Something was revealed in Greg Gianforte's assault of a Guardian reporter that will be missed by most because in the US, we are in the habit of believing that we are not only free to decide whether to work or not, but also whether to keep or leave a job. This is why Ben Carlson can say poverty is "a state of mind." America sees itself as the land of choices.
But the connection between the assault (“I’m sick and tired of you guys. The last guy that came in here, you did the same thing. Get the hell out of here!”) and what triggered it (a reporter asking a GOP politician for his thoughts on the report by the Congressional Budget Office that stated if Trumpcare was implemented in its current state 23,000,000 Americans would lose health insurance) makes perfect sense in light of a significant feature of American employment that's not discussed enough: workplace discipline.
When we talk about the importance of Obamacare, we rarely say, as Paul Krugman did in his post, "Unfreeing of American Workers," that it liberated millions of workers from the discipline that results from tying health insurance to employment. Until Obamacare arrived, if you didn't have a job, and you were not rich, you did not have health insurance. And so if you got sick, or had an existing condition, quitting a job you didn't like was not an option. You had to stick with it, and because you didn't like it, it probably made you all the more sicker (sadness and depression are real illnesses with real effects). For millions, repealing Obamacare only means that health insurance resumes its form as a mode of workplace discipline because it empowers employers and dis-empowers employee. It limits your choices.
Only a few economists have examined the modes of workplace discipline. For example, Michal Kalecki (a Depression-era Polish economist who bridged Marxism with Keynesianism) briefly mentioned one in his readable essay "Political Aspects of Full Employment" (PDF). He wrote:
Under a regime of permanent full employment, the 'sack' would cease to play its role as a disciplinary measure. The social position of the boss would be undermined, and the self-assurance and class-consciousness of the working class would grow. Strikes for wage increases and improvements in conditions of work would create political tension. It is true that profits would be higher under a regime of full employment than they are on the average under laissez-faire; and even the rise in wage rates resulting from the stronger bargaining power of the workers is less likely to reduce profits than to increase prices, and thus adversely affects only the rentier interests. But 'discipline in the factories' and 'political stability' are more appreciated than profits by business leaders. Their class instinct tells them that lasting full employment is unsound from their point of view, and that unemployment is an integral part of the 'normal' capitalist system.
As full employment (and the right kind of full employment) is actually good for business (but not so good for those who will never be happy with normal profits that relate to normal growth), and from the prospective of the society as a whole, good for the economy, universal healthcare (a form of socialism) actually gives workers more freedom (not less), and so encourages entrepreneurship, which in turn challenges existing monopolies by injecting new ideas and products into the economy.
The GOP is attacking Obamacare not only to transfer public money to equity markets and other assets (called placements by the British) that are sources of revenue for the primary beneficiaries ("the rentiers") of a huge tax, but also to restore the full force of a disciplinary stick ("fear of the sack").
