Read on Twitter
The whole issue with means-testing arguments is that they reaffirm notions that the goods being redistributed--health, housing, education, basic provisions--aren't rights, but gifts of largesse from the rich to the least advantaged https://twitter.com/namarasmith/status/1342523227973836802
When the real argument should be about what is in the commons and what is property: Certain goods should never have been commodities in the first place just as vast amounts of surplus labor, transformed into private profits, should never have become the property of the few.
This is a cultural argument as well as political one and leaving aside being cheapskates, liberals try to win the debate by disingenuously shifting the target of the argument to questions of "welfare" instead of what, as a society, we believe should be the commons/property lines
No matter the claims of being the universalists in the room, liberals actually prefer to particularize the allocation of social rights and provisions because it prevents a larger and more fundamental debate over what should be considered in the commons and what should not be.
What if instead of debating whether a Yale law grad should or should not have his debt forgiven, we debated whether Yale, which gets vast tax write-offs and subsidies from the state, should be a public or private institution?
