOTB, whichever it may be:
Who the hell are you to make me look like a sock puppet?
You take a very small excerpt from a quote I noted from DavidM in my responses to him and make it seem your own. I have no problem with people stealing ideas, but the fashion that you performed this with makes me look like I’m posting under multiple aliases.
So does the Klein reference directly above the said.
COINTELPRO still lives, it would seem.
DavidM,
“So no, I did not purposely misrepresent the data that I sourced. I misrepresented it by mistakenly choosing the wrong tense in my sentence structure.”
——————————-
You know, that’s incredibly similar to what Fox News says everytime they identify a Republican congressman caught sexually harassing congressional pages or taking kickbacks from defense contractors as a Democrat.
Mistakenly on purpose. Or were you just lazy?
And another thing David,
Naomi Klein doesn’t purport to document The History of capitalism. She just doesn’t.
What she makes clear is that she traces the the legacy of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics free market philosophy, as it has been put into application around the world for three and a half decades.
For a guy like you, it’ll read like pornography.
David,
What do the words “White House Memo” mean to you? A written version of Oval Office chit-chat, or a postit note left stuck on the refrigerator in the Chief of staff’s office?
It’s actually an official communication among Administration Officials. Recorded and numbered, and stored.
The conversation between Nixon and Ailles took place nearly a decade after the Kennedy debate, when Nixon was President.
It was a conversation about creating a network to promulgate Republican propaganda and pull the wool over the eyes of the Moral Majority Morons.
In your case, it appears to have worked.
Bron: Sam Adams, in this speech, has what I regard as an incoherent view of Rights.
As I said, Rights mean nothing if they are not protected, if there is no punishment by society for their violation.
I do not believe in “natural rights,” they are completely meaningless; barely excuses for doing whatever you do. If you have a “Right” to self-defense, what in the world does that mean? It can only mean that others are obligated (to you) to not punish you for engaging in self-defense, but that very obligation to YOU means the two of you have a pact and are therefore a society.
Rights sound like privileges, but they have a flip side: In order to be a privilege they must entail an obligation from other people to refrain from denying you that privilege, as well as an obligation to protect you if others try to deny you that privilege, and in return you have that obligation to do the same. That is a pact, and even with two people, that is a society.
I think Rights are meaningless gibberish without such reciprocal obligations, and Man in a state of Nature (outside of a society) has NO Rights, because nobody is obligated to protect him or honor any privilege he claims. What good does it do to talk about Rights in a hypothetical setting where they can be violated at will without any punishment whatsoever?
Right and wrong, fair and unfair, just and unjust are constructs of intellects with empathy, logic and a theory of mind. So mostly but not exclusively humans. Right and wrong do not exist in nature, all that exists in nature is brute force. The lions take down and eat the pregnant female and her kid while they are still alive and bleating. That seems wrong to us, but nature is mindless, all that counts there is force. And that applies to Man in nature just as well, without a pact, implied or inherited or explicitly negotiated, all that matters is brute force. Rights only emerge from the social compact.
gbk:
You should probably get your money back.
I just wanted to share an article from a physical anthropology journal that I subscribe to that might have relevance for this thread. It’s behind a paywall, so I’ve copy/pasted only a small amount of the article.
_____________________________________________
A stunning discovery in the Sredinny Range on the remote Kamchatka Peninsula might lead to a redrawing of the genetic lines of modern humans.
“My discovery here might be as significant as the Denisovan finds of 2008,” stated Dr. Furzfänger, “in showing the complex migratory and adaptation patterns of human ancestry.”
“What is truly stunning about my findings here is that it appears that only one individual inhabited this site, and that this individual was remarkably prolific in his, um, their ability to fashion and use crude tools.”
According to Dr. Furzfänger, the site shows complex adaptation in the form of tool-making and use, yet does not exhibit the typical detritus of a site inhabited by even a small band of lazy and shiftless hunter-gatherers.
“It’s quite amazing, really, that one individual was able to do so much,” noted Dr. Furzfänger. “It appears that this individual discovered a flint outcrop roughly thirty kilometers from here, mined it, and made remarkably sophisticated flaked cutting tools way before any other hominid did. Additionally, this individual was able to fashion bone awls and barbs, preserve hides from kills, and control fire. It’s astounding that one individual could be so prolific.”
Dr. Furzfänger noted that his field work requires many more years to arrive at conclusive results, and that this is primarily due to the slow progress of careful trench work.
“It’s difficult to find qualified trenchers today. Even graduate level students can’t be bothered with it as they all want to be published without expending any fieldwork effort. Why, just last year, I had some graduate trenchers steal my dental picks and hand trowels at the end of their internship. This is why I’m doing all the work here by myself now.”
Dr. Furzfänger’s research is funded by the Individual Endowment For Cultural Stoicism, the Historical Non-Associated History Association, and the Singular Justice Society.
DavidM:
What is your take on Tony C’s interpretation of what Sam Adams wrote?
To Sam Adams:
Sam Adams says: Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right to life; Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. These are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.
That is not evident to me, it sounds like an assertion without proof. Self-preservation could excuse all sorts of things; like pre-emptive murder as “self-defense” that violates somebody else’s right to life.
Sam Adams says: All men have a right to remain in a state of nature as long as they please;
No, they don’t. This is just another unjustified assertion. In truth all men are born into a society, and in truth (in modern times) there are few places a man can go to BE in a “state of nature,” short of a jungle.
Sam Adams says: When men enter into society, it is by voluntary consent; and they have a right to demand and insist upon the performance of such conditions and previous limitations as form an equitable original compact.
No, they have no such right. The society determines the equitable original compact, and you live with it or exit the society. It is a take it or leave it proposition, there is no room for individual demands or insistence.
Sam Adams says: Every natural right not expressly given up, or, from the nature of a social compact, necessarily ceded, remains.
Sure. Let me rephrase: The social compact decided upon by the laws of the society are necessarily ceded to be a member of that society, and anything not against the law is within the law. Heck, that seems self-evident.
Sam Adams says: All positive and civil laws should conform, as far as possible, to the law of natural reason and equity.
Mayyyyybe, you will have to define what you mean by “natural reason.” Since nature does not reason, or play equitably.
Sam Adams says: The natural liberty of man, by entering into society, is abridged or restrained, so far only as is necessary for the great end of society, the best good of the whole.
Correct. Let me rephrase: Your liberty is abridged and restrained when it is necessary for the best good of the whole. Which, I will note, includes your liberty to exercise your greed, exploit others for profit, or harm others out of selfishness. Such things that are good for YOU are not necessarily in the interest of the best good of the whole; because, as should be obvious, your $1000 in profit, when obtained by defrauding somebody else out of $10,000 by deception, causes your victim more harm that it did you good.
Sam Adams says: In the state of nature every man is, under God, judge and sole judge of his own rights and of the injuries done him. By entering into society he agrees to an arbiter or indifferent judge between him and his neighbors; but he no more renounces his original right than by taking a cause out of the ordinary course of law, and leaving the decision to referees or indifferent arbitrators.
That is just patently ridiculous. If you mean he is allowed to hold a grudge, fine. But if the social compact demands an indifferent judge, and he has agreed to be a member of the society, then he has indeed renounced any natural right to act against his neighbor according to his own judgment. He has given up that “natural right” in order to become a part of a society and enjoy the fruits thereof; that is the price of being a member.
Yet despite Adams personal views, the property language was left out of the Constitution as ratified. And if anyone had input, it was Adams as he functioned as sort of parliamentary whip at the Second Continental Congress and was a major political force in general.
Again, you are not arguing from what is but rather what you think ought to be.
dAVIDm:
Gene says “That right is neither absolute nor recognized as fundamental.”
It my not be absolute but I think the case can be made that property rights are a fundamental right in a free society.
I am also suspicious of most supreme court decisions after about 1900. From what I have read the progressives really started moving us to a European style social welfare system during the late 19th and early 20th century. It expanded considerably under FDR.
“Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right to life; Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. These are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.”
Sam Adams
The Rights of the Colonists
The Report of the Committee of Correspondence
to the Boston Town Meeting, Nov. 20, 1772
http://history.hanover.edu/texts/adamss.html
Nah, Locke didnt have hardly any influence on those long dead socialist revolutionaries we call our founders.
They even laid the ground-work for the welfare state in the preamble, they thought of everything.
DavidM: I also think socialism (at the survival level) is both more effective and less expensive than much of the regulation. Exploitation of workers occurs (I think obviously) because the workers have no real choice.
Socialism (as is proven by sociological observations of employment attitudes in Norway and other modern socialist countries) corrects that by making sure employees DO have a choice. It is not as good a choice as working a decent job for a decent boss and owner, but it is not as bad a choice as working for an exploitive a-hole ripping you off and taking advantage of your misfortunes, or the obligations you feel to friends and loved ones.
In such modern socialist countries (which basically means a strong and mostly unconditional safety net) you don’t need law or coercion to restrain a-holes, they fail by the law of supply and demand. The demand for the jobs they can offer vanishes, because working for a jerk that rips you off is pretty much a function of how much desperation you feel. So they can’t get enough people to work for them, at least not for very long, and they either adapt to be more friendly or get fired or their business fails.
So fewer laws and less law enforcement is necessary. Unions also diminish in value (something else seen in Norway). Why doesn’t this same approach work in a free market? Because the free market theory fails when the penalty for not earning any money seems infinite or catastrophic — It makes any finite level of abuse, exploitation and being ripped off acceptable; i.e. when the choice is “work or die,” people work, even in the worst conditions (the history of slavery proves that). But that is not a negotiation and voluntary agreement, it is just blackmail. Socialism can eliminate that as a bargaining tactic, and much of the rest follows naturally; better working conditions, fewer laws and law enforcement, fewer unions holding companies hostage, civil bosses, better salaries, and a much more equitable distribution of wealth (meaning a lower standard deviation with fewer people on either extreme end).
DavidM: …we would all earn less than a homeless beggar in New York City?
With no government, there is no infrastructure (unless left over by a previous government). Government can include dictatorship and Monarchy, those can successfully build infrastructure through coercion, taxation, and enslavement, but typically the vast majority are not wealthy, only the powerful and their minions that enforce their will are wealthy (think Kings and their Knights).
It takes a government to supply your “Rights,” however they are formulated. I have (effectively) no right to life (or property) if nobody is obligated to protect that right (and in “protection” I include punishment for violation), David, and my own “right” to defend my life or property is meaningless if I can be punished or killed for doing that, without my assailant facing any kind of retribution. Protection must include an obligation to exact Justice, without compensation for the cost or risk that entails, when your rights are violated. So if somebody murders me, then regardless of whether my estate or relatives have money, my murderer must be found and punished to the best of my society’s ability. If that is a choice they make on a case-by-case basis, I effectively have no Rights, because they are conditioned upon me currying favor with others. Favors are not Rights. Rights require unconditional obligation.
Government is the entity that protects your Rights, not just of life and liberty but it enforces your contracts, prevents you from being subjugated into slavery or exploited by powers greater than yourself.
Without government (including failed governments) only the barest of infrastructure is developed, because extensive infrastructure would just be stolen by brutal sociopaths as a resource for crime, extortion and the acquisition of resources (including human slaves). We see this in half the countries in the world where Government has failed or never existed beyond the tribal level. Towns spring up, small coalitions, but they don’t grow to cities without some form of government (which usually begins as a Monarchy or Dictatorship of some sort, sometimes benevolent but often malevolent and driven by greed and power).
So, as I said, we all (by which I mean, and should have said, the vast majority of non-sociopaths) end up earning less than a homeless beggar, because all of our economic output is stolen from us, either directly or in taxes or tribute. By “all” I mean the feudal serfs, property that works the land and is not entitled to any fruits of its labor, whose rights are not protected. Whether an official serf or not, earning more than survival or accumulating excess just makes us a target for sociopaths looking for other people’s work to steal.
That doesn’t mean we are all sociopaths, far from it. But we have between 1% and 3% of the population that qualifies at any given time; and even more when under their own existential stress. That small dose of sociopathy is all the poison it takes, the violent sociopaths, without morals to restrain them, subjugate, steal, and murder with impunity.
So here is an interesting experiment I read about decades ago, done by a botanist, which was an actual experiment but I think serves as a metaphor. One spring the botanist was walking through a grass field used by migrating grazing herds, and his sharp eye was finding little sprouts of bushes; just a few weeks old. But there were no full grown bushes in the field. So he tried an experiment; he built strong little fenced in squares on the field, at random, about six feet on a side, and left them for a season. When he returned, each square held young bushes, saplings, flowers and of course weeds — a whole variety of plants that were not anywhere else in the field.
The reason for this is that the grazers, along with the grasses, ate all the sprouts before the sprouts had a chance to get large enough to evade predation (and for a plant, anything short of a thick tree branch is likely to be eaten by grazers, which are probably the selective pressure that led to tall woody plants like trees). (The reason the grass survives and the other plants do not is that grass grows from the root, so occasional grazing doesn’t kill it, but most plants (like bushes and trees) grow primarily from their extremities, so without a deep root system grazing does kill them.)
Metaphorically speaking, the grazers are the sociopaths; the fence is government protection, the bushes, saplings and flowers are the profits that can only be grown with protection, and if you like, the weeds are the free riders on that system. The grass is the natural production of value that people produce by work; if the sociopaths steal an accumulation one day and move on, the person will continue to produce and slowly accumulate a new excess in the days to come. (Which is all only an illustration, it cannot be extended too far without breaking down.) But without the “fence” the profits never grow, they are consumed, along with the grass, by the greedy whenever they show up looking for a free meal. Larger enterprises cannot survive without a government to protect them.
The only way to accumulate large stores of wealth is to band together, into a tribe or society, with members mutually obligated to fight against the human predators, even those in its midst. That obligation must be enforced or it falls apart; some members (usually adult males, because they are the more expendable resource) must be willing to fight and die to deter the predators. That fence, in whatever form it takes, is government, and your profit depends upon it.
When it doesn’t exist, your earnings remain at the survival level, which is less than 10% of our typical earnings, even less than 5%. It is the equivalent of a NYC beggar “earning” around $10 a day. (A real and destitute one, not one of the sociopathic scam artists posing as beggars and intentionally crafting their pitch, act, voice and costume to maximize sympathy and donations).
“doesn’t the Ninth Amendment protect all rights not enumerated within the Constitution?”
Not exactly.
In Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), Justice Goldberg in his concurrence summed up the 9th thus: “I do not mean to imply that the Ninth Amendment is applied against the States by the Fourteenth. Nor do I mean to state that the Ninth Amendment constitutes an independent source of rights protected from infringement by either the States or the Federal Government. Rather, the Ninth Amendment shows a belief of the Constitution’s authors that fundamental rights exist that are not expressly enumerated in the first eight amendments, and an intent that the list of rights included there not be deemed exhaustive.” id, 493 [emphasis added].
This is shown in the Court later adopting the Doctrine of Selective Incorporation. This doctrine states that those rights guaranteed by the first eight amendments to the U.S. Constitution that are fundamental to and implicit in the concept of ordered liberty are incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause. The majority opinions of the Supreme Court have instead adhered to a fundamental fairness standard or applied selective incorporation in determining whether a state has violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause. The Court reviews such rights on an individual basis as the situation dictates. Not all of the Bill of Rights is even incorporated and indeed some rights are only partially incorporated. For example, states don’t have to apply the grand jury requirement found in the 5th Amendment.
However, no modern SCOTUS decision has found property rights to be fundamental. This is based on United States v. Carolene Products Company, 304 U.S. 144 (1938) – which created the concept of strict scrutiny as applied to fundamental rights versus the lesser standards of heightened scrutiny, intermediate scrutiny and rational basis scrutiny and did so in the context of economic regulation. This would include regulation of property which is permissible under the Commerce Clause. Strict scrutiny under Carolene would require that that law as drafted was prima facie unconstitutional, i.e. it violated a specifically enumerated right. Property receives only the previously mentioned minimal protections of due process and just compensation. Otherwise, Congress and state legislatures may regulate property in any way they see fit.
Basically your notion that property is a fundamental right – if asserted – would run afoul of stare decisis based in Carolene Products, the Commerce Clause and the plain language of the 5th and 14th Amendments. You have a right to own property. It is only minimally protected by the Constitution. That right is neither absolute nor recognized as fundamental.
That is what the law is.
Not how you wish it was.
DavidM: Under your system of Socialism, who decides what companies startup? Do individuals make these decisions for themselves, or does the government do the planning and decides which companies are going to be allowed and which are not? Is it only the government that can invest in companies?
Read all of this as “my opinion.”
Anybody can start a business in any “non-force” industry. “Force” being interpreted literally, you cannot start a private police force, or another government, or a court system, or a military, or a jail, or a tax collection agency. Only the government is allowed to force citizens to do anything.
I would not allow for-profit prisons, courts, police, military, etc. I also would not allow police or courts to fine people for anything, I think that discriminates against the poor. I would make such penalties mandatory community service in increments of 8 hours, up to two days a week, every week until served. Under the supervision of one or more police officers. From speeding tickets on up. I don’t think the police force (at any level) should be put in the business of “earning” money for stopping crimes, 100% of their funding should come from taxpayers. In circumstances where they recover drug money or property that cannot be returned to owners, that money should be pooled and used to reduce the taxes required for something like trash collection or water treatment or sewage disposal; some public work that benefits all citizens equally.
The government doesn’t plan what businesses are allowed; and the government would not be allowed to invest in any for-profit business whatsoever. Never. No subsidies or aid at all for any business, no tax breaks for any business of any kind. The government should spend, only. It should not receive any revenue other than tax revenue; which can be income tax, sales tax, property tax, other kinds of tax. But the government cannot be a business or be run like a business, it cannot be in the business of making a profit. Because the government has the power to coerce citizens (like with the ACA) and they will inevitably end up using that force to increase their profits. There should be only one way for the government to increase its revenue, and that is taxation, and all taxation should be approved by citizen vote. Not Congress.
Only citizens can start businesses.
The government can start “enterprises,” which are intended to be zero-profit (which only a government can actually do because only a government can withstand the unexpected disasters or catastrophes), or to be run at a loss (as a public service, like the postal service or food aid or the public school system). The “at loss” enterprises are funded by taxpayers as an altruistic service.
The ‘enterprises’ a government can start do not have to be exclusive. Norway allows private hospitals and private doctors, for example, and those exist in Norway, alongside their free-for-all unlimited health care.
They also allow things like “unemployment insurance,” which provides extra money on top of the public assistance you get should you become involuntarily unemployed, so you can maintain an elevated standard of living longer while looking for a new job.
I think the services the government provides are the basics, outside of existing regulatory agencies I include life-critical elements. Basic nutrition, basic spartan (but clean and safe) housing, sanitation (water and sewage), health care, education, legal representation (as either plaintiff or defendant), and retirement benefits. Also probably power at-cost, and free emergency telephony (it would not be expensive to provide phones that can only call 911, for those that need such a thing). I think in centralized locations like libraries and schools, the government can provide all citizens books and Internet access for research.
Of course the government has to run the military, courts, police forces, jails, inspection and licensing agencies, etc.
Competition and the drive to earn profits is a very powerful engine of advancement. It creates pressures to innovate, to invent, to become more efficient, to serve customers better. I believe all of that is true, I am a capitalist.
But there are a thousand underhanded, unfair, lying dirty ways to compete, and a thousand more that are just plain criminal. Among those is underpaying employees, coercing them by threatening their jobs if they don’t work free overtime, or coercing them to do “favors” (sexual or otherwise).
The point of the socialism is two-fold. First, to remove the roadblocks for anybody becoming what they want to become because education or training costs too much money or too much time. I think education is always a good odds-on investment, even if it doesn’t pan out. It is worth it to us if somebody has three years of med school and drops out before becoming a doctor; they will find a way to put that knowledge to use, because they don’t want to waste three years of their life, either. It will benefit us in time with a more productive citizen.
The second reason for the socialist component is more serious. It is to ensure everybody in the society has a fall-back position, a “screw you guys” alternative, that they are truly free to walk away from abuse, coercion, or exploitation, because they are truly not so desperate to work that they will put up with misery. Being able to walk away at least helps to ensure their deals are voluntary and not coerced.
People should not have to put up with misery to survive, to feed and shelter and educate themselves or their kids, in a safe environment.
But the floor is where it stops; the socialism is for the prevention of misery, not the creation of happiness or contentment. The socialism is so nobody is worried about survival, nobody’s potential has to go to waste. it is to eliminate fear and despair and subjugation or coercion by employers. It is not to fill any entertainment needs. (Unless, like me, you are entertained by education.)
That’s all for now.
pete,
😀