Chris says:

September 28, 2013 at 7:19 pm

@mai naem:

Oh for sure. It’s all about control, not money. That was the glory of the Gilded Age; you didn’t have a safety net, even though one was desperately needed, so whoever had enough resources to provide the necessities of life was all-powerful.

Like your employer: “Want money? Enough of it to feed your family? Then you’ll work as hard as I want, as many hours as I want, and I don’t want to hear you complaining about working conditions, or any of this nonsense about unionization! Do everything I tell you, then maybe you’ll have enough to eat.”

Or the local machine politician: “What, you need job relief and no one’s hiring? Sure, we can totally help with that. But you and all your friends better vote Tammany in the next election! If this district goes to someone else, it’ll be the last help you ever get from us!”

Or the church: “Charity? Oh, well that’s what we’re here for, isn’t it. But I’d better damn well see you in the pews every Sunday, and if I ever catch you disobeying the moral code of this church, it’s over for you and your family!”

Or the mob: “Some day, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me. But until that day, consider this charity a gift on my daughter’s wedding day.”

All those parasites lost big when the New Deal took all the things that they used to be able to dole out on a whim (and withhold if you didn’t do exactly what they wanted) and made them available to everyone as a right, not as charity. Health care, as it happens, is one of the last tools of control that the feds never quite managed to wrest from them during the 20th century, so it makes sense that they’d be fighting so furiously to keep control of it.