brendan halpin

Whenever someone (thinking currently of Zohran Mamdani, but insert anyone’s name here) advocates having the government do something to acutally help people, you typically get two responses.

One is from the corporate centrists, who say, “well, of course we’d like to do something like that, but it’s just not realistic.”

The other, from the right, derides the whole idea as “people wanting free stuff.”

Let’s start with the centrists, shall we? This is the kind of Bill Clinton politics that has infected the Democratic party at all levels. And it’s a con. Because of course what’s realistic is simply what you’re willing to fight for.

Let’s take single payer healthcare, for example. They’ve told us for decades that free at point of service health care like so many other countries have is not realistic. This has proven true in that no one has been willing to fight for it. So of course it’s not realistic. The absolute best face you can put on this is that it’s a colossally incompetent negotiating tactic, where you give in to your opponent before you even talk to them. The more accurate face, I believe, is that it’s a calculated dodge—you call something you don’t want to do unrealistic. Then you don’t have to get into “Actually I get huge donations from Aetna and United Healthcare, so I don’t want to fight for a health care system that works.”

History is littered with examples of things that were considered unrealistic until they happened. Like the USA becoming an independent country! Like France beheading the king! Like Apartheid ending without massive bloodshed! Big, revolutionary changes can happen as long as people are willing to fight for them. Duh.

And now let’s go on to free stuff, shall we? Regular readers, know that I, a non-rich person, went to school with a lot of rich people.

And you know who gets a TON of free stuff? Rich people.

For example, rich people get a free college education. I don’t mean they get full scholarships or anything—I just mean that they don’t pay a dime for college.

Because their parents pay.

“Ah, but that’s not free!” you might say, but I submit that you are wrong. If you, a legal adult, get to attend college without paying for it, that’s free. The fact that your parents paid for it doesn’t make it any less free to you. Did you earn that money? Or was it given to you by your parents? What does free mean?

So when people deride people “wanting free stuff,” they should really include rich people. A house and a college education are, for most people, the biggest investments of their lifetimes. And rich people get one or both of them for free.

This isn’t derided in the media—indeed, saving up so you can give your children hundreds of thousands of dollars they did nothing to earn is portrayed as a thing that good, responsbile parents do for their children. I’m not going to get into that—I just want to point out that there are a LOT of people out there gathering lifelong benefits from stuff they got for free.

You cannot argue that an 18-year-old who gets a free education from their parents has earned it. They haven’t. Sure, maybe they worked hard in high school (though at least in the places I went to school, the wealthiest kids were not the ones who worked the hardest), but so do a lot of people who don’t get a free college education.

Given how many people get a free college education and aren’t vilified for it, we have to conclude that the right’s ostensible opposition to people getting things they haven’t paid for from wages they’ve earned is not sincere. I mean, yes, the right is sincere only about power and domination, but they’ve done such a good job indoctrinating us into the idea that you have to earn everything you get in life that most of us can’t even see the glaring exception that’s all around us.

So neither the “realism” nor the “free stuff” arguments make any logical or moral sense. Maybe there are sound arguments to be made against free transportation, free college, free health care. If so, I’d be interested in hearing them. But, so far, I haven’t.