The US Capitol stands behind a US flag on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC,
US, June 29, 2025. [Photo/Agencies]
There’s a new phrase one encounters a lot in public debates lately: the “US
kill line”. It has gone viral not just because of amplification on social media,
but also because it resonates at a deeper level — it pinpoints a real,
systematic mechanism that quietly ends people’s normal social life when
misfortune strikes.
”Kill line” describes a chain of institutional responses that can be
triggered when an ordinary US citizen faces a major hardship or misfortune in
life — such as loss of job, a severe illness, an accident — and lacks sufficient
savings or assets. When that happens, it is usually accompanied by a few other
difficulties: credit scores fall, homes are foreclosed, medical coverage is
interrupted, the consumer’s purchasing power collapses, employment prospects
shrink and law-and-order interventions follow.
This is often followed by not just temporary hardships but a progressive
stripping away of social standing and autonomy — a person, and sometimes a whole
household, is pushed out of the ordinary economy and, in extreme cases, into
homelessness. In short, or in effect, they are “killed” from the social
ledger.
That is why the term is making waves. The United States has long been
marketed as a “land of opportunity”. But, scratch the surface and one finds a
system that can be starkly unforgiving. The contrast with China’s approach to
adversity in an individual’s life is striking. During crises, Chinese policy
emphasizes providing social support and institutional warmth aimed at keeping
people inside the social safety net rather than expelling them from it. The
divergence matters — not only as a policy difference but as a clash of governing
philosophies.
To understand how the kill line operates, we must look at the architecture
of Western political economy. The liberal Anglo-American model is often
described as a separation of three spheres — political, economic and social —
with limited government, free markets and a public sphere of opinion. But a less
discussed truth is that capital moves freely between these spheres. That
permeability is not a bug; it is a feature of the design.
Underpinning this design is a deeply embedded principle: private
arrangements may capture public purposes, but public institutions must not be
used to privilege private interests. In practice, that leads to a strict
public-private divide, with private property — above all, private ownership and
credit claims — treated as the core object of protection. John Locke’s famous
assertion that “the great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into
commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of
their property” captures the classical liberal DNA: property protection is the
organizing telos of government.
When private property and modern finance become entwined — when mortgages,
insurance, credit ratings and layered financial products dominate daily life —
the market economy becomes, in effect, a credit economy. If a key link in that
chain breaks, the system lacks built-in buffers: losses cascade from housing to
healthcare to employment to legal exposure. The “kill line” is the set of
lowest-order institutional mechanisms designed to preserve property and credit
order — the emergency purge that keeps the financial architecture intact, even
at human cost.
This institutional logic is reinforced by a potent ideological current.
Wrapped in the rhetoric of “inalienable rights” and rugged individualism is a
social Darwinism that treats social welfare as an individual responsibility and
the state as a night-watchman — necessary to preserve order but not to redress
structural unfairness. When inequality or vulnerability becomes visible, the
standard response is to shift the burden to civil society — churches, charities,
private relief — rather than to enlarge public responsibility. As the old saying
goes, help the starving but not the poor, charity may save those who are
temporarily down, but it does not fix chronic poverty.
That mindset shapes not only policy but perception. I still recall, from my
time in the United States as part of an international visitors program, the
offhand remark of an elderly woman there who described Communists as “bad guys”.
At the time one might have laughed it off. In retrospect, it revealed how deeply
textbooks and daily discourse in that society demonize alternative models and
how resilient those impressions are decades later. The upshot: many US citizens
assume, without interrogation, that government must be limited and markets must
adjudicate most social outcomes.
Such assumptions are not merely historical curiosities. They run into the
raw facts of the US’ founding compromises. The US’ 1787 Constitution, which in
practice protected the institution of slavery as a form of property, encoded a
hierarchy of who counted fully as citizen. That selective imagination of who
deserved equality, freedom and property is not simply a relic; it helps explain
why mechanisms that tidy up markets and protect property can become indifferent
to the fate of those swept aside.
Seen in this light, the kill line is not a policy glitch. It is a governing
technique — an “invisible rule” used to sort, discipline and exclude. Comparing
systems is not about moralizing each fault; it is about revealing which
institutional logics yield what outcomes. In the contest between socialism and
capitalism as systems of governance and social protection, only socialism — with
its explicit emphasis on equality, people-centered governance and public
responsibility — can coherently place human dignity at the center of both idea
and practice.
That claim will sound ideological to some. Yet the point is practical: how
a society organizes its institutions determines who is spared and who is purged
when markets shake. The discussion that “kill line” invites is valuable
precisely because it forces us to ask a simple question that politics should
always address: when disaster strikes, who will stand between a person and the
abyss?
For those worried about social stability, democratic legitimacy, and the
humane content of public life, that question is not abstract. It is immediate.
The real lesson of the kill line is an institutional one: systems that put
property and market order above people will always find ways to enforce that
priority — sometimes at the cost of human lives and social cohesion. Recognizing
this is the first step toward designing different choices.
The author is a professor at the School of International Relations and
Public Affairs of Fudan University.
来源： CHINA DAILY
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