I'm privileged enough to not have to worry about the costs. But many people aren't that lucky. Don't you think everyone deserves good healthcare and education?
Absolutely not!
- Healthcare is a madness: organized healthcare creates more than half of the illnesses. Ivan Illich explained that already 50 years ago - healthcare is an evergrowing moloch of useless therapies. He says, the problem is that politcal responsibles do not question the usefulness of healthcare-products, but only demand that the most expensive stuff must be available to everybody. (And people are supposed to think that receiving expensive therapies instead of proper treatment makes them more equal.)
- Education is not something you can put into people, it is something the individual must strive for on their own. What you can provide is just facilities: a good basic education of reading and writing and critical thinking, and then accessibility of knowledge.
Now after probably three dozen "school reforms" in the last half century, just go and talk to an elementary class teacher and ask them what has become of this all.
The defect with both matters is the same: the believe that you just need to
fill in therapy into people to make them healthy, that you just need to
fill in education into people to make them knowledgeable. And that this stuff that you "fill in" has only a price-tag, and you need to extort that money from the taxpayers in order to get what you want.
But it doesn't work that way.
Healing, as well as learning, is a process of self-responsibility: you cannot do it for others. Putting that responsibility into the government just takes away self-responsibility from the people and, consequentially, makes them less educated and less healthy.
In (western) Europe you can see that effect whereever you look.
Or at least have the opportunity to get it, so it's not only the rich people that benefit from those opportunities?
That might have been a topic 50 or 100 years ago, when there still were opportunities reserved for the rich.
Back 50 years ago when I grew up, the only opportunity I couldn't have was a motorcycle with 16 years, so I could impress the girls. Even the working-class sons had one. But there was nowhere an issue with not getting any kind of required learning stuff
if you would want to get it.
The current business-paper discussions about a lack of skilled/educated workers is entirey a lie. What they want is
not skilled workers, what they want is trained monkeys to operate their GUIs. (Otherwise I wouldn't be longterm-unemployed.)
So aspiring to give everyone the same opportunities and benefits somehow shows contempt and disrespect? I think you got that backwards.
You cannot give whatever to whomever if it isn't your property at first. You just
don't have opportunities and benefits to give to everybody. Neither does anybody. But making people believe that they would depend on "opportunities and benefits" to be received from somewhere, that already makes them less engaged and more waiting and demanding.
What You aspire, was already achieved 50 years ago. And it was achieved because
we (and I count me among that) did fight for it.
Now this has become a kind of frozen religious matra that is ever recitated but can never be truly achieved (just like Jehova witnesses forever walk around and tell their story which never will be achieved), and does now only serve as an excuse to have the established powers gain more power (and these established powers are basically those who did fight alongside 40 years ago, but then got corrupted by politics - but they still strongly believe that their way is the only proper way, and therefore anybody critisising their way must be a nazi - like an EPROM staying with the believes they got programmed 50 years ago - and when they tried to use LSD to finally EEPROM their brains as Tim Leary recommended, they got a horror from realizing what freedom actually means).
So because you can never achieve that goal it's not even worth trying?
You should have asked that in 1960.
Consequentially, it was tried. Some things were achieved. Society and public services did change a lot. Sometimes to the better, sometimes to the worse.
But now continue just parroting the old matras without reflecting on current reality, without learning from what went good and what went bad in the recent decades, without reflecting about todays challenges, about the planetscope digital enslavement, etc. - I think that doesn't lead anywhere.