Sociedad, Poder y Economía

Imagina a dos estadounidenses.

Uno quiere construir una empresa valorada en mil millones de dólares.

El otro quiere pintar paisajes, reparar radios antiguas, tocar en una banda, criar hijos, estudiar insectos o escribir novelas que quizá nunca se vendan especialmente bien.

No hay ninguna razón evidente por la que una sociedad saludable deba exigir que cualquiera de estas personas adopte la definición de éxito de la otra. Tampoco hay ninguna razón evidente por la que la primera persona deba exponer a la segunda al riesgo de quedarse sin hogar si las cosas salen mal para poder volverse extraordinariamente rica.

Esto sugiere un pacto político que no encaja del todo en el debate estadounidense habitual entre el capitalismo y el Estado de bienestar:

Garantizar el piso. Dejar el techo abierto.

En un sistema así, todos los ciudadanos tendrían alguna garantía básica de atención médica, vivienda, alimentación e ingresos suficientes para seguir participando activamente en la sociedad. Perder un empleo seguiría siendo doloroso. Un negocio fallido todavía podría acabar con los ahorros. Elegir una vida económicamente poco productiva seguiría significando tener menos dinero que alguien que dedicó veinte años a construir una empresa exitosa.

Pero la enfermedad, el desempleo o el fracaso dejarían de traer consigo la amenaza de una catástrofe material.

En el otro extremo de la distribución, no existiría una fortuna máxima predeterminada. Si alguien construye algo por lo que millones de personas pagan voluntariamente y se vuelve fabulosamente rico, bien por esa persona.

Americans spend a great deal of money on cars, but we have developed a convenient way of not thinking about the total.

The payment comes from one account. Insurance arrives on another date. Gas disappears twenty or fifty dollars at a time. Tires show up every few years with the impeccable timing of a dental emergency. Registration is somebody else's problem until suddenly it isn't. Then one morning the transmission starts making a sound ordinarily associated with farm machinery.

Each expense seems to be its own small incident.

Wealth, unfortunately for anyone trying to measure the damage, works in the opposite direction. Small amounts of money combine. Savings earn returns. Those returns can earn returns. Time takes a few hundred dollars a month and, given enough years, does something almost indecent with it.

Which raises a question worth asking:

What would Americans be worth if cars simply cost less?

Not if everybody gave up driving. Not if the suburbs were bulldozed tomorrow morning and replaced with bicycle paths and espresso bars. And not if Americans suddenly stopped liking cars.

Just: what would happen if getting around took a smaller bite out of the household budget?

The answer may be considerably larger than the monthly savings suggest.

The almost-$1,000-a-month machine

AAA has been trying to answer a deceptively simple question for more than 70 years: what does a new car actually cost to own?

Electric vehicles have a peculiar way of making gasoline cars feel complicated.

You plug the car in. Electricity flows into a battery. Later, that electricity turns a motor, and the motor turns the wheels. There is no gasoline to pump, no miniature sequence of explosions under the hood, and much less energy disappearing as waste heat. After spending some time with a good EV, it becomes surprisingly easy to look at the internal-combustion automobile and wonder whether we are seeing the mature form of transportation or an extraordinarily successful transitional technology.

That raises a much bigger question.

Suppose the United States eventually converted essentially its entire passenger-vehicle fleet to electricity. Where would all that electricity come from?

One intriguing answer begins in the enormous stretches of open land across the American interior. The Great Plains and neighboring regions contain abundant solar and wind resources, along with vast areas where large generating projects can be built. Could we simply build enough solar capacity there to provide the energy currently supplied by gasoline?

And if we could, could that electricity eventually appear wherever Americans currently expect to find fuel: interstate exits, highway service plazas, neighborhood filling stations and thousands of other places across the country?

It sounds like a project of almost cartoonish scale.

The surprising part is that the arithmetic itself does not rule it out.

I. Two Ways to Answer the Same Hunger

In many cities, the same question is being asked in very different ways:

If a society is structured in a way that leaves people hungry while food is thrown away, what counts as a moral response?

One answer says: steal. If the system itself is based on exploitation, then taking from large corporations—especially when they discard surplus goods anyway—can be framed as a small act of justice. Under this view, shoplifting from big-box stores or supermarket chains becomes a kind of micro-reparation: a way of clawing back value from an economic order that was rigged from the start.

Another answer says: build parallel systems. Instead of sneaking goods past the scanner, ordinary workers and volunteers quietly organize an alternative supply chain: surplus food is reclaimed with permission, rerouted into a mutual-aid network, and distributed for free from a folding table in the middle of the city. No questions asked, one bag per person, no money accepted.

Both approaches are trying to address the same reality: people are hungry in a world of abundance, and much of that abundance is controlled by institutions whose priorities are profit, not care. But they make fundamentally different bets about how to change that reality, and at what cost.

This essay looks at those two paths side by side. It does not deny the anger that fuels the first. It simply asks a harder question: Which underground do we actually want to grow?