Just a Smack at Liberaltarianism
Brink Lindsey is thinking about voting Dem for the best of reasons:
In the here and now of the current election cycle, the main reason I’m considering voting for a D — let me go ahead and put it more strongly, the main reason I’m presently leaning Democratic — is foreign policy. I was a supporter of the war in Iraq, and I now believe I was badly mistaken. But whether the war was a mistake at the time or not, it has clearly gone terribly wrong — for Iraq itself, for our interests in the region, for our standing and influence around the world, and for the readiness of our military to respond to other crises. It is past time, I think, to cut our losses there. Whether that means a full pullout or some kind of dramatic change in our force structure, I am not prepared to say. But I don’t see how the U.S. can begin to pursue an effective foreign policy as long as the status quo persists.
Looking beyond Iraq, I have completely lost faith in preventive war as a way of dealing with nuclear proliferation. Consequently, my sense now is that military action against Iran would backfire badly, perhaps disastrously.
So the knee-jerk hawkishness of the leading Republican candidates sends me running in the other direction.
Ah, but which Dem? he wonders. Especially since, as Brink notes, there’s not a lot of the libertarian-liberal fusionism of the sort he outlined last year.
I said at the time that the practical problem with Brink’s program is that there’s no serious constituency within the Democratic Party for the sort of entitlement restructuring that Brink made the linchpin of his original article. More generally, not just the Democratic Party but the country as a whole is trending “left” on economics, and has been since 2000. The southpaw candidates – Gore and Nader – pulled a majority of the popular vote that year, and while I would never argue that Nader’s votes “belonged” to Gore, the aggregate percentage shows where the country’s head was at economically. Were it not for a very famous incident involving airplanes I suspect we’d have seen Democratic pickups in 2002. If not for the fallacy of sunk costs, I suspect George W. Bush would have been a one-termer.
As it is, the Democrats can trace the moment of their revival as a viable political party to their uncompromising opposition to the President’s social-security proposals of 2005. That was their first political victory of the 21st Century and the fifty-millionth time the Donks have profited politically from “defending social security.” I say this not to pick on Brink, but just to clarify why libertarians can’t ground their hopes for liberal-libertarian concord in “entitlement reform.”
We’re entering an era where the public, according to all the polls, is looking for populist economic measures and the Democratic Party is going to give them some. Libertarians have the usual few unsatisfactory options. The first is to return to the bosom of the GOP and encourage them to thwart as much of the Democrats’ economic agenda as possible. In ordinary times I’d be all for this – sweet, sweet obstructionism. These are not ordinary times. Libertarians can’t in good conscience further the fortunes of the Banana Republican Party. Note that while Milton Friedman did meet briefly with Augusto Pinochet, he didn’t participate in Pinochet’s coup. The Caudillo Party needs to lose its fatally campy attraction to “swagger” before it can be trusted with so much as a seat on the student council in a rural middle school.
The second option is to continue to think long term, and continue to concentrate on saying the things we think are true, regardless of their present salability. (Gene Healy said this somewhere, I am certain, in response to Tyler Cowen back in March. I’m damned if I can find the right entry, though.) This is an entirely honorable course, and at least some libertarians ought to make it their main focus.
The third option is to try to coax the least damaging version of the populist measures coming down the pike, while trying to get “the left to be good on issues the left is supposed to be good on,” as Jesse Walker put it last year. That is, peace and civil liberties. I realize that the Democratic Party as a whole has done fvck-all for peace and civil liberties, but it contains constituencies that would like it to do more, and libertarians can swell that chorus. This means singing harmony with “dirty fucking hippies,” which will be hard for libertarians who are more anti-left than anti-state. But the hips, more than the self-styled contrarians who cluster around the New Republic and the Democratic Leadership Council, are the ones who really oppose preventive war, the unitary executive and the domestic security state.
As to the economic populism, the short answer is to prefer the simple to the complex. Treat safety-net measures with the least in social-engineering provisions as less bad than the alternatives. From and anarcho-capitalist perspective it’s all theft and coercion, and I’d never want anarcho-capitalists to stop making that point. But even anarcho-capitalists may decide that, given one’s choice of thievery, that some are less damaging than others.
Now, the last aspect of this approach may be the most challenging, and call for the biggest break with habits of thought from the days when many libertarians thought of themselves as “small government conservatives.”
Every safety net entails moral hazard by lowering the price of imprudence. Welfare and unemployment insurance encourage a certain level of irresponsibility at the margins of the working world. Government pensions marginally discourage private retirement savings. National health insurance will breed incremental insouciance about diet and other personal habits. Plus, all social insurance eventually gets paid in taxes, either now or in eventual debt service, and ceteris paribus people would rather pay less in taxes than more. Politicians often try to control moral hazard by legislating against the “problem” behavior. Drug prohibition, twinkie taxes, workfare provisions, forced savings – all have been enacted or proposed to limit moral hazards stemming from safety-net programs, and not just by liberals. During the 1990s I got the impression that, having given up on eliminating welfare, Republicans had decided to settle for making it really annoying to be on welfare, based on the kinds of proposals they were submitting. Just within the last month we’ve seen calls for trans fat bans and other food prohibitions based on the logic that the health costs of such foods come out of the public treasury.
Traditionally the libertarian instinct, faced with an entitlement or social insurance program, has been to limit it somehow. And of course the libertarian instinct is also to reduce spending as much as possible, which moral hazard regulation does. I submit, though, that “social insurance plus moral hazard regulation” is the worst of both worlds from a libertarian perspective. The social insurance makes large claims on the public purse while the hazard regulation fills daily life with niggling restrictions. Therefore I think we libertarians should prefer more subsidized vice to more enforced virtue.
The thing is, that will cost money. It will even in many cases be annoying. But a state that spends massive piles of money on social insurance is a less intrusive state than one that spends massive piles of money on social insurance while using that spending as an excuse to keep anyone from having fun.
The preceding is almost completely useless to Brink at the Obama vs. Hillary vs. Edwards vs. Richardson level. I’m a big picture guy! (For the duration of this already lengthy blog item anyway.) Nor does it offer libertarians much of a positive program for the pending populist moment. I’ll see what I can whip up for next time. BUT! I suspect Hillary Clinton is easily the worst of the Dem candidates by almost every criterion discussed above, little better than a Republican. Personally, I’m still hoping Richardson vaults into the first tier and believe he has time to do so.
Comment by Jon H —
May 9, 2007 @ 12:26 am
“That was their first political victory of the 21st Century and the fifty-millionth time the Donks have profited politically from “defending social security.â€
On the other hand – just imagine what sort of misbegotten replacement the Bush administration would have come up with. Never mind the vaguely reasonable system it might have been advertised as, but think of the horrifically corrupt, partisan abortion it would have been as implemented.
It’s clear that any Bush initiative would have ended up being worse than what we have now.
Now, granted, that surely wasn’t the leading Dems’ thinking at the time. But I think it’s clear that the Dems’ ingrained and habitual resistance to changes in Social Security worked out for the best this time – even for libertarians.
Comment by Mona —
May 9, 2007 @ 4:25 am
Jim, I just had a bitter round of arguments at Greenwald’s comments section with the lefty “safety-netters” there who see no problem with a single-payer, universal health care system that makes us all stakeholders in each other’s personal choices that carry any expesnive risks, from drug use, to anal sex, to being sedentary to, well, everything. Nothing scares me as much about healthcare reform as the potential for giving the government the best excuse yet for being the Safety Nazi Patrol.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 9, 2007 @ 5:59 am
I don’t really disagree with either of you.
Comment by G'Kar —
May 9, 2007 @ 6:52 am
The problem, sadly, is that, to quote Jim’s favorite philosopher, you go to the polls with the parties you have, not the parties you wish you had. Which means that the best libertarians can do is determine which option is likely to do the least damage, then look to see if there are ways to mitigate that damage further. I think you’re on to something here, Jim. As depressing as it is from purely libertarian standpoint, from the standpoint of where we’re at now I think this may well be a good starting point towards reaching the least bad possible outcome.
Comment by Thoreau —
May 9, 2007 @ 7:38 am
My approach is simple: When I absolutely have to, I will vote for the party less likely to torture me and send me to prison without a trial. America has become the sort of country where that’s actually an issue in play.
With regard to better and worse factions of the Democratic Party, yeah, I’m all in favor of encouraging the best. Ironically, the hippies and the Richardson types, two very different factions, might represent our best hopes. Richardson seems more responsible than your typical Democrat, and I’m especially encouraged (for reasons that differ than most) by what he said about guns during the debate: “Most gun owners are responsible, law-abiding people.”
Guns are actually not a first-tier issue for me. They really, honestly aren’t. I’ll argue the pro-gun side when the issue comes up, but I don’t pull the lever based on that issue. But what I liked about Richardson’s statement was that it displayed an attitude that goes beyond guns: Why would you want to go after responsible, law-abiding people who aren’t hurting anybody else?
On the end end, strangely, the damn dirty hippy faction of the Democratic Party displays a bit of common sense on a major economic issue: As Mona has blogged here, Kucinich has said smart things about drug legalization, and he’s observed that it’s as much about economics as anything else.
Now, I won’t pretend to agree with Kucinich on the economics of health care. But to hear one of the “hippies” approach the drug issue from an economic standpoint is refreshing. We’re talking about a very large industry and an incredibly expensive effort to regulate it out of existence, which only creates horrendous unintended consequences. When the economic good sense on that issue comes from the left, of all places, it reminds us that the world is a bit more complicated than left vs. right.
The lesson of all this? We live in a dangerous time, where the leadership of one party is moving toward dictatorship, and key figures in another party seem less interested in halting the war and torture and more interested in nationalizing healthcare. In those circumstances, useful allies with good insights might come from the most surprising places. The most socially tolerant and responsible attitudes might come from a former UN ambassador and Clinton administration official. Good sense on war and economics might come from the hippy faction of the party.
I will vote for either Richardson or Kucinich in the primary, and in November of 2008 I will vote for any Democrat except Hillary. If it’s Hillary I’ll vote LP. I simply will not vote for another Presidential relative.
Comment by Thoreau —
May 9, 2007 @ 8:00 am
BTW, Jim, I like your comment that if some sort of social program is inevitable we should choose the least damaging version. It brings to mind something I was going to comment on in the UN thread, regarding the critique of the state and whether people who claim to be anti-government are really competent to run it:
Given the libertarian critique of the state, there are multiple possible responses. If one’s response is “harm reduction”, then I think a person who accepts the libertarian critique of the state is highly qualified to hold office. That sort of person will strive to minimize damage at every turn.
OTOH, if somebody responds in a more cynical fashion with “Well, it’s all bad no matter what, so what does it matter?” that can quickly lead to “Hey, everybody is doing it”, which quickly leads to excesses that aren’t even constrained by some sort of naive sense of duty or whatever.
I have noticed a few libertarians (no, I’m not painting with any broad brushes here) who have responded to the excesses of this administration with (paraphrase) “Well, it’s not like the Democrats have been saints. I mean, it’s the state, so it’s all bad, so why should we be surprised?”
I don’t think a cynical critique of the state causes such excesses, but I do think it can be an easy excuse, and that excuse might be one way of distinguishing anti-state from anti-left.
Comment by LarryM —
May 9, 2007 @ 8:30 am
This is a little OT, but here goes. I’m in many ways a fairly traditional moderate liberal, aside from fairly extreme distaste for the national security state (I would say neoliberal, except that I’m none too happy with the direction in which that movement has gone). I’ve always leavened that with a dash of libertarianism. Recently, I’ve become somehat more libertarian. I’m looking for a specific type of libertarian thinker to read – someone who shares my own somewhat unusual beliefs:
(1) On the one hand, I don’t like the fetishization of property rights. I don’t think that taxation is theft, and I don’t believe that property rights are fundamental in the sense that, say, speech rights are fundemental (though I do believe that property rights do have value in a utilitarian sense). I also don’t have nearly the level of faith in the free market that many libertarians do, while recognizing that markets can, under many or even circumstances, be very effective.
(2) On the other hand, I buy most of the rest of the libertarian critque of government – the moral hazard issues mentioned above, the concern that a strong central government will almost always eventually result in a deprivation of the freedoms that I consider important, both because you can’t guarentee that people of good will will always be in charge, and because people used to wielding power will usual want more, the fact that monied interests will usually have a disproportionate sway in the government, issues involving rent seeking, etc., etc.
So – which libertarian thinkers should I be reading? And what type of libertaian would I be, if I were one? (An anarcho-synicalist, perhaps?)
Comment by Alex Knapp —
May 9, 2007 @ 8:31 am
I think it was Heinlein who said something on the order that making the choice between bad and worse is harder–but much more imporant–than making the choice between good and bad. Not sure if he had politics in mind, but he should have.
I second the Richardson nomination for a couple of reasons. First off, I agree with what most of you have said. Second, the man helped turn around New Mexico’s economy by lowering taxes and lifting some nasty regualtions. Third, he’s got more experience in governance than the three top-tier Democratic candidates COMBINED, and most of that history has been pretty decent for a mainstream politician (which is not to say I agree with what he’s done–just that he’s never, to my understanding, done anything horrible).
But fourth, and foremost, everthing about this guy’s political and personal history suggests that his FIRST INSTINCT is to negotiate and approach things diplomatically, rather than fight.
That’s an instinct that more politicians need.
Comment by Alex Knapp —
May 9, 2007 @ 8:32 am
LarryM-
I’d say the man you’re looking for is Thomas Paine.
Comment by Eric Martin —
May 9, 2007 @ 9:29 am
National health insurance will breed incremental insouciance about diet and other personal habits.
Is this true? Did the countries with such insurance programs experience such a shift when implemented? I’m thinking Western Europe, and the Mediterranean states in particular.
Comment by ajay —
May 9, 2007 @ 9:48 am
Silly Eric Martin. This is what Econ 101 predicts, so this is what must happen. Facts are superfluous to the True Believer.
(In fact, of course, the introduction of national healthcare systems in European countries came just before a significant increase in life expectancy and a significant drop in morbidity. But it’s difficult to tell whether the two are related, given that it was also accompanied by massive economic growth.)
(It would also be rude to point out that there are other disincentives to illness along with the financial ones; for example, the fact that having a heart attack Really Hurts.)
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 9, 2007 @ 9:53 am
ajay, what makes the familiar “Econ 101″ jibe especially asinine is that, pretty obviously, there exist plenty of professional economists who make the same arguments. They can be right or wrong, but they’re certainly schooled. Not every funny Atrios makes is actually telling.
Comment by Mona —
May 9, 2007 @ 11:12 am
The other thing to keep in mind is that the U.S. has a Calvinist streak that runs wide and deep, among many varieties om the left and right. Europeans, not so much.
Give us a nationalized, single-payer health care system and a Calvinist American populace will expand its reasons to prohibit, criminalise and control “bad” substances and behaviors.
Comment by Donald Johnson —
May 9, 2007 @ 11:17 am
What would be nice is if the Democratic party became the dirty hippies and the Henley-style libertarians, rather than the dirty hippies and the DLC.
Actually, I’m not sure how that’d work out, but at least there’d be unanimity on the anti-imperialist front.
Comment by Phillip J. Birmingham —
May 9, 2007 @ 11:27 am
The other thing to keep in mind is that the U.S. has a Calvinist streak that runs wide and deep, among many varieties om the left and right. Europeans, not so much.
Give us a nationalized, single-payer health care system and a Calvinist American populace will expand its reasons to prohibit, criminalise and control “bad†substances and behaviors.
Dead on, Mona. I can’t tell you how many arguments I’ve been in on drug legalization where the other guy says something to the effect that “I would be in favor of legalizing drugs if we could find some other way to penalize people for taking them.”
Comment by Gsnorgathon —
May 9, 2007 @ 11:56 am
“…I think we libertarians should prefer more subsidized vice to more enforced virtue.”
.
That’s a libertarian program I can really get behind. You go, Jim!
Comment by Walt —
May 9, 2007 @ 12:23 pm
Ajay: There are plenty of places on the internet for snark. It would be nice to have one place where we can have reasonable conversations.
Comment by Uncle Kvetch —
May 9, 2007 @ 12:24 pm
Jim, you responded to ajay but not to Eric Martin’s original comment (#10) that ajay was responding to. So, to restate: how do you square your assertion that
National health insurance will breed incremental insouciance about diet and other personal habits.
with the fact that the one developed country without some form of universal health insurance is far and away the fattest?
Comment by Larry —
May 9, 2007 @ 12:26 pm
Jim @13, you responded to ajay’s “Econ 101/True Believer” jibe, but didn’t respond to his argument, that facts show that in Europe at least, universal single-payer health care has been a very positive thing. I couldn’t believe that an intelligent guy like you would actually say: “National health insurance will breed incremental insouciance about diet and other personal habits.” This is what you worry about?
While national health insurance is certainly no panacea to the country’s health care problems, I think a more likely prediction is: national health insurance will mean a healthier populace due to inexpensive, universal preventative care. It will also likely reduce the percentage of the GDP spent on health care by a huge factor by cutting out the useless, expensive administration and paper shuffling of the big insurance carriers.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 9, 2007 @ 12:34 pm
Fair points, guys. I’m talking about the logical effect at the margin here in a multivariable problem. It’s just a restatement of the truism that if you lower the cost of something you’ll tend, all other things being equal, to get more of it. I completely agree that the moral hazard effect of free health care may be swamped by other cultural, political and economic factors.
But recall that, as we saw with Ben Adler last month, the social cost argument will get used regardless of the actual size of the moral hazard.
Comment by Eric Martin —
May 9, 2007 @ 12:54 pm
But recall that, as we saw with Ben Adler last month, the social cost argument will get used regardless of the actual size of the moral hazard.
True. But personally, I’d rather some form of nationalized health care, and then fight those “social cost” battles with gusto when they arrive.
Mona’s fears, yours and all others expressed along those lines are well founded. But the support for social cost type policies would not be insurmountable.
Just as America has a Calvinist streak, it also has an individualistic streak.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 9, 2007 @ 12:58 pm
Eric, is it timely for me to remind people that the actual thesis of my piece is, “Like it or not, something like national health care is coming, therefore we should be prepared to fight the ’social cost’ battles with gusto when they arrive?”
Comment by Larry —
May 9, 2007 @ 1:06 pm
Jim, I think what you should be spending your time worrying about is that a “national health care” program is hijacked by the big corporations to look something like Bush’s medicare drug program: more added monetary cost (forget social cost) and completely unnecessary levels of bureaucracy. That should be our main worry now. If, in fact, it is inevitable, I’m not worrying that people will abuse the system (which some will), but that corporations will (with no value added).
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 9, 2007 @ 1:11 pm
Larry, that’s an interesting thought. When I get to the question of what sort of positive program libertarians can pursue during the coming period of economic populism, I’m going to talk about agitating to curtail various corporate-welfare measures and rent-seeking behaviors by businesses.
Comment by Eric Martin —
May 9, 2007 @ 1:26 pm
Impeccable timing, as usual, Mssr. Henley.
I was just trying to bring it back to your thesis – which I happen to support wholeheartedly – and assuage the fears of the eventual hyper-legislating of social cost prohibitions.
[currently amassing ample supplies of gusto for subsequent battles, GRRRR]
Comment by Leonard —
May 9, 2007 @ 2:36 pm
LarryM – unfortunately, I can’t think of any modern libertarians to recommend to you. Jim here is about as good as you’re gonna find in terms of “sharing your unusual beliefs”, and even he is sympathetic to “taxation is theft” even though he doesn’t think there’s any way to avoid it.
One of the intriguing things about ideology (or vexing, depending on viewpoint), it that it comes in lumps. Private property is very important, though I’d not say fundamental, to libertarianism because it is the alternative to state control. There are no other stable alternatives, at least not compatible with free people. (Communitarian ownership schemes are possible with ownership level “in between”, but these are not stable if the people are free to move.)
The 19th century libertarians and anarchists are probably closest to where you are. Guys like Lysander Spooner or Benjamin Tucker. This was before socialism as a full-blown ideology had completely captured the ideological left, so there was a lot more room there for individualism. There were far fewer ideas about big government stuff that ought to be, and the natal community (while in decline) was still a fairly viable intermediate level of ownership.
You probably do already read Alexander Cockburn, but he may be the man on the hard left most similar to you. He’s pretty good on a lot of individual rights, as well as being deeply sceptical of power and its (ab)use.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
May 9, 2007 @ 2:46 pm
Jim, I thought just that sort of thing was Julian Sanchez’s take on”liberaltarianism” – give up on opposing or resisting various expansions of government, and just fight to make things a hair less onerous than they could be. (Along with Step 2: ???, and Step 3: liberals start listening to us, but that’s a side issue.)
I don’t know. It all makes some sense to me of course, but at some level, I don’t see the bright, shinning difference between something like “Yeah, we’re going to have national health care in the foreseeable future, let’s not fight that and just try to tackle certain problems as they come up,” and “Yeah, we’re going to have the drug war for the foreseeable future, let’s not fight that and just try to tackle certain problems as they come up.” Aside from the “But I oppose those things…” objection, which we’re ignoring, I don’t see what the advantage of such a stance is.
I mean, it’s one thing to say “We’d have a better chance with a targeted effort to solve this aspect of the problem,” – but how exactly does that work? Are we somehow expecting less resistance or greater acceptance because we’ve shifted from opposition to specific criticism? If a libertarian criticizes without arguing outright opposition on such issues, those criticisms get dismissed because they’re just “stealth efforts” to get what s/he “really wants”. It’s like the more honest and less knee-jerk Blue folks pointed out in response to the liberaltarian stuff in the first place – such groups don’t want our ideas on how to build and retrench their programs.
Or, put another way, if someone’s a proponent of a plan, what credence is s/he going to give to someone who argues “harm reduction” when the proponent knows that person considers the very plan the proponent supports to be “harm”?
Now, the thing is, I see a difference between what I’m arguing here and whether to bother voting (or voting for major-party candidates), so I may just be off on a barely-relevant tangent.
Comment by jlw —
May 9, 2007 @ 3:07 pm
As someone on the center-left, what I think we (um, those on the center-left who generally vote Democratic) need from liberatarians is counter-proposals: ways to achieve progressive goals in really elegant ways. Right now, the Democratic Party is in thrall to a generation of consultant-neutered leaders and corporate-owned “intellectuals” who, even if they can (sometimes) identify the right problem, can’t come up with light-weight, elegant solutions.
I know that Social Security is the bete noir for many libertarians, but look at what it replaced–not just rampant poverty among the elderly, but a system of county- and state-run “farms” and old-folks homes that housed the indigent. I find it hard to swallow that replacing state-run and state-ruled institutions with cash pensions is a net loss of freedom. Likewise, the idea of a guaranteed income that was popular in the mid-20th century seems more pro-freedom than the complex rule-based welfare and child aide that it was to replace, and the child tax credit that is the guaranteed income’s offspring seems an improvement over the previous status quo.
And contra the mutually incompatable arguments of moral hazard and moralizing intrusiveness, I see a guaranteed health insurance as a remarkably pro-freedom program. At present, many people (such as, ahem, me) are limited in their choice of careers because they can’t purchase health insurance in the open market. (Having a heart attack at 35 will do that, no matter who healthy you are now.) Breaking the non-sensical bond between employment status and health care will free up millions to become more entrepreneurial, to take a chance starting small businesses or working for the kinds of start-ups that will produce more good down the line than the large, lumbering organizations that can offer insurance. A moral hazard? Perhaps, but paradoxically, an America that doesn’t have to worry about what happens if they get sick might be more willing to embrace libertarian or neoliberal reforms in other areas.
I mean, most people are only willing to try to fly on the trapeze if they know there a strong safety net there to catch them.
There are “libertarian” ways to achieve liberal goals–ways that increase the number of real options and useful liberty that people can enjoy–and I think it’s time better spent developing those ideas rather than hitting the taxation-is-slavery macro over and over again.
Comment by Kenneth Fair —
May 9, 2007 @ 3:18 pm
Moral hazards are an economic problem, but I’ve never really understood why libertarianism seems to treat them as the only economic problem, or even the most important one. For instance, having health insurance does introduce the moral hazard that I might not take care of myself as well as I otherwise would. But is that the only consideration I face? Is it even close to being the most important factor in my daily decision-making? Of course not. It’s not even close to being the most important factor in my health-care decisions, let alone in my other daily decisions that indirectly affect my health.
If I went without health insurance, I might be more efficient in making decisions that affected my health. But I guarantee you that efficiency gain would be offset by the inefficiencies introduced from worrying about and preparing for low-probability catastrophic events.
Insurance reduces risk by spreading it around. It is necessarily inefficient – the redistribution carries a cost – but it leads to greater efficiency overall because other decisions can be made more effectively.
Given that health insurance is a necessary evil, the question is how best to provide that insurance to the population at large. And here, there’s really no doubt on the evidence that single-payer health insurance gives better health outcomes at a lower total cost than our current system. We have more than enough evidence from other developed nations to know this.
I support single-payer health insurance because it’s more efficient than what we have now. The additional benefits of insuring everyone and improving health through preventive care are gravy on top.
Comment by Leonard —
May 9, 2007 @ 3:22 pm
Hmm, I think it depends on the particular vices and virtues and the their costs/benefits, both on their own terms and in terms of enforcement.
If you have a gaping, obvious, popular, and costly exploit to a socialist program, you should plug it. For example, requiring people on welfare to get jobs. The social costs of subsidizing idleness are large, and it’s clear what the person on welfare ought to do (from the POV of the taxpayer).
On the other hand, if the exploit is unpopular, or cheap, etc., then I probably would agree that it’s not worth worrying about. So some people getting food stamps will swap them for drugs, which hurts them. OTOH, it’s a self-destructive course and thus not super popular. And it’s expensive and difficult to police.
Comment by T. Paine —
May 9, 2007 @ 4:43 pm
National health insurance will breed incremental insouciance about diet and other personal habits.
Yeah, thank goodness we’re a healthy nation of athletes and yoga gurus right now. There might be a lot of out of shape and overweight people if we didn’t have such a dynamic private insurance system.
…
Oh, wait…
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 9, 2007 @ 4:54 pm
Is “incremental” really a hard word?
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
May 9, 2007 @ 4:54 pm
“I said at the time that the practical problem with Brink’s program is that there’s no serious constituency within the Democratic Party for the sort of entitlement restructuring that Brink made the linchpin of his original article.”
At the risk of damaging my credibility, I’d say there are constituencies in the Democratic party that can be brought over to supporting an agenda of limited government (or, if not truly limited government, at least government that is more limited than what we have now).
A few idle speculations:
1.) When I read Radley Balko’s work about the War On Drugs, I thought that perhaps a politician of libertarian instincts might be able to appeal to African-American voters by campaigning to undo the damage that’s been done. Obviously, such a politician would be viewed with suspicion by black voters. The politician would have to be quite sincerely passionate in his/her outrage regarding The War On Drugs to convince African Americans to vote for them.
2.) Among high-tech companies, such as the one I work, I run into a lot of people that meet Chris Nolan’s definition of a progressive libertarian. She defined this group as “progressive for their good-hearted desire to change and order their world, Libertarian for their cold-eyed faith in the bottom line”. These people are currently loyal to the Democratic party, but are much more libertarian than the average Democrat.
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
May 9, 2007 @ 5:06 pm
“I think a more likely prediction is: national health insurance will mean a healthier populace due to inexpensive, universal preventative care”
That’s not at all certain. There was a recent article in Scientific American (might have been this one) that pointed out that the upper middle class in America had the same risk level for diabetes, heart disease, and other illnesses of old age, as did the poorest citizens of Britain. And, the article noted, the upper middle class in America generally has universal health care. So an abundance of health care does not necessarily mean that people will end up healthier.
(The article suggested that life in America is more stressful than in other countries, and that the increased stress lead to the high rate of stress-related illnesses.)
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
May 9, 2007 @ 5:14 pm
I think Hayek was open to the idea of universal health care. This is from page 133 of The Road To Serfdom:
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
May 9, 2007 @ 5:16 pm
“the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong”
Every time I re-read Hayek I am reminded, again, what an agile thinker he was, and how hard it is to pin him down with a simple label such as “libertarian”.
Comment by Uncle Kvetch —
May 9, 2007 @ 5:22 pm
(The article suggested that life in America is more stressful than in other countries, and that the increased stress lead to the high rate of stress-related illnesses.)
And being a boring old JPL (just plain lefty), I can’t help but wonder whether trying to stay afloat in a winner-take-all society, with only a fraction of the protections afforded by a social democracy, might not make life just a tad more stressful.
Comment by Fledermaus —
May 9, 2007 @ 5:27 pm
I fall into this category as well. I really don’t have a problem with regulating the hell out of corporations. But I’m also open to any argument that shows that regulatory scheme is not achieving its goals or that the adverse effects outwiegh any benefit, or that it works well but a more limited program would work just as well.
I am not convinced by general arguments that regulation x is bad because it interferes with the operation of the free market, without any additional argument. After all there must have been an original problem that the free market wasn’t addressing and that led to the regulation.
Comment by Mona —
May 9, 2007 @ 6:29 pm
Lawrence Krubner @35, I have quoted that Hayek passage several times, to some on the right who don’t want to hear it. Hayek was not opposed to all safety net programs, but he was extremely concerned that they not interfere with markets, not empower the state, not contract liberty, and most definitely not become command and control by the state.
That’s why if national health care is upon us — and it is — I’d hope that Cato is involved in drafting most of the solution.
Comment by Leonard —
May 9, 2007 @ 6:44 pm
Lawrence, Hayek appeared to be more open to state action than many modern libertarians. But then again, we know more now. For all of his foresight for a man immersed in a socialist zeitgeist, he was still subject to it.
To take one example, while I would agree with him in the abstract that truly unpredictable events might be subjects of state action, without any moral hazard, that’s not what we see in real life. Here, we have every disaster, no matter how predictable, getting “emergency” federal “assistance”. And that includes perfectly predictable “acts of God”, like, say, hurricanes hitting the Gulf coast. We know this happens, and even have some understanding of why. Or, the Mississippi flooding. Or, the shocking development of a tornado in Kansas. No! Who could have predicted it?
In real life, any state power will be expanded methodically and inexorably until it hits powerful opposition. And that does not include such scholarly considerations as “really really actually and actuarially unpredictable”. Rather, considerations such as “popular” in a democracy, or “seem to Do Something because the horses are out of the barn and reelection looms”.
Comment by Leonard —
May 9, 2007 @ 6:51 pm
Related to the debate over socializing health care: check out this post over at Overcoming Bias.
A challenge to the idea of free health care, anyway. Not necessarily socialized health care with nanny-state controls. But certainly confirmation that people react as microeconomics predicts to economic incentives.
Comment by Steve —
May 9, 2007 @ 7:11 pm
Jim, ignoring the specifics of your analysis here, I think there’s a real movement towards a Hayekian skepticism about unintended consequences on the left side of the punditocracy (witness the immediate backlash to Garance Franke-Ruta’s musings about the solution to problem of Girls Gone Wild). There’s nothing like seven years of truly disastrous governance to remind liberals of the dangerous that can arise from putting structures into place that assume mere ordinary incompetence.
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
May 9, 2007 @ 10:24 pm
“Hayek appeared to be more open to state action than many modern libertarians. But then again, we know more now….. In real life, any state power will be expanded methodically and inexorably until it hits powerful opposition. And that does not include such scholarly considerations as “really really actually and actuarially unpredictableâ€.”
I hope I’m misreading you, but it sounds like you’re saying Hayek lived in innocent times, and was unaware that government programs, once started, tend to expand.
Comment by Chris M. —
May 9, 2007 @ 11:47 pm
I majored in econ (honors to boot). After two econ classes you’re a raving libertarian. Then literally every class you take is about why markets aren’t working the way you’d expect.
LarryM, I’m with you. I’m a baseline libertarian, but after making so many exceptions (free education, social safety net, compulsory savings, universal health insurance) I’m basically a liberal. This is basically a pragmatic position. I just roll my eyes when my fellow liberals tinker with tax credits for this or that. I guess the Republicans do that too.
My favorite writers:
Robert H. Frank – Choosing the Right Pond
Richard Rorty – Achieving Our Country
Michael Lind – The Next American Nation; The Radical Center
None of these writers are libertarians, but they’re cranky liberals, which I like.
I think the Frank book is exactly what you’ll want. He takes the libertarian perspective seriously.
Comment by Leonard —
May 10, 2007 @ 12:01 am
Hayek wrote Serfdom before libertarians had fully articulated the idea of public choice theory. Nor was it as obvious in 1944 that the democratic nanny state was as creepy as it has since proven to be. Back then, it was a social struggle to control the stuff the old-line socialists cared out: the means of production. Factories. Jobs. I’m against all that, but I can see why a man would want dispossess his employer; the terms of his employment affect him, deeply and directly. Whereas, the modern nanny activist state, hectoring people to stop smoking via police pressure, offends me in a way the socialists don’t, exactly because they don’t benefit from the “improvements” they’re trying to force others into. Mind your own business!
So, yes, that was a more innocent time. People smoked like chimneys and drank like fish, and they liked it!
The quote you have shows, to my eye, a certain naivity about how the state uses media events. Well, unless you think that Hayek thought that “disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself nor make provision for the consequences” would be exceedingly rare, and that even having stepped in on a rare occasion, the state would not set up a permanent apparatus to deal with them. But that’s not how I take it. Would Hayek revise his views in light of the current size, power, and political use of FEMA?
Comment by ajay —
May 10, 2007 @ 5:20 am
Nor was it as obvious in 1944 that the democratic nanny state was as creepy as it has since proven to be.
Not sure about this. In 1944 the “nanny state” existed, at least in Britain (where Hayek was writing) at a level that modern citizens can barely imagine. There were compulsory ID cards and ration books. People were encouraged to keep an eye on their neighbours for “espionage or sabotage”. Newspapers were threatened with banning if they were judged to be “defeatist”. (The Daily Herald, for example). It’s true that you could smoke in a pub, but the pub’s opening hours were severely restricted. Government propaganda campaigns were aimed at every aspect of life: recycle your kitchen waste! Collect old rags! Separate your rubbish and recycle paper! Use your handkerchief to avoid passing on your cold to other people! Eat more carrots! Eat more spinach! Grow your own vegetables! Don’t waste leftovers! Is your journey really necessary? Go on foot if you can! Cook your potato peelings in a Woolton Pie! Use the new National Flour – this is how! Maintain the blackout! Don’t gossip! Don’t pass on rumours!
This is what life was like in a society at war, and this is what Hayek – and, for that matter, Orwell – were writing about. The idea that wartime Britain was less of a “nanny state” than modern Britain or America is a very odd one.
(On the health issue, it’s also a matter of record that Britons came out of the twelve years of rationing a lot healthier than they went in – or had ever been. For the first time, a healthy diet had actually been forced on them. This is still not a very good argument for rationing.)
Comment by Leonard —
May 10, 2007 @ 9:42 am
ajay, all that stuff is nannying of a sort, but it’s not of the for-your-own-good variety, which is the one which really offends me. As C. S. Lewis put it: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
The British state in the 40s were trying to mold people to a end: to fight the Germans. And the Nazis really were a threat worth worrying about (by contrast to say, oh, Saddam). In general, I’m against that sort of thing — war bad! war socialism bad! — but at least the reasoning behind it is something I appreciate. If I want to fight a war using your stuff, it makes sense for me to hector and oppress you to conserve it.
There’s a natural limit to “nannying” intended to extract resources for war: wars end. But there is no limit, as Lewis points out, to nannying when well intended. Your own good ceases only when you die.
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
May 10, 2007 @ 10:00 am
“Would Hayek revise his views in light of the current size, power, and political use of FEMA?”
You are making many, many, many assumptions. From what I can tell, all of them are unjustified. You seem to be thinking that when Hayek speaks of social insurance, he actually means a program like FEMA. You’re also implying that Hayek would, in fact, be supportive of a program like FEMA. You do this despite the fact that the paragraph I quote mentions that he wanted to preserve the system of competition. Why is it that, in your mind, insurance means FEMA? Why do you feel that Hayek, of all people, would support a program where the government does everything and no space is left open for the private sector to help out?
Insurance, to be clear, could mean simply disbursing money after a disaster has occurred. The citizens receiving the money could then use it to hire private sector agents who could do the work of rebuilding. Insurance can actually mean a lot of things. An insurance scheme can be structured a lot of ways. There are many points of detail where those wishing to preserve the competitive system and those wishing to supercede it by something different will disagree on the details of such schemes. There is no reason to assume that FEMA is the one and only way to do such things.
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
May 10, 2007 @ 10:02 am
“There’s a natural limit to “nannying†intended to extract resources for war: wars end.”
This sentence is hopelessly optimistic.
Comment by Glaivester —
May 10, 2007 @ 11:27 am
But why are economic populist measures getting so much more popular?
Could it be that working class wages have dropped? But why?
Could it have anything to do with the endless supply of cheap labor we are importing from Latin America?
No, no, a thousand times no! Open borders is the prime libertarian commitment! If we have to compromise on an issue, let it be socialism rather than border control!
Comment by Leonard —
May 10, 2007 @ 1:13 pm
Lawrence, the point I’m working on here is that any state response to an ongoing problem will not, cannot, remain limited. It will become bureaucratized. FEMA is a perfect example of this (see the history at wiki). It just sort of evolved, from nothing to ad hoc Congressional and executive aid, to being formalized into various agencies, then gradually expanding further to cover more things, be used more often, etc. ‘Til we get what there is now, where a flood or tornado anywhere sends the President scrambling to “help”. And people just keep building on floodplains, building cheaply in hurricane and tornado-prone country, secure in the knowledge that if the Big One hits, Uncle Sam will be there to pick up the tab when, eventually, another storm hits.
Hayek should have known this, at least by the end of his life, but I think it was less obvious in 1944. Certainly if he was ever for it, he had turned against nationalizing healthcare by the 60s, but I don’t know what he thought about disasters. (Britain doesn’t get semi-predictable natural disasters the way that the USA gets floods, hurricanes, and tornados.)
As for “wars end”, my meaning was, of course “real” wars. Two nation-states duking it out to decide who gets to rule a particular territory. Not the metaphorical kind of war, “wars” on drugs, cancer, terra, etc.
Comment by Lawrence Krubner —
May 10, 2007 @ 9:20 pm
“Could it have anything to do with the endless supply of cheap labor we are importing from Latin America?”
How much education do these immigrants have? Are they competing against doctors, lawyers or computer programmers? Whose wages would be effected? The unskilled? But how much do these immigrants buy? Don’t they need food? Don’t they rent some place to live? Surely most of their wages go back into the American economy? So, perhaps, they are increasing demand, and therefore possibly raising wages?
Can you suggest why their labor might put more downward pressure on wages than their spending puts upward pressure on wages?
Comment by ajay —
May 11, 2007 @ 9:23 am
all that stuff is nannying of a sort, but it’s not of the for-your-own-good variety, which is the one which really offends me.
So you’re actually more offended by someone saying “You shouldn’t smoke; it’ll give you cancer, and I don’t want you to get cancer” than by someone saying “You shouldn’t smoke because it is consuming resources – including your own health – which I wish to tell you how to use”?
Huh. OK.
Comment by Leonard —
May 11, 2007 @ 10:19 am
ajay, depends on who “someone” is. If it someone I know, then no. If it is a stranger, which includes you and the state: yes.
It also depends on how you construe “want”, or “wish”. Neither of those is particularly offensive; but that’s not what we have been talking about. Rather, we have been talking about the law, which is an imperative backed by force. “You will not smoke, and if you do I’ll fine you and if you resist that I am willing to escalate the violence all the way up to the point of killing you, if need be, to get my way — because smoking might give you cancer, and that could kill you, and I care.” People that care about others don’t aggress against them. Go ahead and want or wish good ideas for me all you want. Talk it up. But if your idea of caring for me includes initiating aggression against me “for my own good”, please stop caring.