A guy recognized the injustice of a company making billions of dollars withholding medical care from paying customers and murdered the company's CEO.
This is adjacent to an idea I have had for some time, but haven't openly shared -- I think? I might have. This blog has existed for a couple decades -- because of how dark and cynical it seems. But I guess America went dark and cynical when I wasn't looking, because everyone is mainly in favor of this murderer. I cannot blame them.
So, the $800 retirement plan.
Jobs, broadly speaking, no longer offer retirement plans. You generally can't go to work for Big Jim's Widgets with the guarantee that you can retire to Big Jim's Retirement Village with your coworkers and their spouses. You aren't guaranteed a pension anywhere anymore. I work for the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and our "pension" is just a fund that you spend on an annuity when you retire. Every worker is advised to also save into a IRA or 401K or some other instrument, which is not paid into by your employer. You don't get your pension at all if you don't last five years, and you don't get the full amount if you don't last ten. Folks are kinda on their own, so the generation that had to move back in with their parents may find their parents moving in with them in a few years.
It's bad, and there's no safety net. You can't rely on Social Security, Medicaid is a joke, and rich guys keep ruining New Deal-era retirement programs and protections.
One thing they haven't fucked up is the Second Amendment.
So this is my modest proposal. You retire, and you have X dollars. Budget out how long it will take you to spend all your money except for $800. Live how you want to live. Travel, give gifts, do the things you never could while you were struggling to pay rent, or medical bills, or student loans. Go ahead. You won't need the money by the end of this step. Use credit cards as well. Max them out as you approach the end of your cash on hand.
When you are down to $800, purchase an AR-15 rifle. (When I first imagined this retirement plan, a rifle and a box of ammunition was $800. Costs have risen since then, but the principle remains the same.) Go somewhere where the costs listed above - insurance, student loans, rent - are collected. Distribute some lead at people who deserve it. Post-Luigi Mangione, it will be difficult to get a shot at executives, policymakers, truly evil people. Try not to kill anyone who doesn't deserve it, but make sure you kill people who do. Don't be stupid and shoot working class people who have no control over your wage slavery. No one will support that.
If you have no desire to keep on living, kill the cops who respond first and the remainder will make sure you die. Retirement costs solved. If you want to keep on living (it helps to be a white man for this part), surrender yourself after promising not to hurt anyone else. You'll spend the rest of your life with three hots and a cot, medical care, and no concerns about how you'll pay for it all.
This is a horrific plan, and I hope it never becomes necessary for anyone. But the country is increasingly taking the options, backstops and buffers away from ordinary citizens. 'Murica loves their guns, though, and an American with no pension, no health plan and no community will still be able to purchase a weapon capable of killing 23 schoolchildren in the time it takes to sing "John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt". The problem is a person without any of those benefits has nothing to lose, and is entirely likely to have $800 in spending capital, cash or charge.
Cory Doctorow wrote a short story adjacent to this, called Radicalized, about men whose loved ones are denied health care by unfeeling insurance companies, who proceed with terrorist actions against the insurance companies. Doctorow didn't foresee the broad support the terrorists would enjoy among the American citizenry, but then he's Canadian. He probably didn't want to be impolite.
William Gibson said that "People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary." Those people might not be able to afford the fully adult security blanket, but they can afford the one that ruins everyone else's security. We just have to hope they aim at the source of their misery.
7:30 PM, EST, Philadelphia, PA, That's not how it oughta be --REM, "Don't Go Back To Rockville"
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