Capitalism Cannibalizing Itself-Part 1 An Introduction

Capitalism Cannibalizing Itself-Part 1 An Introduction

I began writing this and realized fairly quickly that it was going to be too long for one piece, so I’m going to break it up into a series. This intro will give you some backstory on me and my thinking to help with understand how I come to the conclusions that I do along the way.

I grew up in the southern United States of America, and from a young age had the concept of U.S. exceptionalism shoved down my throat, and with that also came an almost religious support for the military and “democracy” which somehow also connected with capitalism. Socialism and communism were used interchangeably and connected with dictators and the evil “others”. Even though we see that in the U.S. there is a flavor of what many would call “socialism” for many things that are overall popular among the populace, such as highways, firemen, police, the military, social security, Medicaid, Medicare, public schools, etc.

It wasn’t until my young adult life and having great dissatisfaction with our systems that I even began to research more into what other countries even had as systems. In my childhood, I had heard about the First Lady pushing for a single-payer healthcare system, which as a young person with no political beliefs, I thought sounded like a good idea, but of course, it never got any traction. It wasn’t until Obama that the topic seemed to come into the spotlight again, and by the time it did pass it had become a transfer of public tax money to the insurance industries.

In my early 20s, I lost one of my best friends due to him not having health insurance, this was before the ACA passed, banning health insurance from refusing service or dropping you due to pre-existing health conditions, not that he even would’ve likely been able to afford an Obamacare plan anyways. He waited too long to have an infection seen, and by the time he got to the terrible ER in our town, he was going septic and passed.