If we conjure the political will to create socialized medicine under the argument that health care is a human right, what forms of becoming gendered will be covered? To say that only bottom surgery would qualify is to reinscribe precisely our enemies’ reductive biopolitics of genital obsession. But what if becoming woman is a process not simply of jumping across a gendered binary, but one constantly occurring within gender itself? Do we then lean into or out of the medicalization of the gendered body? Do we have a right to be hot? Why should the socialist state cover one woman’s acquisition of breasts and not another’s augmentation of them? What is the space of nonequivalence between these two visions of “rights,” the right to purchase a commoditized medical service and the rights of an individual within a sociopolitical collectivity? If the welfare state is staked on the ethical wager that the plastic body is sponsored by the collectivity to help realize a collective vision of the good, what is the relation between rights and desires? And if the body is not private property to be managed as an investment, then how do we relate to it?

THE CONTEMPORARY READER IS UNHAPPY. What troubles him? It’s the critics: they are lying to him. He encounters them on the back cover of every new book, promising the world. “An exhilarating debut, poignant and thrilling” . . . “A much-anticipated return, necessary and trenchant” . . . “Dazzling sentences” . . . “An unforgettable voice” . . . “Words that will rend your garments and kiss you on the mouth, that’s how good they are!” The reader trusts the critics. He buys the book. But from page one it is trash: listless, forgettable, unnecessary. He is outraged! He thought false advertising was illegal.

Billionaires are also set apart by the fact that an average person cannot reasonably aspire to be one. There are an estimated 22 million millionaires in the United States alone, more than 8 percent of the adult population. Becoming a millionaire is simple, if unimaginable for many: graduate from college with no debt, get a $50,000 starting salary at 23, save 8 percent per year, and get 2 percent raises every year for the rest of your working life. By the time you’re 65, you’ll have $2.7 million socked away, ready to burn on a long-term care facility. There is no equivalent path for billionaires. Culturally, they not only possess but represent the wealth that can be neither justified nor “earned”: the vast and malignant pools of overaccumulation that often result from long periods of pacifically exporting conflict to the periphery of the world system. When Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, there was no good reason to think that it would beat out the hundreds of other tech companies to become the world’s largest merchant monopolist, but the possibility that such a mega-capital would emerge is baked right into the technology. Under modern-day capitalism, becoming a billionaire is just something that happens to some people.