Jon Stewart proposes a policy that we cannot sell.

The NY Times "Small Business" blog points out that Jon Stewart, of all people, proposed a way the Democrats could easily sell universal health care. He pointed out that people are shackled to their desks due to fear of catastrophic health care costs. If your dream is to be a writer, save up enough money, quit your shitty desk job, and write for a year. If it doesn't pan out, you can always go get another shitty desk job. Nothing's stopping you. Worst case scenario: you end up at a shitty desk job. You're already at a shitty desk job: you're already living your worst case scenario.

Only fear of the ultimate worst case scenario: not having a shitty desk job and having a health catastrophe, keeps otherwise brilliant young men and women shackled to their penultimate worst case scenario.

If we had universal health care these people would no longer have that fear. They could become writers-- or they could found powerful companies that improve on and ultimately replace Amazon, Facebook, Merck, Goldman Sachs, Goodyear, and General Electric.

There's only one problem: those companies don't want to be replaced. They have no incentive to unshackle their most brilliant people. They have no incentive to overturn the de-facto indentured servitude that serves the corporate bottom line. They see no benefit to entrepeneurial independence. Corporate conservatism sees no benefit to universal health care.

Religious conservatives have no incentive for universal health care either. They like the fact that "the little guy" doesn't dare take entrepreneurial risks for fear of losing health coverage. As middle-of-the-road conservative David Frum approvingly wrote in his 1994 book Dead Right: "Fear makes people circumspect. It disciplines them and teaches self-control. Social security, student loans, and other government programs make it far less catastrophic than it used to be for middle-class people to dissolve their families. Without welfare and food stamps, poor people would cling harder to working-class respectability than they do not."

Capitalism isn't good, in this conservative formula, because it generates wealth. It's good because it forces people to live precarious, desperate, "disciplined" lives. It forces people into an ascetic self-denial, and fearful of the consquences of "paganistic self-expression" (as ur-conservative Isaiah Berlin called it).

So, while I approve of Stewart's formula, we shouldn't kid ourselves: a powerful capitalist economic engine in which those not currently in power are unshackled from the economic fear of catastrophic health costs is nothing businessmen or religious conservatives want, and they will fight it every step of the way.