“shibboleth”–any custom or tradition, including a word or phrase, that distinguishes one group of people from another; password or means of group identification or affinity.
In the Hebrew Bible, the part starring God as warlord. the Gileadites tried to keep the Ephraimites out of their territory by making them pronounce an “sh” word, namely “shibboleth,” because the Ephraimites’ language didn’t have that sound.
Each suspect had to try saying the word, and getting the “WRONG!” buzzer at this form of ancient “Jeopardy” caused your head to be separated from your neck. The Holy Bible duly reports that “40 and 2 thousand” tongue-twisted Ephraimites bit the ample Palestinian dust while YHWH looked on benignly. Thus spake the Lord at Judges 12:5—6, and so did the ancients teach us to exclude dangerous foreigners from the holy circle.
Current examples abound, but one popular shibboleth we haven’t heard lately is, “How are you going to PAY for [insert measure to improve human well-being]?? A parade of debate monitors insisted that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders answer this pressing question of financing healthcare for all when they dared to suggest that for-profit insurance companies should not occupy an entrance gate between our doctors and ourselves.
Yet, now that everyone is equally threatened, including rich people, by a disease, the idea that money must be found for medical procedures, supplies, infrastructure, or personnel is strangely absent. Perhaps that’s because the “money” was there all along, as proven by the sudden appearance of $2 trillion of it at the waving of a U.S. Treasury wand.
What the COVID-19 experience is demonstrating—not that the lesson will be learned by our thick-headed species—is that money is a social construct and, in a country with its own currency, is never limited any more than a bowling alley has a limited number of strikes or a baseball game a limited number of home runs. The U.S. Treasury “pays for” things it wants to buy via the issuance of a U.S. Treasury check that says, You now have X number of dollars in your bank account.
What could be (and now clearly is) lacking are the INPUTS that that money is desperately eager to buy: the masks, gowns, hospital beds, nurses, gurneys, interferon injections, medical researchers, respirators, fentanyl drips, and other wonderful things that could stave off mass illness and death. Despite guidelines against price gouging, hoarding, and queue-jumping by the rich, prices for those scarce items will inexorably rise because as a society we decided not to put a priority on stockpiling them.
It has nothing to do with where the money will come from.
No comments:
Post a Comment