Moral Outsourcing

Look at all of the policy arsonists who leave a swath of destruction, then show up with a shot glass of water and say, “thoughts and prayers!”

When my children were young, a typical doctor’s visit was approximately $35. Around that time, insurance companies figured out a way to insert a parasitic administrative layer between the doctor and patient in order to extract more money, and lobbied the government for legislative blessings.

In 1973, the Nixon administration pushed the HMO model hard, turning healthcare into a business model that profits from people’s suffering. Now that $35 office visit costs $150 – $250, with so many restrictions that health care is functionally unaffordable for millions of Americans.

Less care, more profit. Costs exploded, people are squeezed, and the quality of care plummeted. The response from the politicians, lobbyists, and people who benefit from these policy changes has been, “Whoa! Not our fault!” “What about personal responsibility?” And my personal favorite intellectual insult, “God never gives more than you can handle!”

Same pattern for guns. Make access easier, block all research into causes and possible fixes, flood public media with propaganda, and as the horror and body count climbs, scream about “liberty” the “second amendment” and “freedom.”

What about jobs? Republicans lobbied relentlessly (and democrats provided no meaningful opposition) to allow corporations to ship factories overseas for decades and shelter their taxable income in offshore accounts in order to boost corporate profits, then act shocked when entire towns collapsed and opportunities to earn a middle-class income evaporated.

Look at housing. Wall Street deregulation and repeal of consumer protection laws have allowed investment firms to eat homes and radically tilt the market, making housing unaffordable for ordinary people; then stigmatize and criminalize people for being “unhoused.”

And climate? Roll back regulations and standards that took years to pass into law, enabling supercharged pollution to resume unabated, then shrug off record-breaking floods and fires as “acts of God.”


This isn’t confusion or innocent ignorance. It is moral outsourcing. If you can blame the market, or god, or poor people, you never have to admit your policies were to blame for the suffering and damage. You never have to fix what you broke.

It’s performance art with a body count.