Société, pouvoir et économie

Imaginez deux Américains.

Le premier veut bâtir une entreprise valant un milliard de dollars.

Le second veut peindre des paysages, réparer de vieilles radios, jouer dans un groupe, élever des enfants, étudier les insectes ou écrire des romans qui ne se vendront peut-être jamais très bien.

Rien n’indique qu’une société saine devrait obliger l’un ou l’autre à adopter la définition de la réussite de l’autre. Rien n’indique non plus que l’enrichissement extraordinaire du premier exige que le second risque de perdre son logement si les choses tournent mal.

Cela laisse entrevoir un compromis politique qui cadre assez mal avec l’opposition habituelle, aux États-Unis, entre capitalisme et État-providence :

Garantir un plancher. Ne fixer aucun plafond.

Dans un tel système, chaque citoyen disposerait d’une garantie élémentaire en matière de soins de santé, de logement et d’alimentation, ainsi que d’un revenu suffisant pour continuer à participer pleinement à la société. Perdre son emploi resterait pénible. L’échec d’une entreprise pourrait toujours engloutir les économies de son fondateur. Choisir une vie peu productive sur le plan économique signifierait toujours avoir moins d’argent que quelqu’un ayant consacré vingt ans à bâtir une entreprise prospère.

Mais la maladie, le chômage ou l’échec ne s’accompagneraient plus d’une menace de catastrophe matérielle.

À l’autre extrémité de l’échelle, aucune limite ne serait fixée à l’avance à la fortune d’une personne. Si quelqu’un crée quelque chose que des millions de personnes achètent de leur plein gré et devient fabuleusement riche, tant mieux pour cette personne.

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?