The Ownership Society

Actually, ownership is a big deal for preserving the middle class in a consumer economy. If multinationals keep shipping the jobs overseas until there's nothing to do but sell things to each other at Sprawl-Mart, how long will the workers making things overseas keep shipping stuff for us to consume? It's perfectly good stuff, why shouldn't they just keep it?

If the ownership of the multinationals is sufficiently diffused among us, we'll have to remain a market because we own the factory. There are some sorta scary implications in all this which I'm not smart enough to grasp, but the argument was made (IIRC) in The Atlantic a few months back.

Anyhow I suspect this lingers somewhere in the long-term view of the GOP (to the extent they have one). How it applies to health-care & such is beyond me.

I suspect what Bush proposes is essentially to privatize the financial assets held by the U.S. Government by dumping them into HSA's and other accounts where they will carry the name of an actual citizen but be controlled by some manager somewhere and invested in corporations that dick citizens over and sell us shoddy goods.

To assume that Bush is talking only about tax shelters for rich people could be dangerous. Rich people are voting for him anyway. He's talking to people who hope that his plan will make them rich. That's going to take some actual debunking.