Needs, Wants, and Justice

There is an idea that goes back to ancient times. People have needs and wants.

Needs are the basics of well being everyone requires: food, shelter, clothing, education, and the opportunity to participate in the economic system, political system, and culture.

Wants are those things people desire over and above basic needs necessary to live a happy and fulfilling life in the classical sense.

One view of justice is that everyone should have their needs met. Being human is the moral justification for having your needs met, and it is your right.

Unregulated market economies do not assure that everyone's needs are met. The perfectly free market for needs merely sets equilibrium price for supply and demand. If you can't pay the price for a need, your need is not fulfilled.

That is why there must be a socialistic element to every just political system. A minimal socialist system must be in place to obtain the highest moral good, that everyone's needs are met.

The United States is not a just society. The disaster in New Orleans has shown us that in the most horrific way.

In fact, the United States does not even deliver on its promise of efficient and effective allocation of wants. There has been a systematic government sponsored accumulation of wealth into the hands of a very few. Unregulated markets did not create this concentration of wealth into the hands of a few. Systematic legislation designed to create a plutocracy of the few has sabotaged the good life for many people living above the poverty line.

The political Right is not even close to being Conservative. It's spokespersons and thinkers have become merely the mouthpiece for those who would desire the perpetuation and expansion of wealth and power in the hands of a few. In this sense, President Bush is both part of the plutocracy and another mouthpiece dupe of the plutocracy.

How long will it take for the United States to return to the path of justice? If the United States does not reinstitute and reinvorgorate the social systems that guarantee people's needs are met, it will never return to the right and just path. Given how justice in the United States has been ravaged, fulfilling everyone's needs must take priority. Even then it will take a lot of time and resources. As far as returning to the efficient and effective allocation of wants, it will have to wait until the United States embraces the ideals of justice and begins to implement those ideals.

The United States has been once again exposed as a land of hypocrisy, an unjust society, and a land where citizens are expected to be slaves to the plutocracy.