Pay-the-Rich Social Programs"The only utility whatsoever which an object can have for capital can be to preserve or increase it." -- Karl Marx -- Grundrisse: Notebook II
The imperialist cartel parties design social programs to remove the burden of individual companies from themselves paying for social programs and infrastructure they need to function in a socialized economy. The social programs must generate private profit for a section of the oligarchs including the prospect of private money-lending to governments. This general trend has been further codified as public-private partnerships and is most evident in gigantic public-private infrastructure projects such as the Site C dam and LNG Canada projects in BC and others of like kind across Canada. Most aspects of what is considered public health care in Canada are privately supplied at great private profit such as hospital supplies and pharmaceuticals and the construction of fixed means of production including hospitals and their machines and equipment. Most health clinics and labs are private yet funded publicly. The public funds for health care come from individual taxation and public borrowing from private moneylenders. The funds are mostly channeled from the federal government to Quebec and the provinces and territories with varying amounts from user fees and health care insurance premiums. It should be noted that medical care for many parts of the body, such as eyes and teeth, and certain treatments and drugs, except those provided in hospitals, are excluded from the social program and supplied privately through user fees and private insurance. Big Pharma and others increasingly want a public pharmacare program to increase its guaranteed sales of drugs. This can be seen in the Big Pharma push for government upfront money to finance a COVID-19 vaccine.
The product of health care and education, the capacity to work of educated healthy workers, is at the disposal of the imperialist employers without directly paying the price of production to the public institutions that produced it. The 1965 Canada-U.S. Auto Pact became a source of great profit for the U.S. auto industry. The auto monopolies were attracted by, among other things, Canada's national health care insurance program, which became codified in 1966 as the Medical Care Act. Medicare saved the auto monopolies from being pressured into paying for private health insurance for their employees as is the case in the United States. Another attraction was Canada's unemployment insurance program (then UI, now a greatly weakened Employment Insurance (EI)), which allowed big companies to lay off workers for extended periods with UI paying a significant portion of their wages. This meant most auto workers remained on call while receiving a government stipend to be available to return when the auto monopolies wanted them. Even when social programs are aimed at those who cannot work for whatever reason, such as injury or illness, and are poverty stricken, the programs must serve private profit in some way. Housing is an example where private interests put themselves in the middle by building and selling social housing to the government at great profit and often managing and maintaining the property. Welfare recipients are sometimes housed in rental units where the government pays the rent directly to the landlords. In the U.S., food stamps, now replaced with Electronic Benefit Transfer debit cards, are distributed to recipients who use them to buy food. The neo-liberal mantra is that people should accept pay-the-rich social programs as "better than nothing" or "better than what the conservatives would deliver." (Photos: TML, M. Sardinha)
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For liberals and
others in the imperialist camp, the issue is not
opposition to social programs per se but the
necessity that social programs must serve the
ruling oligarchs. Pay-the-rich social programs,
through imperialist design, must contribute in one
way or another to the aim of maximum private
profit and to defend the status quo. The working
class movement must confront this problem with a
clear head and conscience. 
In the public
education sector the construction of schools is
private and almost all supplies, such as computers
and textbooks, are privately delivered.
Post-secondary education has become a feeding
ground for private companies mostly parading as
colleges. Universities do research and training
for the big companies while funded through the
public purse and increasingly from high student
tuition and other fees.