Category: Political Philosophy

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Barack Obama Criticism Economics Financial Crisis History Morality Political Philosophy Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

Must-Reads of the Week: Krugman v. Ferguson, Ted Kennedy again, Hank Paulson, Sedaris, and Phreaking

This week there are quite a few good pieces to take a look at over the long weekend – in between games of beer pong, or BBQs…

Krugman v. Ferguson. Matthew Lynn in the Times of London wrote a feature on the “war” over the response to the economic crisis going on between the American Princeton Professor, New York Times columnist, Nobel-prize winner, and noted liberal Paul Krugman and British Harvard Professor, Financial Times columnist, and noted conservative Niall Ferguson. I had been following it closely already, but this article had a number of more details and conveyed the story arc well. Meanwhile, Krugman released another attack on Ferguson – indirectly though – in which he laid out his vision (as a kind of short intellectual history of economics in the 20th and 21st centuries) of what happened in the most recent crisis, why so many economists got it wrong, and why we’re taking the right steps now:

As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.

The article is missing Krugman’s usual zingers and partisan swipes – and is really quite good. It also reminds you that Ferguson is an historian – not an economist.

Ted Kennedy, leaky vessel. Sam Tanenhaus writes about Senator Ted Kennedy as a kind of magnificent character, capturing him and the movement he led better than most others:

But if the art of governance did not redeem Mr. Kennedy, it irradiated him, and the liberalism he personified. At a time when government itself had fallen into disrepute Mr. Kennedy applied himself diligently to its exacting discipline, and wrested whatever small victories he could from the machinery he had learned to operate so well. Whether or not his compass was finally true, he endured as the battered, leaky vessel through which the legislative arts recovered some of their lost glory.

Hank Paulson. Todd Purdhum of Vanity Fair finally writes his piece about his many conversations with Hank Paulson before and during the financial crisis – a piece notable for the fact that Paulson seemed exceptionally forthcoming as he knew the piece wouldn’t come out until well after he had left public office.

The Wisdom of David Sedaris. A nice story from last week’s New Yorker:

[S]he invited us to picture a four-burner stove.

“Gas or electric?” Hugh asked, and she said that it didn’t matter.

This was not a real stove but a symbolic one, used to prove a point at a management seminar she’d once attended. “One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work.” The gist, she said, was that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.

Pat has her own business, a good one that’s allowing her to retire at fifty-five. She owns three houses, and two cars, but, even without the stuff, she seems like a genuinely happy person. And that alone constitutes success.

I asked which two burners she had cut off, and she said that the first to go had been family. After that, she switched off her health. “How about you?”

I thought for a moment, and said that I’d cut off my friends. “It’s nothing to be proud of, but after meeting Hugh I quit making an effort.”

“And what else?” she asked.

“Health, I guess.”

Hugh’s answer was work.

“And?”

“Just work,” he said.

Phone Phreak. David Kushner in Rolling Stone features the story of a poor, fat, lonely, blind boy who finds a way to be happy as a phone phreaker (a kind of hacker on telephone lines.) The boy – Matthew Weigman – submerges himself in the culture, and due to his unique skillset is able to become an almost cartoon villain, without the manic desire to take over the world. Instead, he unleashes SWAT teams on girls who refuse to have phone sex with him, as he fakes calls from inside their house pretending he is holding them hostage; or ferrets out all the names and biographies of the team tracking him down, which he jovially explains to an FBI agent who comes to recruit him.

Categories
Humor Libertarianism Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

Are You A Libertarian If…

DarkSyde at the Daily Kos lists the “Top 10 Signs You Might Not Be A Libertarian.” It captures the silliness of the claims some people make – especially those who only fled the label “Republican” as George W. Bush became less popular:

[I]f you think government should stay the hell out of people’s private business — except when kidnapping citizens and rendering them to secret overseas torture prisons, snooping around the bedrooms of consenting adults, policing a woman’s uterus, or conducting warrantless wire taps, you are no Libertarian.

Check it out. Funny, yet true – the best combination.

Categories
Barack Obama Health care Political Philosophy Politics The Opinionsphere

What Do Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and Che Guevera Have in Common?

[digg-reddit-me] Answer: Not much.

But Democracy in America’s anonymous blogger seems to think that some of liberal bloggers Ezra Klein’s and Matt Yglesias’s recent posts suggest a new and profound (indeed revolutionary) disenchantment with our means of governance. DiA cites Klein who recently wrote:

[Health care] like climate change, is a litmus test for our government. Both are serious, foreseeable and solvable threats to our society. One threatens to bankrupt the country. The other threatens irreversible damage to the planet we live on. Responding to such threats is the test of a political system. And our system will fail it. We will not avert catastrophic climate change. We will not protect ourselves from health-care inflation.

Yglesias recently wrote this post I’ve noted before explaining how our current media-political system can be manipulated so easily by people acting in bad faith – and how that leads to bad policy outcomes.

DiA tries to summarize this generation of pundits and policy wonks – led by Klein and Yglesias:

Mr Klein exemplifies the generation of young left-leaning policy wonks, journalists and activists who have been formed politically by the reaction against Bush-era conservatism, and for whom the Obama presidency represents the first experience of wielding political power. Like Mr Klein, many of these young progressives are fundamentally moderate, process-oriented wonks who, long before the Obama campaign even began, had accepted that the pragmatic limitations of real-world American politics rule out any utopian, or even first-best, solutions to most public-policy problems. They have happily dedicated themselves to figuring out what kinds of reform are possible within the constraints of corporate and interest-group lobbying, ideological and partisan divisions, and America’s kludgey, creaking 220-year-old machinery of government.

But now, DiA suggests, they have abandoned this moderation and want a revolution – that they have become disillusioned about our media-political processes due to Obama’s lack of success.

Certainly, Klein and Yglesias are extremely critical of the processes by which policy is created and by which the public views and understands policy debates. They believe that this system is broken. But both believed this before Barack Obama’s recent troubles – as Yglesias himself pointed out in response to DiA.

What DiA is missing is that reformists (towards both the right and left, but here I will look only at the left) have long been extremely critical of our media-political process works. Just two days ago, in The American Prospect, executive editor Mark Schmitt wrote:

[T]he idea that America’s “existing democratic institutions are strong enough to deliver accountability ” flies in the face of all observed reality. For at least eight years, those institutions consistently failed to deliver accountability, and the Department of Justice and courts likewise failed to punish some of the greatest abuses of power in our history…

As Al Gore wrote in his book describing The Assault on Reason:

American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong.

Or look at Lawrence Lessig’s lecture on Corruption – which eloquently makes the case for “disinterestedness” as one of America’s key founding principles which has been since lost. Read Glenn Greenwald’s blog – which constantly points out the deep and serious faults in our media-political processes. Obama himself made a number of these arguments. Virtually every intellectual reformist has a “theory of what’s wrong” – and what none of them seem to disagree with is that something is wrong.

While in other times, reformers may have focused more on accomplishing something regarding important issues – temperance, Wall Street greed, environmental issues, discrimination – today, the central problem facing reformers is how to reform the system itself. This is the essence of the reform movement today – from Obama to Gore, Lessig to Yglesias, Klein to van Heuvel.

Reformers have presented compelling critiques of how the media presents issues; of how Congress deals with issues; of how long-term problems such as an increasing number of uninsured, spiraling health care costs, climate change, copyright expansion, and many others are ignored or marginalized because any attempt to address these issues involves significant obstacles and risks in the present for an uncertain future benefit. One of the key beliefs that makes reformers reformers today is their understanding that America’s political system is broken and that our traditional democratic institutions just aren’t up to the job of managing serious and difficult areas and making rational, long-term decisions when the payoff only comes after policy-makers are out of office.

This idea was the basis of my post yesterday discussing Obama’s focus on outsourcing authority to independent, technocratic institutions as a way of getting around our broken media-political system.

Continue reading “What Do Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and Che Guevera Have in Common?”

Categories
Barack Obama Conservativism Criticism Financial Crisis Latin America Politics

In Case You Missed It: Best Reads of the Week on Whining Conservatives, Internet Battles, Peru, The Single Life, and the Unborn

1. Whiny Conservatives. David Frum scolds conservatives for  quite whining and points out how silly they look doing so given how far the conservative movement has moved America since it gained power:

In 1975, the federal government set the price of every airline ticket, every ton of rail freight, every cubic foot of natural gas and every barrel of oil. It controlled the interest rates paid on checking accounts and the commission charged by stockbrokers. If you wanted to ship a crate of lettuce from one state to another, you first had to file a routemap with a federal agency. It was a crime for a private citizen to own a gold coin. The draft had ended only two years before, but not until 1975 itself did Congress formally end the state of emergency (and the special grant of presidential powers) declared at US entry into the First World War.

2. The Battle for the Internets. Fred Vogelstein writes in Wired about the brewing battle between Facebook and Google for the internet.

3. Peru’s Moment. Most of the world has lost ground in the financial crisis and recession. Daniel Gross in Newsweek tells the story of one country that has managed the financial crisis perfectly (Peru), and their secret ingredient: leadership in the years leading up to the crisis:

In the latter half of 2008, being a poor, export-dependent, commodity-producing country set you up for a vicious downturn. But Peru has weathered the storm, in large part because President Alan García, an old leftist turned center-leftist, and the Peruvian central bank have proved adept at a set of capabilities notably lacking in the United States in recent years: sound fiscal and financial management. Fearful of a return of hyperinflation amid rapid growth, Peru’s central bank raised interest rates throughout 2008. Instead of spending the foreign currency that piled up on its books ($32 billion at the end of 2008), the government saved it. In 2008, Peru ran a $3.3 billion budget surplus.
And so, when troubles came, it was able to respond in textbook fashion. In December 2008, García announced a stimulus program, promising to boost government spending by $3.2 billion, and to take up to $10 billion in further measures. The total of $13 billion in promised stimulus doesn’t sound like much, but that’s equal to about 10 percent of Peru’s GDP.

4. New York Wins Again. Forbes has released a list of the top cities for singles. New York is – as in everything else – number one.

5. This strong, invisible and unacknowledged force. David Brooks (in a piece that Yglesias ridiculed, justly on some grounds) – manages to write an interesting meditation on the importance of the unborn to our society:

People live in a compact between the dead, the living and the unborn, and the value of the thought experiment is that it reminds us of the power posterity holds over our lives.

Bonus: This song came out months ago, but I just starting enjoying it recently, so here’s to sharing:

[Image by me.]

Categories
Barack Obama Liberalism Libertarianism Political Philosophy Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere

The Libertarian-Democratic Alliance Will Survive

[digg-reddit-me]Jon Henke over at The Next Right scoffs now at Markos Moulitsas’s prediction – a few years back – of “an emerging brand of ‘libertarian Democrats.'” Henke makes two mistakes in his scoff: first, he equates the tea bagging movement with libertarianism; and second, he is extrapolating from the immediate post-election dynamics to more general party dynamics in the future.

In the first, he is certainly right that the Tea Bagging movement has adopted libertarian themes and rhetoric – and there are certainly libertarians among this group. But there are also many right-wingers of other sorts. And if the Tea Baggers truly were outraged by government spending, they had eight years to get excited before Obama took office. The Tea Bagging movement is an odd combination of right-wingers angry with Obama using libertarian rhetoric and libertarians who are fed up with everyone in American politics except Ron Paul. But I’d be pretty certain that the majority of people at these rallies decrying socialism and government interference also join in the right-wing’s attempts to demonize Obama for his modest steps in reining in the national security state.  Henke – in equating the Tea Bagging movement and libertarianism does libertarians a rather severe disservice.

Second, it was inevitable that the libertarians that were part of the anti-Bush coalition would not fit so well into the pro-Obama coalition, despite their support for Obama over McCain in 2008. It was always clear that Obama would not move fast enough on national security matters – and would not even attempt to go far enough for libertarians – and that Obama’s domestic agenda, especially health care, goes against libertarian principles. That said, there are significant areas of agreement between libertarians, progressives, and liberals – and these are considerably stronger than those between right-wingers, Republicans and libertarians. On economic matters, the Republican Party has done very little to embrace free market reforms – instead, embracing a form of crony capitalism; on national security issues, the party has embraced every accoutrement of a police state; on spending, Republicans have been far more fiscally irresponsible; on social issues, the Republican Party has abandoned libertarian principles and embraced a christianist platform. The Democratic Party – on the other hand – is for reigning in the police state (though not enough); and on social issues, it often sides with libertarians; on economics and spending, this gets more complicated. Obama’s positions do seem at first glance to be exactly what libertarianism stands against – but if I’m right about what Obama is doing – that he is adapting the Democratic Party and liberalism to a market-state in which the state seeks to provide the maximum opportunity to its citizens rather than providing for them (as socialist, Communist, and post-New Deal American capitalist states did), then the Democratic Party’s economic platform will be less of a threat to libertarian values and the party will be more or less aligned with the libertarians on every issue.

These first years of Obama’s presidency were always going to strain the libertarian-Democratic alliance. But it seems the long term trends favor this alliance.

[Image by Brian Buchanan licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Criticism Economics Political Philosophy

Dreaming can be dangerous

Gavin Kennedy responded to my post of several weeks ago, written in response to the spectacular success of Goldman Sachs, which I saw as a repudiation of the free market in which I offered the “modest proposal” of tearing down our capitalist system and replacing it with a free market. Kennedy responded:

Much of Joe’s thinking is well motivated but he is confused because he advocates root and branch transformation in a long-established socio-economic system, and that isn’t going to happen.

The sheer impracticality of it is breathtaking.

I can understand why Kennedy responded as he did to this post. The tone was radical – deliberately so. I tried to suggest in the opening that I was writing “looser” than normally and called my radical suggestion a “modest proposal” – realizing it was not. I intended to suggest Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” though I did not intend the piece to be satire – but rather a rant unmoored from my usual pragmatic hedgings.

Barack Obama said a few times with regards to health care that “if he were starting from scratch” he would suggest a single-payer system – but then acknowledge that we were not starting from scratch. This post was my attempt to “start from scratch” without attempting to triangulate what position was and was not practical – to explain what was fundamentally wrong, and to suggest what we should be moving towards. Rather than sudden, centralized changes though, I advocate tinkering, reforming processes at the outsides, carefully modulating incentives, experimenting with changes at more local levels before trying them nationally or internationally. I subscribe to Friedrich Hayek’s idea that we shouldn’t willy-nilly “disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time [as w]e don’t understand their logic.”

But there are time to be bold – there are times when the faults of the current order are revealed. Sometimes these call for revolution – but I am no revolutionary. Which is why I believe now is the time to try to try to change the philosophical underpinning of our economic system from focusing on capital to one focusing on opportunity. This doesn’t require a revolution as much as a (and I hate this phrase) paradigm shift.

On one point though, I have to disagree almost wholly with Kennedy. He says that “Dreaming can be dangerous,” seemingly because it is impractical. But what’s dangerous is when you confuse dreams with reality. T. E. Lawrence wrote:

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.

Dreaming with open eyes can be dangerous – just as any risk can. But this doesn’t mean it is bad. The danger lies in the fact that one cannot know in advance whether the decision you are about to make will end well or badly. Living is what happens when you take that risk.

[Image by me.]

Categories
Economics Political Philosophy The Opinionsphere

The Success of Goldman Sachs as a Repudiation of the Free Market

[digg-reddit-me]David Rothkopf – commenting on Goldman Sachs – sees their success as a repudiation of the free market – and I tend to agree with him:

I’m a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist. I love free markets. I hope a free market marries one of my daughters some day. But if some people have too many advantages and others simply can never catch up, the markets aren’t free, regardless of law or intent. Even if the advantages are in part derived from talent and hard work, fairness can remain an issue if other components of the success are linked to access, influence, history and other intangibles. [my emphasis]

From this insight comes the inevitable conclusion that – contrary to the doctrine of the right-wing – the government is not the antithesis of the free market, but rather plays an essential role in creating and maintaining it.

Goldman Sachs – with their obscene profits so soon after needing public assistance – demonstrate that our system has become less free and more feudal. As I wrote several weeks ago:

[T]he free market is effective because it prevents any small set of individuals from monopolizing decision-making. Especially in the world today with so much information available and events moving so quickly, the “right” business choices to make aren’t always clear. A free market – by allowing each business to make its own choice – prevents decision-making from falling victim to individual follies. But our current economic system – with it’s enormous corporations – ends up recreating the feudal system in which power is not centered in a single place, but in a handful of powerful “princes.” While these “princes” push for free market reforms, it is not in their interest to actually achieve this ideal free market – as Yglesias points out:

As a market approaches textbook conditions—perfect competition, perfect information, etc.—real profits trend toward zero. You make your money by ensuring that textbook conditions don’t apply; that there are huge barriers to entry, massive problems with inattention, monopolistic corners to exploit, etc.

George Will himself has pointed out that those “reforms” that are passed tend to be of a specific sort, following what Will calls, “the supreme law of the land…the principle of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs.” What free market supporters rarely seem to admit is that the free market exists not in spite of the government, but because of it. And today, our market is far from free because the government has failed to protect it – and has instead allowed the worst characteristics of capitalism (exploitation of labor; externalizing as much cost to society as possible, for eg. pollution) with the worst characteristics of socialism (concentration of power and limitation of competition) to create a kind of modern feudal society. In  this feudal society, freedom is enjoyed by the “princes” of finance and industry while the creative ferment of a real free market is formally protected but effectively quashed.

David Rothkopf expresses the same thing with different terminology:

These guys [at Goldman Sachs] operate as ultra-citizens in our society, virtually able to tell the government to heel and fetch in ways the rest of us can only fantasize about.

Warren Buffett seems to agree – as he claimed that America is moving from an aspiring “Ownership Society” to a “Sharecropper’s Society” – with its suggestions of a feudal structure. Of course, Buffet now owns a significant portion of the very Goldman Sachs that epitomizes this trend.

Goldman Sachs – along with other major corporate powers – rise by exploiting inefficiencies in the market – and eventually must try to create inefficiencies in the market in order to maintain their profitability (which is the hyperbolized point of Matt Taibbi’s recent piece). This contradicts those who see the market as supremely efficient – as Warren Buffet admitted, he would “be a bum on the street with a tin cup if the markets were always efficient.”

Goldman Sachs proves – with its successes – that our system is not a truly free market – but a more feudal one – in which those with sufficient money can secure power and tilt the system to their advantage.

[Image by saebryo licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Health care Libertarianism Political Philosophy The Opinionsphere

There Is Such A Thing As A Right to Health Care

[digg-reddit-me]F. Paul Wilson had a post that was reddit-famous last week (in the Libertarian subreddit) in which he declared “There ain’t no such thing as a right to health care.” He proposed “the alone-on-a-desert-island rule [as] a convenient way to differentiate genuine human rights from the poseurs.” The genuine human rights are inherent, according to Wilson – and he says – on this desert island alone – one has the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, the right to free speech, free sexual expression, freedom of religion, and freedom to smoke or inject anything you want. What you don’t have – according to Wilson – are the right to a house (because there is no one to build it), the right to three solid meals a day (because there are no farmers), or the right to health care (because there are no doctors.)

But by Wilson’s “alone-on-a-desert-island rule” Iran would be considered quite free. Fine – they don’t have freedom of assembly – but you can’t have that on a desert island. They don’t have free speech in public – but they would in the privacy of their own homes (in their own, walled-in desert island), especially if no one was listening. The Iranian authorities actually  allow their people a broad range of rights as long as they keep their activities private.

The problem is – as social animals, humans cannot fully express their freedom of sexuality, the freedom of religion, the freedom of speech, or many of their other freedoms except in the presence of others. Many of the rights we take for granted are social rights – relying on others to a society to make these rights possible.

Perhaps the distinction Wilson is trying to make is between negative rights – rights which constrain the government – and positive rights – rights which impose responsibilities on the government.

The right to health care is one of the latter – but that does not make it any less a right. While the right to health care is not absolute – as if one is alone on a desert island, one has no such right, just as one has no right to assemble, or vote – few today would deny that each individual has a right to some level of care if they are sick and injured. While Wilson is concerned about imposing a burden on doctors, they have already sworn an oath to provide such care if it is needed, a responsibility they take upon themselves with their profession.

This right to health may not be inherent – but that does not make it less substantive. All humans live in some sort of society – as it is our nature. One of the most basic purposes of a society is to take care of the sick and hurt. As a citizen in such a society, I have a right to health care – even as it imposes a burden on others, just as I have a right to vote, even though others must then count my vote, and as I have the right to an attorney if accused of a crime, even though this imposes another burden. It is a right inherent in my citizenship, in my status as a member of a society.

[Image by Matthew Winterburn licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Domestic issues Economics Health care Political Philosophy

How the Problem of Health Care Undermines the Legitimacy of the Market-State

[digg-reddit-me]Philip Bobbitt and other use the term “market-state” to describe the next (and to some extent current) role of the state – in contrast to its previous historical roles. While throughout most of the 20th century, the state’s role was to provide basic services and goods to its people, by the turn of the century – starting in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the state’s role had evolved to providing opportunities to its citizens. The United States has been on the leading edge of this evolution – from Jimmy Carter’s first steps towards deregulation to the Ronald Reagan’s riding of this zeitgeist to power – as he ushered in an era of increasing deregulation and privatisation, and a reduction of all government interventions in the economy. In proposing that “Government is not the solution to our problem – government is the problem!” Reagan placed the Republican Party at the head of this evolution in the government’s role – making Democrats who opposed this seem out-of-touch.

But if a market-state’s success is judged by the extent to which it maximizes opportunities for its citizens – the problems of global warming and health care now threaten to undermine the legitimacy of America’s market-state. The problem in each case began long before the transition to the market-state – but in both, this transition escalated the scale of the problem and made it harder to manage. However, for this post, I’m only focusing on health care.

Coinciding with the deregulation of various industries and other market-state reforms that began in the early 1980s, health care costs began to grow substantially faster than other products and services in America (though without providing better results.) This growth in the costs of health care has created three problems that undermine America’s market-state:

  1. Given the government and state insurance plans for the poor and elderly, this growth undermined the fiscal solvency of the government overall.
  2. The rapid rise in costs has undermined the faith of many citizens in the market.
  3. The business model private health insurance companies have adopted creates extreme insecurity for citizens – thus dampening economic growth and the entrepreneurial spirit needed for a market-state to thrive. Paul Waldman describes the perversity of this model in The American Prospect:

    4. [T]he central pathology of our deeply pathological health-care system is that most of us have no choice but to get health coverage from an entity whose sole reason for being is to take our money and then try to avoid paying for our care when we get sick.

With prices increasing so rapidly and with people feeling less secure in their coverage and the government deficit exploding in the next fifty years, the sense of an impending crisis is palpable. The crisis in health care thus undermines the entire market-state model.

To date, most Repbulicans and right-wingers do not seem to have realized the scope of this problem – the extent to which it undermines the very legitimacy of the type of state they have been promoting. The best proposals that have been made from the right have focused on the ideology of anti-governmentism rather than a focus on the market-state expansion of citizen opportunity that was the true core of Reagan’s success. For example, John McCain, in a bold move, sought to overthrow the system of health care insurance as we know it – and to place the responsibility for paying for health care squarely on the shoulders of individual citizens – instead of the collective pools that spread out such risk, whether organized by employers or the government. This would hold down health care costs – because individuals would be constrained from making health decisions by the amount of money they had to spend. The theory behind this was that the increasing costs of health care stemmed directly from the fact that consumers were going to the doctor or hospital or otherwise using health care more because they did not bear the direct consequences of their decisions. Of course, being out of power and with their ideas generally unpopular with the public, Republicans have instead merely sought to minimize or deny the clear problems with health care and simply be obstructionist.

Alternately, liberals, progressives, Democrats describe health care as a place in which the market has simply failed. As Paul Krugman has recently pointed out, health care economists have long maintained that:

[T]he standard competitive market model just doesn’t work for health care: adverse selection and moral hazard are so central to the enterprise that nobody, nobody expects free-market principles to be enough.

Their are various solutions being worked out by the Democrats – to create regulations that prevent health insurance firms from maintaining their exploitative business model; to create a competitor to these firms that will operate on a different model to keep them honest; to link payment of health care to outcomes instead of time and services.

The great irony is that if the Democrats are successful in reforming health care, they will have legitimized the market-state which many on the left are suspicious of – but they will have done so by firmly rejecting the Republican dogma that the government is always the problem. As Bill Kristol wrote in his famous 1993 memo on Bill Clinton’s attempt at health care reform:

[T]he long-term political effects of a successful Clinton health care bill will be … worse … It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle-class by restraining the growth of government.

Today,  it is only the Democrats who will be able to preserve the legitimacy of the market-state in the midst of this crisis.

[Image by FoxTongue licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Iran Political Philosophy Politics

The Intellectual History of the Green Wave

Abbas Milani explains the “intellectual history of the Green Wave” in Iran in a New Republic piece that provides a glimpse of the deeper theological and philosophical forces at work in the movement. Milani warns that this intellectual tradition “has not always found itself on the side of the angels,” but makes a strong case for it as an authentic incorporation of democracy and other “Western” 20th century ideas into an Islamic framework:

The roots of Iran’s current divide to a great extent lie at the turn of the century, when the country’s ayatollahs essentially split into two camps on questions of religion and politics. The first was led by Ayatollah Na’ini, an advocate of what is called the “Quietist” school of Shiism–today best exemplified in the character and behavior of Ayatollah Sistani in Iraq. According to Na’ini, true “Islamic government” could only be established when the twelfth imam returned. Such a government would be the government of God on earth: Its words, deeds, laws, and courts would be absolute and could tolerate no errors. But humans, Na’ini said, were fallible and thus ill-fitted to the sacred task of establishing God’s government. As the pious await the return of the infallible twelfth imam, they must in the interim search for the best form of government. And the form most befitting this period, Na’ini argued, was constitutional democracy. The role of ayatollahs under this arrangement would be to “advise” the rulers and ensure that laws inimical to sharia were not implemented. But it would not be to rule the country themselves.

Opposing Na’ini was an ayatollah named Nuri. He dismissed democracy and the rule of law as inferior alternatives to the divine, eternal, atemporal, nonerrant wisdom embodied in the Koran and sharia. As Ayatollah Khomeini would declare more than once, his own ideas were nothing but an incarnation of Nuri’s arguments. But for the moment, at least, those ideas were on the defensive. It would be decades before they would reemerge to dominate Iranian politics.