5LL #2 - Life-Saving Healthcare, Ripped-Off Workers, Debunking Anti-Socialist Arguments, Politics of Rent, Neoliberal Perfectionism

Government Healthcare is Saving My Mum's Life
Libby Watson, Splinter
Because she is lucky enough to live in Britain, she receives this life-saving treatment for free. There are no deductibles, no wrangling with insurance companies, no GoFundMes, no co-pays, no prior authorization or surprise bills, no billing at all. This is because of the National Health Service. She walks in, gets the drugs she needs, and goes home. Every three weeks, the NHS gives her life. For free.
New Study Confirms That American Workers are Getting Ripped Off
Eric Levitz, New York Magazine
There’s likely some truth to these narratives. But a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) offers a more straightforward — and political — explanation: American policymakers have chosen to design an economic system that leaves workers desperate and disempowered, for the sake of directing a higher share of economic growth to bosses and shareholders.
3 Arguments Against Socialism and Why They Fail
Nathan Robinson, Current Affairs
However, in order to actually have a sensible discussion about whether, for example, the radical socialist agenda of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez makes sense and should be implemented (I think it should), we need to clear away a few glib critiques of socialism that pop up over and over. They are: (1) it’s vague and cagey (2) it’s a recipe for calamity, and (3) it’s hypocritical. I am certain that once we show why these criticisms fail, Current Affairs will never again receive angry correspondence from the public asking us if we have heard about a little place called Venezuela.
The Rising Politics of (Too Damn High) Rent
Sarah Jones, The New Republic
Many American renters are in crisis: The Pew Charitable Trusts found that the share of “rent-burdened” households—those which spent at least a third of pre-tax income on rent—rose from 19 percent in 2001 to 38 percent in 2015. Meanwhile, multiple factors—including the Great Recession, still-stagnant wages, and demographic trends—have caused a steady increase in Americans who rent, to a 50-year high (and a concurrent decline in homeownership). With several of those trends showing no sign of slowing, the percentage of renters likely will continue to rise—and so will the political importance of rent policies.
Under Neoliberalism, You Can Be Your Own Tyrannical Boss
Meagan Day, Jacobin
Self-oriented perfectionism is the tendency to hold oneself to an unrealistically high standard, while other-oriented perfectionism means having unrealistic expectations of others. But “socially prescribed perfectionism is the most debilitating of the three dimensions of perfectionism,” Curran and Hall contend. It describes the feeling of paranoia and anxiety engendered by the persistent — and not entirely unfounded — sensation that everyone is waiting for you to make a mistake so they can write you off forever. This hyper-perception of others’ impossible expectations causes social alienation, neurotic self-examination, feelings of shame and unworthiness, and “a sense of self overwhelmed by pathological worry and a fear of negative social evaluation, characterized by a focus on deficiencies, and sensitive to criticism and failure.”
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