501(c)(8) is an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax exemption status that applies to "fraternal beneficiary societies, orders, or associations operating under the lodge system...and providing for the payment of life, sick, accident, or other benefits to the members of such society, order, or association, or their dependents."
I’m tipping a golden calf. But imagine a future in which you join a mutual society instead of a political party to provide for your healthcare and retirement. Instead of Team Red and Team Blue competing for votes to gain power and make a monolithic system for 330 million people, a thousand benefit associations would bloom to replace Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare after those damnable programs’ repeal.
Let’s take three of the four systems listed in blue below: Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare, which comprise 46 percent of the federal budget. That’s $2.8 trillion in taxpayer dollars.
Feasibility
The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.
Sadly, a majority of Americans think that our big, bloated welfare state monopoly is more or less the apotheosis of the general welfare. But that seems like an odd opinion due to the fiscal cliff we’re currently staring down.
Pluralism, Please
Just as people in Texas cannot require those living in Thailand, Tahiti, or Tijuana to conform to Texas laws or norms, no one could force you to join a particular mutual society. Why should the history of conquest over great expanses of soil bind everyone to the same shitty systems, or to some monopoly taxation and debt regime? In this condition, the only questions anyone needs to worry about are whether or not their benefit association delivers on its commitments to members and remains solvent.
But why shouldn’t there be a single conception of social justice and thus one system for everyone? Why can’t there be a philosopher king who has absolute knowledge of the right and the good?
As biologist E.O. Wilson says, “Like everyone else, philosophers measure their personal emotional responses to various alternatives as though consulting a hidden oracle.” He continues:
That oracle resides in the deep emotional centers of the brain, most probably within the limbic system, a complex array of neurons and hormone-secreting cells located just beneath the "thinking" portion of the cerebral cortex. Human emotional responses and the more general ethical practices based on them have been programmed to a substantial degree by natural selection over thousands of generations.