When the answer for every problem is a market-based solution — a private account, leavened with a tax cut for the wealthiest — we are trapped.

The message — sometimes implicit but often explicit — is, You’re on your own. Its acronym, YOYO, provides a useful shorthand to summarize this destructive approach to governing.

The concept of YOYO isn’t all that complicated. It’s the prevailing vision of how the United States should be governed. As such, it embodies a set of values, and at the core of the YOYO value system is hyper-individualism.

Burdening the individual

That is, the notion that whatever the challenges we Americans face as a nation, the best way to solve them is for people to fend for themselves. Over the past few decades, this harmful vision has generated a set of policies with that hyper-individualistic gene throughout their DNA.

One central goal of the YOYO movement — the politicians, lobbyists and economists actively promoting this vision — is to continue and even accelerate the trend toward shifting economic risks from the government and the nation’s corporations onto individuals and their families.

Harmful agenda

You can see this intention beneath the surface of almost every recent conservative initiative.

The concept of YOYO embodies a set of values — and at the core is hyper-individualism.

These include: Social Security privatization, personal accounts for health care (the so-called Health Savings Accounts), attacks on labor market regulations and the perpetual crusade to slash the government’s revenue through regressive tax cuts — a strategy explicitly tagged as “starving the beast” — and block the government front playing a useful role in the economic lives of Americans.

While this fast-moving reassignment of economic risk would be bad news in any period, it’s particularly harmful today. As the new century unfolds, Americans face prodigious economic challenges, many of which have helped to generate both greater inequalities and a higher degree of economic insecurity in their lives.

Personal Initiative

But the dominant vision has failed to develop a hopeful, positive narrative about how these challenges can be met in such a way as to uplift the majority.

Instead, messages such as “It’s your money” (the mantra of the first George W. Bush campaign in 2000) and frames such as “the ownership society,” stress an ever shrinking role for government and much more individual risk taking.

Absent personal security

Yet, global competition, rising health costs, longer life spans with weaker pensions, less secure employment and unprecedented inequalities of opportunity and wealth are calling for a much broader, more inclusive approach to helping all of us meet these challenges, one that taps government as well as market solutions.

Americans have shut off our critical faculties that under normal circumstances would lead us to be deeply angered by much of what’s going on.

To cite one potent example we urgently need a system of universal coverage as exists in every other advanced economy. In every case, these countries insure their citizens, control health costs better than we do and have better overall health outcomes.

Yet, U.S. leaders want to solve the problem with an individualistic, market-based system of private accounts designed to cut costs by shifting risk from the insurer to the patient, unleashing more of the very market forces that got us into this mess in the first place.

We're in this together

We need an alternative vision, one that applauds individual freedom but emphasizes that such freedom is best realized with a more collaborative approach to meeting the challenges we face. The message is simple. We’re in this together. Here, the acronym is WITT.

We simply cannot effectively address globalization, health care, pensions, economic insecurity and fiscal train wrecks by cutting taxes, turning things over to the market and telling our citizens they’re on their own, like the gold prospectors of the 1800s, to strike it rich or bust.

Lack of leadership

Many of us share a sense of deep discomfort and insecurity about the direction our country is taking.

Only the national government has the scope to reverse the risk shift and undertake risk sharing, in the name of both efficiency and equity.

But there do not seem to be any signposts pointing to a better way. Why not?

It’s easy to blame the lack of leadership, and there’s something to that. The quality of many of our leaders does seem particularly suspect these days.

Opportunists can always be found in politics, but their influence is often countered by those truly motivated to promote the public good (which is not to say that such people agree on how to do so, of course). Right now, the ratio of opportunists to idealists may be unusually high.

Collective Interest

We have shut off our critical faculties that under normal circumstances would lead us to be deeply angered by much of what’s going on. Despite the events of September 11, 2001, we are less prepared for a national disaster now than we were a few years ago.

When the answer for every problem is a market-based solution — a private account, leavened with a tax cut for the wealthiest — we are trapped. Clearly, we need to escape from that restrictive, cynical vision. Pursuing our collective, rather than strictly personal, interests will help.

The national government's responsibility

Only the national government has the scope to reverse the risk shift and undertake risk sharing, in the name of both efficiency and equity.

We urgently need a system of universal health coverage as exists in every other advanced economy.

It’s not a vision of more government.

For the sake of continuity, efficiency and political viability, we ought to devote about the same share of economy to government as has been the historical norm — about 20% of GDP, with one exception.