Russomanno For Congress

Before the welfare state existed, working-class Americans built their own safety nets, and those nets caught people. Fraternal mutual aid societies like the Odd Fellows, the Sons of Italy, and hundreds of smaller ethnic lodges ran insurance programs throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. By 1920, roughly one in three adult American males belonged to one. Members paid modest dues, typically $1 to $2 monthly in 1900 dollars, and received sickness benefits, death payments, and access to lodge doctors who charged $1 to $2 per year per family. The Foresters of America covered 900,000 members by 1908. These institutions ran on mutual contracts between people who knew each other; it wasn't charity. Accountability created alignment of incentives. Lodge members had every incentive to verify that sick claims were genuine, because fraudulent payouts drained their own pool. Government bureaucrats face no such incentive. Someone else bears the cost of fraud in their system. The lodge doctor system collapsed because the American Medical Association lobbied state legislatures throughout the 1910s and 1920s to ban contract medicine. Doctors working for lodges earned less than AMA members preferred. The state obliged, eliminated the competition, and left citizens with the fee-for-service monopoly that still strips your paycheck today. Voluntary cooperation built welfare that worked. Politicians dismantled it.

The entire left-right political spectrum is a lie designed to keep you arguing about the wrong things. Both "far left" and "far right" share one defining feature: the total subordination of the individual to collective power. The Soviet Politburo murdered kulaks for holding grain. The National Socialists murdered Jews for holding capital. Different scapegoats, identical mechanism: the state deciding who deserves to exist and on what terms. The conventional model places maximum government on both ends and freedom somewhere in the center. This model is geometrically incoherent. A line with tyranny at both poles and liberty in the middle tells you nothing about the actual variable being measured, which is the concentration of coercive power. The only axis worth mentioning runs from zero coercion to total coercion. Mao's China and Hitler's Germany sit centimeters apart on that axis. Venezuela under Maduro and Mussolini's Italy were structurally identical in their economic controls, even as their ceremonial aesthetics differed wildly. What passes for "far right" in media coverage today often means nationalism plus market skepticism, which is state capitalism with a flag. What passes for "far left" means internationalism plus market abolition, which is state capitalism with a committee. You get robbed either way; the paperwork just differs. The prefix "far" does no analytical work. It signals emotional distance from a speaker's preferred center, nothing more. A government that controls prices, conscripts labor, and criminalizes dissent is totalitarian. The color of its flag is insignificant.