Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There

According to Rutger Bregman, too many social institutions are rooted in the assumption that one person’s gain must come at another’s loss. They hold that providing money for the poor, especially without conditions, would take away the taxes someone paid for through their work to reward someone who did nothing to earn the money. They fear that a living wage would lead employers to slash hours or would cause inflation because of an increase in the supply of money. Additionally, they hold that an immigrant, legal or otherwise, takes work or public assistance that should have gone to a native-born citizen. In each of these cases, Bregman shows that these fears thrive on the unknown. Evidence is insufficient, or at least not widely known, to disprove such ideas because fear of the consequences has generally prevented anyone from trying them on a significant scale. The social systems that do exist to address problems such as poverty and immigration seem designed mainly to reinforce preexisting prejudices. Welfare programs make it nearly impossible for a person to escape poverty. The extraordinary difficulty of immigrating legally to the US, along with a bottomless demand for cheap and under-the-table labor, creates a system of undocumented migration that then validates the idea of such people as criminals and even terrorists.