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Is vs. Ought

• IS: College costs a fortune so only the wealthy or those willing to take on a huge debt can get a higher education.
• OUGHT: College is free (like it was until recently in Sweden); the cost is borne by society because society benefits from having people well educated.

• IS: 30 million Americans will have no health care insurance under Obamacare.
• OUGHT: All people who contribute reasonably to society have an equal right to the health care they need for free, with equitable rationing according to need when there is a scarcity of a required kind of care.

• IS: In the United States, more than one out of five children lives in a household with food insecurity, which means they do not always know where they will find their next meal. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), in 2012, 15.9 million children under 18 in the United States live in this condition – unable to consistently access nutritious and adequate amounts of food necessary for a healthy life.
• OUGHT: All people who contribute reasonably to society have an equal right to the food they need or reasonably desire for free, with equitable rationing according to need when there is a scarcity of a required kind of care.

• IS: Public K-12 schools are controlled by and run for the benefit of the richest and most powerful Americans for the purpose of making working class children blame themselves for failing standardized tests (which are are a form of child abuse designed to fail a set percentage of children no matter how well students learn the material). In this way schools are used by the very rich to make working class children accept their place at the bottom of an increasingly unequal society and feel unworthy of having a good paying job or even a job at all because they are not "smart enough" or didn't work "hard enough" to score higher on the standardized test.
• OUGHT: Teachers and parents, who want to instill in all our children the confidence, skills and joy of learning that can enable them as adults to take charge of society and make it more equal and democratic and caring for all, run the schools in a genuine democracy.

• IS: Many people who are able and willing to work cannot find a job and thus suffer great economic hardship, simply because no employer finds it profitable to hire them. People unable to work (because of their age or a disability) must live in poverty on "welfare."
• OUGHT: To get a job requires nothing more than a) pitching in wherever people are doing work or b) learning a skill so as to be able to pitch in later, because the economy is not a capitalist economy based on profit, but a sharing economy in which all who pitch in reasonably according to ability (and all who are unable to work) share in the fruits of the economy with equal status according to need--no rich and no poor.

• IS: Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison owns mansions worth an estimated $200 to $250 million, while approximately 3.5 million Americans are homeless in a given year.
• OUGHT: All power is in the hands of local assemblies, open to all who support equality and mutual aid; and these assemblies decide if people like Larry Ellison are allowed to own so many houses, or if non-greedy people should be allowed to live in them as their own instead.

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