There is an image—one you may have seen before, or perhaps simply sensed in the marrow of your own experience. A suited man, calm and well-fed, sits before a table piled high with cookies—ninety-nine of them. Across from him, two others sit in silence: one with a single biscuit on his plate, the other with none. The suited man gestures, not to his hoard, but to the man beside him, whispering: Careful mate… that foreigner wants your cookie. It is a crude cartoon, yes—but it reveals something essential. Scarcity is not merely endured; it is cultivated. It is not a passive condition but a governing strategy.
In British Columbia’s public education system, we are not living through a famine born of misfortune. We are living inside one carefully, even masterfully, engineered.
What is often called a funding crisis is in fact a scarcity script: a story written in the language of constraint and discipline, designed to make us forget that there are other possible worlds. Parents are told that the system is improving. That inclusion is a core value. That budgets are rising, and support is forthcoming. Yet for those raising disabled children, the story feels more like a trapdoor than a promise. What we live—what our children absorb—is not abundance, but absence. Not inclusion, but conditional tolerance. Supports are delayed, or denied. Needs are scrutinised. Harm is reframed as resilience. Meetings are held not to understand, but to manage. And always, we are told: there simply isn’t enough.
But what if that’s a lie?
Scarcity, in this context, is not the absence of resources—it is their misallocation, their enclosure, their calculated withholding. The province is not poor. It is wealthy. It is home to billionaires whose fortunes could fund inclusive education for generations. And yet, families are made to feel greedy for asking for what their children need—things as basic and humane as predictability, one-to-one support, sensory tools, the ability to leave a classroom before melting down. In a just world, these would be standard. In ours, they are rationed.
This rationing is not neutral. It is ideological. It is built into the architecture of educational governance—a system that has learned to survive not by meeting need, but by managing perception. Administrators speak of balance. Boards speak of trade-offs. Trustees weigh seismic upgrades against support staff, forced to treat them as morally equivalent. But they are not equivalent. They are not even close. One is a structural investment in the physical safety of buildings. The other is the scaffolding of emotional, sensory, and cognitive safety for actual human beings. You cannot retrofit a nervous system. You cannot delay belonging.
You cannot retrofit a nervous system.
What has emerged instead is a culture of institutional self-preservation—where budget documents prioritise reserve funds and executive compensation while families organise food drives for lunchrooms and teachers buy visual schedules with their own pay. Inclusion becomes an aspiration, not a practice. Parents are told to become advocates. Teachers are told to become case managers. It is implied that children’s needs are burdensome, their presence provisional.
Scarcity is not a timeless truth but a story that serves the powerful
These patterns are not unique to education. As political anthropologist David Graeber argued in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, scarcity is not a timeless truth but a story that serves the powerful. Imagined deficits are used to discipline the public. Debt becomes a moral cudgel. Graeber’s critique of bureaucracy and austerity—especially in The Utopia of Rules and public lectures—helps us see how imagined constraints become real suffering.
Graeber’s landmark work argues that debt is not a financial invention but a moral and political relationship rooted in power. Drawing on anthropology, history, and political theory, he dismantles the mainstream economic myth that barter preceded money and debt. Instead, he shows that debt systems long predated coinage and were enforced through state violence.
In Graeber’s telling, “human economies” once relied on informal, relational debts grounded in mutual obligation—what he calls everyday communism. These were gradually replaced by rigid, calculable debts enforced by empires, armies, and markets. He traces how debt was used to enslave populations, justify conquest, and create hierarchies that persist to this day.
Crucially, Graeber shows that debt crises are not natural or inevitable. Throughout history, societies have periodically erased debts—through jubilees or revolts—when the burden became unbearable. He calls for a similar moral and political reckoning today, arguing that modern debt is less a financial necessity than a mechanism of control.
Austerity not as a response to crisis, but as a tool to protect elite interests
Political economist Mark Blyth builds on this in Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, describing austerity not as a response to crisis, but as a tool to protect elite interests. He calls it a dangerous idea because it punishes the many in order to preserve the wealth of the few, all under the guise of fiscal responsibility. We see this logic clearly in our schools: the wealth exists, but it is not for us.
Blyth argues that austerity—the policy of cutting public spending to reduce government deficits—is not an economic necessity, but a political choice that protects the wealthy while burdening the public. He traces how austerity is repeatedly sold as fiscal responsibility during crises, yet in practice, it deepens inequality, stalls recovery, and punishes those with the least power.
Drawing on historical case studies and contemporary examples, Blyth shows that austerity tends to fail on its own terms: it does not reliably reduce debt, but it reliably dismantles public services. He names it a “dangerous idea” because it shifts the cost of financial collapse away from those who caused it—and onto the institutions and people who can least absorb the blow.
Responsibilisation—how care is offloaded to individuals
Wendy Brown, in Undoing the Demos and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, describes how neoliberal institutions redefine people as market actors rather than rights-bearing citizens. She writes about “responsibilisation”—a term for how care is offloaded onto individuals. In schools, this looks like asking families to become policy experts, navigators, full-time advocates. It reframes abandonment as empowerment.
Wendy Brown argues that neoliberalism is not just an economic policy but a political rationality that reshapes how we think about ourselves, our institutions, and democracy itself. In Undoing the Demos, she shows how neoliberalism converts citizens into market actors—families, teachers, and even schools become entrepreneurs of their own survival, responsible for managing risk and scarcity without collective support.
In In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, Brown goes further, tracing how neoliberalism hollowed out democratic values while fuelling the resurgence of authoritarianism, resentment politics, and social abandonment. What remains is a society that speaks the language of freedom while disassembling the very structures that make freedom possible.
Together, her works reveal how the language of cost-efficiency and personal responsibility conceals a systematic withdrawal from care—and how that logic leaves the most vulnerable to bear the brunt of institutional failure.
Institutions withdraw care, not by accident
The term “organised abandonment”—coined by scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore—makes clear that harm is not accidental. Institutions withdraw care and then criminalise those who fall through the cracks. Gilmore’s work, particularly in Golden Gulag, traces how scarcity is created through structural decisions, not natural limits.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore coined the term organised abandonment to describe how institutions withdraw care and protection from entire communities while expanding systems of surveillance, policing, and punishment. It is not passive neglect—it is a deliberate strategy of governance.
In works like Golden Gulag, Gilmore shows how state structures systematically divest from schools, housing, healthcare, and social supports—especially in racialised and marginalised communities—while investing in prisons, police, and other carceral infrastructure. This abandonment is organised because it is structured, intentional, and aligned with economic interests.
Organised abandonment reframes deprivation as normal, and turns social crises into opportunities for control. It explains why people in need are so often met not with help, but with discipline.
Policies that promise everything and deliver almost nothing
Disability justice thinkers like Mia Mingus, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Alison Kafer offer a searing critique of how scarcity is used to erase disabled people. In Care Work, Piepzna-Samarasinha writes of how disabled communities are forced to compete for crumbs, navigating systems that treat access as optional. Kafer, in Feminist, Queer, Crip, challenges how the future is rationed in advance for disabled people—through policies like IEPs that promise everything and deliver almost nothing.
Essential public services are undervalued or ignored
And economist Mariana Mazzucato, in The Value of Everything and Mission Economy, demands we ask: what counts as value? Why is public investment in inclusive classrooms seen as excessive, while executive raises and digital infrastructure are framed as smart spending? Who benefits from that logic—and who is made to disappear?
Mariana Mazzucato challenges how we define economic value—and who gets credit for creating it. In The Value of Everything, she shows that much of what is labelled “productive” (like finance or executive salaries) extracts value rather than creates it, while essential public services (like education, healthcare, and caregiving) are undervalued or ignored.
In Mission Economy, she argues for reimagining government not as a fixer of market failures, but as a bold, visionary force capable of driving innovation and solving public problems—like landing on the moon or achieving true inclusion in education. Her work insists that public investment is not wasteful, but foundational—and that austerity is a political failure, not an economic one.
Shuffling the books
What we are witnessing is not fiscal prudence. It is cost transfer. From education to healthcare. From schools to police. From collective provision to private struggle. The child whose needs are unmet today will surface tomorrow in another system—one less equipped to hold them, more likely to punish. We are not saving money. We are spending it elsewhere, more cruelly.
And so we ask: why does the bus stop where it does?
Why must some children climb aboard with full backpacks, while others are left waiting in the rain, told they should be grateful the driver even slowed down?
The answer lies in what we’ve been taught to accept. That budgets are more sacred than bodies. That equity can be optional. That some children simply cost too much to include.
We can live in abundance if we choose
But what if we told a different story? One where abundance is not just possible but inevitable, if we realign our priorities. One where trustees act as advocates, not administrators. Where budgets are tools for justice, not instruments of harm. Where schools do not operate like insurance companies, but like communities. Where need is not pathologised, but anticipated. Where inclusion is not managed, but lived.
To get there, we must unlearn the logic of scarcity. We must recognise that the famine is fabricated—that the cupboard was never truly bare. And we must refuse to be divided by the crumbs we are offered.
Community is how we begin. By witnessing each other’s pain without flinching. By naming the violence that has been normalised. By insisting that our children are not burdens to be weighed against efficiency metrics—but full human beings, deserving of care, investment, and joy.
This is not merely a budgetary failure. It is a moral one. And the reckoning is not just financial—it is psychic, relational, intergenerational.
The bus stops when we say: this route no longer serves us. When we realise we are not passengers at all—but the architects of a different way forward and show up in Victoria to demand change!
