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What is it with Republicans and smartphones?

A few weeks ago, Utah's Rep. Jason Chaffetz suffered through a totally deserved storm of media derision when he suggested that if people wanted to hang on to their health insurance after Congress gets through destroying Obamacare, all they'd have to do would be to give up the newest iPhone upgrade.

The air in the TV studio, generally thought to be Chaffetz's comfort zone, hadn't stopped vibrating with the sound of his foolish voice before he was rightly and widely denounced as Someone Who Does Not Get It. He walked it back a bit, but never shook the "Let them eat cake" vibe that he began by suggesting that any level of real health care could ever be purchased with the value of even the most expensive smartphone.

A few weeks later, Chaffetz announced he would not seek re-election and might even resign before his current term is up. But not before getting some needed foot surgery on his taxpayer-supported health insurance.

Then, just the other day, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos swung by a high-roller meeting in Salt Lake City to sing the praises of "choice" in education. And her example was that people should be have the same level of freedom to choose their children's schools as they do to switch mobile phone carriers.

In Utah, parents are by law free to move their children among their choices of public or charter schools or, if they are masochistic enough, to home school them. Thus was DeVos busy bringing coal to Newcastle.

In both cases, though, second-tier Republican luminaries were making the same mistake. They were treating two basic functions of a civilized society — health care and education — as though they were mere things. Burner doctors. HD teachers.

More recently, Utah's Sen. Orrin Hatch carried the mistake up to another degree of embarrassment. Asked whether the Senate was going to take the disgraceful mess of the House's horridly misnamed American Health Care Act and make it into something decent and useful, Hatch couldn't resist the urge to lash out at the millions of Americans whose future security — if not their lives — depends on a real answer to that question.

Oozing contempt for anyone who can't afford their own damn chemotherapy or kidney transplant, Hatch described the Americans waiting for an answer as welfare bums and the First World health care system that we are coming up on a century late in creating as being "on the dole."

"Let's face it," Hatch said, "once you get them on the dole, they'll take every dime they can."

In all of these cases, and many more, too many of our leaders can't tell the difference between civilization, which we owe one another, and mere stuff, which we don't.

Fine. Even though they themselves live on the taxpayers' dole — in Hatch's case, for 40 years with an option for at least six more — these GOP luminaries routinely genuflect to the wonders of the private sector. So much so that they don't really know what it's for.

Private business, the marketplace, corporations, produce stuff. Stuff we need. Stuff we love. Stuff we leave our children to clear away from our homes and storage units when we die. Stuff we cannot, sometimes literally, live without. Cars and houses and toothbrushes and potato chips and vacuum cleaners and, yes, smartphones.

Creativity and innovation and competition and the sheer thrill of seeing everybody carrying the thing you had a hand in inventing keeps it all coming, often enough at a price so small that you can lose more computing power than was in the whole Apollo Program when you leave your phone on the bus.

The private sector does not, cannot and will not produce justice, compassion, decency, humanity, civilization. There's just not enough profit in it.

That's on us, together, working through our elected representatives and they through the bureaucracy, routinely using many things that come from the private sector, like concrete and chalk and rocket engines, as tools.

Health care is not a thing, despite Hatch's obsession with the horror of us sharing in its cost and benefits. Education is not stuff, despite the gold mine of public money put to private profit that DeVos has devoted much of her life to.

They ­— like police departments and highways — are the lifeblood of any society that aspires to be called a civilization. Treating them as commodities that are only within reach of the rich is far beneath us.

George Pyle, the Tribune's editorial page editor, has quite enough stuff in his life, thanks. gpyle@sltrib.com