There used to be a job called a "knocker-upper." They'd wake you up for work by rapping on your window.

Cheap clocks put them out of work.

That's unfortunate, but inventing alarm clocks was still a good thing to do.

This is a post about insurance agents and #MedicareForAll.
Works equally well for tax preparers, landlords, payday loan providers, or any other job made obsolete by progress that improves people's lives, just for the fucking record.

Maintaining them when we don't have to is mandating parasitism.

Fight me.
Hey, fun fact, did you know that California tried a pilot program to simplify taxes? Instead of filing, the gov't (which collects your info anyway, to compare it to your return) would just send you a postcard saying "here's what you owe" or "here's what we owe you."
If you agreed, great, check's in the mail. If not, you'd check a box on it for review, and you'd go through the normal file/audit process.

2004. "ReadyReturn." They tried it with 11,000 people.

A program is successful if it sees 60, 65% approval.

ReadyReturn had 99% approval.
They got comments back from people, saying things like, and I quote,

"Finally, government's doing something to make my life better for a change."

It saves money. It saves time. It saves frustration. It eliminates waste, shrinks government, and puts money in your pocket.
Intuit crushed it. Spent absurd amounts of money lobbying to kill it. The professor who helmed the program spent $35,000 of HIS OWN MONEY to try and fight for it.

It lost by one vote in the state legislature.

Intuit said it "minimized taxpayer engagement."

WHICH IS THE POINT.
Hey, y'all like internet, right?

Chattanooga TN decided that it needed faster internet. They pulled the trigger and just created their own - laid fiber optic cable and everything.

1000 Megabits a second. That's 1gig/second.

$70 a month. Cheaper options available too.
City-owned agency manages it. Makes sense - the big barrier to fiber is that it's expensive to lay and maintain, so a risk-averse private business doesn't want to gamble on it.

It's exactly the kind of thing that governments are great at. Infrastructure.
Chattanooga Tennessee was LOW ON THE LIST of markets that the private sector was going to serve, so they just decided to do it.

It's an absurd success. Everyone loves it. Made it a great city to telecommute from, fostered other businesses, really was a win-win, you know?
Comcast sued the fuck out of them.
This is the free market, y'all. Free Market Capitalism + Free Speech. Welcomea

This is what happens, when corporations can spend whatever they want to lobby for fewer regulations and less gov't involvement.

Your life could be easier, but it isn't. B/c they don't want it to be.
Your life would be better with simpler taxes, socialized health care, and high speed internet.

More than that, companies would be forced to innovate to keep up, to try to get an edge.

You'd have more money, more freedom, more choices. Better choices.

You don't.
If you're not goddamn furious, you haven't been paying attention.

To everyone who's only gotten political since Trump, Welcome!

He's not the problem!

He's a tumor, not the cancer!

(The cancer is capitalism.)
Your life could be better, but it isn't, because a few people with a lot of your money don't think you deserve a better life.

Maybe look into that.
Maybe remember that nothing is true. No system of government or economy is natural.

We built them. We can build them differently.

We need to. https://mobile.twitter.com/NomeDaBarbarian/status/1176141227063836672
Capitalism - specifically the American flavor - is a technology. We invented it.

And it's killing us.

And we could invent something else instead.

To make it... stop... killing us. https://mobile.twitter.com/NomeDaBarbarian/status/1234865215738503168
It's funny, because this thread is going to get me called a radical leftist.

I'm not. I'm a democratic socialist. I'm so far to the center I'm almost a Democrat.

I'm not convinced, for instance, that States shouldn't exist.

I recognize the power of markets.

I vote.
I'm down for any plan that makes my kids have a better life than I had, so long as someone else's kids don't have to suffer to make it happen.

That's my first principle.

Nothing about what we have right now fulfils that.
You can follow @NomeDaBarbarian.
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