We must address systemic inequality

In his Feb. 29 response (“System not so bad here”) to my letter of Feb. 24 (“Pipeline protests”), the writer can only offer tired cliches and the usual red-baiting, where any suggestion there may be a better way to organize our economy is equated with fears of a “communist utopia.”

Despite the obvious shortcomings of Russian and Chinese communism (both of which are more like state-controlled versions of capitalism), recall it was the

Russians who did the bulk of the Allied fighting and dying in the Second World War, and for many years China’s growth rate has far exceeded that of all capitalist economies.

Cuba has free universal health care, something the mightiest and “freest” nation on the planet, the United States, has been unable to provide for its own population, which may yet haunt us all as we deal with coronavirus and the ensuing global health crisis.

If we don’t address the issue of systemic inequality, a revolution or worse will happen here. We must abandon a system that works only for profit, and then only for a small percentage of the population — myself included — and one that has to rely on continual, virtually criminal, deregulation of the economy to keep it running.

If we don’t, we implicitly side with the authoritarians present in all forms of society, numbing ourselves to that with all the free market pleasures money can buy; and while some addicts die in our streets, the rest of us die a slower, less immediately noticeable death in spirit.

Tim Nickel, Saskatoon