Our Congress person, Barbara Lee, who’s running for the U.S. Senate, just proposed a bill, The Deposit Act. It “would provide low-income renters with federal assistance to help pay for security deposits.” Lee argues that “Security deposits can be one of the biggest barriers to securing housing for low-income renters,” and therefore the Federal government should intercede “to ensure they have shelter.”
I had to think about this for a while. Lee’s motive is, as always, pure. As a progressive, she long has championed the underdog, and this aspect of her career will be one of her justifications for her uphill fight to replace Dianne Feinstein in the Senate. The part of me still rooted in Sixties idealism admires Rep. Lee for that very reason.
But the more I think about it, the more Lee’s proposal illustrates exactly what’s wrong with progressivism. Government cannot be fiscally responsible for every struggling poor person. There are two reasons for this. One is that there’s simply not enough money in all of America’s treasury to cover everything that poor people want or need. The other is that the struggle to survive is in itself a spur to motivate people to work hard to become economically self-sufficient (and a warning to young people to avoid the plague of indolence).
If we look at the things that progressives in Oakland want government to pay for, the list is endless. They claim that housing is a “human right,” whatever that means, and that if adult Oaklanders are unable to secure housing on their own, it must be the responsibility of government—which is the rest of us--to provide it to them. These individuals also insist that a range of other services be provided to the poor, like mental health counseling, healthcare, and higher education. And now, Rep. Lee would have us pay for their security deposits.
This gets right down to the essence of the question, Where does a capitalistic democracy such as ours end, and where does Socialism, possibly leading to Communism, start? I am not an old-fashioned Communism basher. Although I grew up during the Cold War and vaguely remember Sen. Joe McCarthy’s red-baiting, I never believed that Communism was as frightening a prospect as most Republicans and many Democrats portrayed it. As I’ve aged, I’ve come to see the many shortcomings of our capitalistic system. In its cruelty to extract the last ounce of energy from workers and yet pay them the least possible amount, our system is exploitative and hurtful. This is why, when Carroll Fife urges an end to capitalism, part of me nods in agreement.
But you have to be realistic about the things you wish for. If we get rid of capitalism, what do we replace it with? The fight against capitalism in America usually is waged by cranky people with various grievances, who harbor a grudge against society—a grudge that is often due to their own shortcomings, for which they won’t accept personal responsibility. They blame their failure on anything and everything; and in their grievance, they demand that society compensate them for failing to reward them with what they think they deserve. Indeed, this sense of entitlement is inherent within progressive thinking: Anybody who has failed to get what he wants from life must, ipso facto, have been cheated, and a victim of racism. Therefore the greater society must make amends by giving him what it has so greedily withheld.
Lee’s bill taps into this paranoid thinking. I paid plenty of security deposits before I owned my condo, and while I was quite poor and struggling, I always was able to find the money to do it. I never expected anyone to help me with that sort of thing. Like I said, while I applaud Rep. Lee’s heartfelt motives, I think her progressive political philosophy has strayed too far. She’s always looking for more things to help poor people with, and she will always find them. I don’t mean to sound like the grinch, but there has to be a limit to what government can financially afford when it comes to the vast, unending needs of the poor. Otherwise, we become a social democracy, I suppose, like the Scandinavian countries, where taxes (income, consumption, social security) are vastly higher than in the U.S., with the money redistributed in the form of services. That may work in Scandinavian countries, with their small, homogeneous populations, but the U.S.A. is not fitted for that, and likely will never be.
It’s this unrealistic aspect that I find troubling in progressive thought. Call it the Nanny State, an over-protective, coddling government run by people who always think they know best. Let Oakland be a warning for the rest of the country of the perils that lay ahead if progressives are in charge.
Steve Heimoff