Cato Institute’s (and George W. Bush’s) Ownership Society Created Cop Stand Down in Uvalde

A lot of people are talking about the cowardly Uvalde cops who refused to rescue the grade school children from the AR-15 assault rifle and it’s twisted holder. There is something else to look at here.

Remember George W. Bush’s Ownership Society? That concept was created by the Cato Institute, a right-wing extremist think tank (if you can call that thinking), as a campaign theme for Bush to run on. It didn’t go away with Bush. Democrats since then did nothing to stop it. We’re still living in it.

The theory of the Ownership Society was that there is nothing public, and really nothing private that you get from anyone else, even if you pay for it. The Ownership Society went so far as to say, individuals who are not doctors or medical professionals in any way, should be in charge of their own health care in terms of diagnosing themselves from provided tests. A lot of health providers do just that. The health system I am stuck with due to insurance limitations will give you your test results and you’re supposed to figure them out yourself. I have diagnosed myself, and I diagnosed my dad while the real doctors may or may not comment, with a one-liner at best, via online messenger system.

Under the Ownership Society, public school was supposed to go away. Parents could be given learning materials and would be on their own to teach their kids reading, math, and heaven forbid, science.

The Ownership Society justified companies stealing pensions and leaving workers to play the markets with 401k money.

The Ownership Society also gave us multiple garbage and recycling collectors in one neighborhood over the entire week, basically, trucks and garbage around all week long instead of just on garbage day for the entire neighborhood. I know this went on a lot in Republican areas, one specifically in Minnesota around St. Paul, where my friend lived, and she complained about it all the time.

I knew an elderly woman in a nearby community to me, so proud of her Ownership of her sewer and drainage, until she got the $50,000 bill to redo the septic system before she could sell her home. While she and her husband lived there, they weren’t going to connect to no stinkin’ socialist municipal water and sewer system, no not them. They were rugged individualists. Still, she carried on plenty about that $50,000 bill.