The Crime of Austerity: When Power Serves the Few

OP/ED

What kind of person votes for legislation that knowingly harms or kills fellow citizens? Someone who has abandoned any moral compass in favor of wealth, ideology, or power. The proposed Republican-backed bill, as described by Senators Chris Murphy, Angus King, and Sheldon Whitehouse, is not merely flawed policy. It is a calculated assault on the vulnerable.

Cutting healthcare for 16 million people, slashing food aid for children, and handing massive tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy is not governance, it is cruelty cloaked in bureaucracy. The numbers are stark, but the human cost is starker. Rural hospitals will be shuttered. Children will go hungry. Preventable diseases will go untreated. Lives will be lost.

This legislation is not the result of oversight. It is not the product of economic necessity. It is a conscious, strategic decision to sacrifice the many for the benefit of the few. The architects of this bill claim to defend liberty, but liberty without healthcare, without food, without shelter is not liberty at all. It is a fiction used to mask greed. Their vision would return us to a pre–New Deal America, where economic suffering was a private burden, not a public concern, and where government existed only to protect the interests of those with wealth.

We must remember that the New Deal emerged from a time when America was teetering on the brink of collapse. Franklin D. Roosevelt did not view social programs as charity. He viewed them as justice. He understood that government must serve the people, not just as a referee but as a lifeline. The idea that a nation is only as strong as its richest citizens is a dangerous myth. As Roosevelt stated, the strength of a nation lies in meeting the needs of the many.

When legislation knowingly sacrifices lives in order to enrich a small elite, it is not just a policy disagreement. It is a moral crisis. It is, in every sense of the word, a crime. A crime committed in boardrooms and congressional chambers, a crime carried out with pens instead of weapons, but a crime nonetheless. The bodies left behind are just as real.

And yet, here we are. In 2025, the United States government continues to operate under a system that rewards the powerful for their indifference. Our democracy has been hijacked by dark money, corporate lobbying, and an obsession with free-market dogma. The result is a perverse inversion of values: wealth hoarded, suffering ignored, and policies designed not to uplift but to suppress.

What’s worse is the gaslighting. Lawmakers who support these bills talk about fiscal responsibility while handing billions to defense contractors and oil companies. They talk about American values while gutting the very systems that keep Americans alive. They wrap themselves in flags while stepping over bodies. It is performative patriotism, a theater of cruelty meant to distract from the blood on their hands.

The cruelty is not incidental. It is the point. When a government repeatedly passes legislation that leaves millions without access to basic necessities, it cannot claim to be democratic. It is an oligarchy in practice. It is a government by the few, for the few, at the expense of everyone else.

This is not sustainable. And it is not what democracy is supposed to look like. The social contract has been shredded. The illusion that we are all in this together has given way to a brutal reality: in the current system, if you are poor, sick, or marginalized, you are expendable.

“Participatory democracy empowers citizens not just to vote every few years but to actively shape the policies that affect their lives.”

But there is an alternative. It is time we stop simply resisting cruelty and start reimagining governance. One path forward is Resourceism: the idea that resources, not capital, should be the foundation of our economy. Instead of measuring national strength by GDP or stock market performance, we measure it by access to clean air, nutritious food, education, housing, and healthcare. In a Resourceist system, every citizen is guaranteed the essentials for a dignified life. Decisions are made based on sustainable management of our shared resources, not on maximizing profit.

Pair Resourceism with participatory democracy and we begin to approach a truly just society. Participatory democracy empowers citizens not just to vote every few years but to actively shape the policies that affect their lives. It replaces apathy with engagement. It replaces elite rule with collective decision-making. In this system, power is not hoarded but distributed. Everyone has a seat at the table.

We must break the spell of scarcity that neoliberalism has cast over the nation. We are told that we can’t afford universal healthcare, that feeding children is too expensive, that lifting the poor is unsustainable. But we can afford tax breaks for billionaires and endless military expansion? This is not a financial issue. It is a moral one. The resources exist. What we lack is the will to use them justly.

The United States can no longer afford governance by cruelty. We cannot tolerate a system that treats lives as bargaining chips in a game of political poker. Every vote for austerity is a vote against the people. Every bill that sacrifices the vulnerable is a stain on our national conscience.

We must say it plainly: the current direction of government is not accidental, it is intentional. And if we are to reclaim our democracy, we must confront that intention with a vision that values life over profit, dignity over wealth, and justice over cruelty.

Resourceism and participatory democracy offer that vision. They are not utopian fantasies. They are practical frameworks rooted in the simple belief that society should serve its people, not exploit them. The needs of the many must outweigh the privileges of the few. That is not just a quote from a science fiction film. It is a principle worth building a new future upon.

We have the tools. We have the knowledge. What remains is the courage to act.

And act we must, before more lives are sacrificed for the comfort of the already comfortable. Before the soul of the nation is lost entirely to the machinery of greed.

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