“Few industrialized economies provide as stingy aid to the poor as the United States,” he observed in New York magazine in 2014. “In none of them is the principle of universal health insurance even contested by a major conservative party. Conservatives have long celebrated America’s unique strand of anti-statism as the product of our religiosity, or the tradition of English liberty, or the searing experience of the tea tax. But the factor that stands above all the rest is slavery.” A caste system builds rivalry and distrust and lack of empathy toward one’s fellows. The result is that the
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