Having access to public goods is a higher level of freedom than having private property

The Left will not be able to pass public healthcare until we can change the definition of freedom

If the American left is serious about passing Medicare for All, a policy that would provide public healthcare to all, it must demonstrate that having access to public goods is a higher form of freedom than having access to private property.

Why isn’t it enough to simply continue doing what the Left has done up til now, and make a moral argument along the lines of “don’t you feel bad about people who get cancer and then go bankrupt at the same time”? This argument won’t work because in the end, freedom is more important than empathy or suffering. If you are willing to die for freedom, you are willing to go bankrupt for it as well.

But why is the idea of private health insurance so tied to freedom? The insurance company spin-doctors claim that with private health insurance, you have the freedom to choose between multiple health insurance providers, whereas the government would only provide a one-size-fits-all solution. Ridiculous as this argument may seem, because everybody knows the choice between private health insurers is meaningless since they will all screw you over, it works because it’s aligned with how freedom is conceived in America.

Freedom is conceived as individual liberty: the free individual whose needs are served by the anonymous mechanism of the free market. Government should do as little as possible since it limits this freedom.

But of course, the reality is that no man’s an island. Now more than ever in our highly specialised economies, everybody is dependent on everybody else. So this contradiction between individual liberty and dependence on others must be solved by a new conception of freedom, one that the Left is going to have to push if it wants to realise its projects of Medicare for All and many other public goods.

So this new and improved conception of freedom says that you can’t be free unless you are part of a community of other free people, whose fortunes are tied to yours. You can only be truly free if what’s good for you is good for the people around you, and what’s good for the people around is good for you.

This at first might seem like an awkward compromise. As an individual you lack the power to fully exercise your freedom, since you are always dependent on others, so you have to grudgingly share your fate and pool your resources with others to get anything done. But the highest form of freedom is precisely to be able to disregard your personal desires, your petty private interests, in favor of a higher Cause that exceeds your mortal life.

So the Cause is what unites the community of free individuals. Right-wingers should go along with this fine, since they already have communities centered around causes like patriotism, religion, tradition, etc. However their causes are regressive because they try to combine those causes with individual liberty. That means that right-wing communities are fragile and can only be held together by the exclusion of some Other that stands for the hostility of those who don’t share in the cause, and that stands for the fear of being left out.

Again, the real enemy is liberalism, since it rejects the idea of a Cause out of hand because it’s dangerously totalitarian. And we shouldn’t fool ourselves, there is a lot of work to be done to defeat liberalism.

Bringing it back to Medicare for All, we have to realize that a good chunk of Bernie Sanders’ coalition is made up not of leftists, but of “woke” or “progressive” liberals. When it counts they can be easily dissuaded from supporting Medicare for All.

How? If I were a highly-paid private health insurance industry spin-doctor, this would be my message: “Here at [insert company] we’ve just launched an insurance program specifically aimed towards trans people, and the unique coverage they require. But if you support Medicare for All, they will have the same coverage as everybody else. Do you really want the government to decide what kind of care they can receive? Medicare for All is a threat to trans rights.”

To have any kind of public good — whether that be healthcare, environmental protection, infrastructure or a federal jobs guarantee — we must demonstrate that a shared fate is a higher form of freedom than individual liberty. And we must not be afraid to break our shaky coalition with the liberals, so that we can embrace the idea of a Cause once again.