I
remember my heart breaking just a little bit when an Ayn Rand-loving friend
declared the government shouldn’t be working on making healthcare affordable.
“People should just buy insurance,” he said.
When you earn not even RM500 on a rubber
estate, can you afford health insurance? When you’re a single mother of five,
earning your keep from selling food at the roadside, can you buy insurance?
My friend isn’t alone with his perceptions
about the poor and how they should “help themselves.” I blame Ayn Rand and
libertarianism.
I find it hard to understand the cult worship
Rand and her ideas have attracted. Never mind, I take that back. Her “doctrine
of selfishness” is an easy sell to the materialistic and moneyed.
Libertarianism holds liberty sacred and
government non-interference as the ultimate goal. That individuals, as well as
the market, should be unfettered. Survival of the fittest; none of that
Socialist claptrap or welfare state-ism.
The irony and ultimate hypocrisy is Rand
subsisting, in her last days, on the social security she advocated doing away
with. If she had stayed true to her ideals, she should have rather died from
being too poor to pay for her own medical treatment rather than burden
taxpayers with her treatment bills.
I don’t advocate a welfare state and I
acknowledge that communism, for all its notions about equality, just doesn’t
work. Capitalism isn’t a bad thing by itself, but capitalism practised without
checks and balances by the state creates a systemic inequality.
The problem with a free market is that it may
be free, but it is certainly not free from bias. The richer you are, the more
powerful you are, the bigger the advantage you have. All it takes is for a few
big companies to join together to crush smaller companies in an industry.
Monopolies are manifestations of the evils of unfettered capitalism, but sadly,
those who worship money know that it is an assured way to get rich.
My comfortable middle- and upper middle-class
friends sneered at the “Occupy Wall Street” movement.
“They should all just get jobs, not protest.”
Ah, how money blinds you to the suffering of those who don’t have it.
They had no clue that it’s a struggle to even
get a job at Wal-Mart now. That minimum wage is so paltry in the US, the
working class end up juggling two or three jobs with low pay, poor working
conditions and no health insurance.
People who have never known suffering or true
financial struggle tend to look down on the working class.
“They should work hard. It’s just laziness
that keeps them where they are.”
It’s not that easy. If every child in this
world were born in the same conditions, in the same financial situations, then
you can say that opportunities for wealth and self-actualisation are all equal.
Some children, some people are just luckier
than others. If you were born rich, you’re likely to die rich. If you were born
Caucasian, upper middle- or upper-class, moneyed and live in a neighbourhood
with other people of high net worth, you will have a leg up in the financial
stakes. But if you were born in Africa or Bangladesh to poor, illiterate
parents in a remote area, then anyone claiming that you had the same access to
opportunities are out of their minds.
The world is unfair. That’s the truth of it.
At the very least, it should be a government’s
responsibility to ensure that a nation’s children have the same access to
quality education. It shouldn’t be the norm as it is in Malaysia that the best
education is assured to the ones with the ability to pay for it. It isn’t right
that Malaysian children in private schools or “star” schools in urban areas
have better educational foundations than the Orang Asli.
It’s not about making everyone rich. It’s
about affording the same opportunities to everyone. A person’s economic
standing or social class shouldn’t become barriers to procuring quality
education or healthcare.
But in a country where it’s not about
levelling the playing field but building elevators for the rich or privileged,
what can you do to address inequality? All I can say is that we need to move
from a mentality of “me” to “us” and find that delicate balance between
acknowledging the rights of an individual to doing what’s best for a community.
It’s time to stop asking ourselves what’s in
it for us and ask, instead: what’s in it for everyone?
The Malaysian Insider
Business & Investment Opportunities
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