Category: Domestic issues

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Barack Obama Criticism Domestic issues Politics The Media The Opinionsphere Videos

Campbell Brown Does the Best Journalism Ever!

[digg-reddit-me]Last week Campbell Brown provided a perfect example of the total abdication of the main responsibility of the press in a short piece in which she discussed the debate over whether or not the stimulus had worked or was working. The story was done in a perfectly formulated “he said, she said” manner in which she made no attempt to perform her basic job as a journalist: figuring out who is right and who is not.

It is hard to think of a more basic description of what the job of a journalist is than to say, “He or she should try their best to state the facts, and when there is controversy to try to get to the bottom of it.” Brown though is clearly happy to merely play clips of two different sides saying entirely opposing things, and then to smirk and hold herself above these individuals by taking no position whatsoever. It is on the shoals of this irresponsibility that our public policy debates will be run aground:

Someone here is right; someone is wrong; and there are various sets of facts out there backing up each side. Showing these clips like this – without delving into the actual policy questions accomplishes nothing.

Of course, someone might take the position that there was limited time on the air – and Brown didn’t have time to go into the details of the actual debate. And you’re right. Brown needed time for this great montage a few minutes later:

At the end of this segment, it’s easy to see how Obama is personally so popular and why his policies are less so. The policies are ignored on this serious news show while his coolness under the pressure of an annoying gnat are replayed once again.

Regardless of your position on the political spectrum, an actual discussion of policy in which facts were discussed rather than accusations traded would be to everyone’s benefit.

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.]

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Barack Obama Criticism Domestic issues Health care The Web and Technology

An idea for a new health care public service announcement

[digg-reddit-me]

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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
Barack Obama Domestic issues Health care Politics

Organizing a Grass Roots Movement for Health Care Reform


[digg-reddit-me]About a week ago, I got an email from Mitch Stewart, the Director of Organizing for America, the organization that is tasked with marshalling the remnants of Obama’s campaign organization to create grass roots pressure for change. It read almost as if it were a campaign email:

Joseph –

The fight to pass real health care reform will come down to one thing: you.

That’s because the efforts in Washington, D.C., to fix our broken health care system and provide affordable coverage for all Americans are only part of the battle.

By teaming up with your friends and family and organizing for real reform in your community, you can make the difference in this debate. Together, we’ll make sure the President’s plan succeeds across the country…
In communities around the country, folks will be knocking on doors, making phone calls, and doing all they can to seize what may be our last opportunity to change health care in America forever – as the President has said, reform needs to “happen this year, or not at all.”

The goal of the email was to get people to buy “Health Care 09” t-shirts. But unlike the campaign emails – which often led to me buying whatever they were hawking to demonstrate my support, reading up on the issue (if I had not already) and blogging about it, this email prompted me to no action. A few months ago, I wrote about this issue in a post about the “Paradox of Organizing for America.” The problem I saw then was that while “Obama for America” had a clear, singular goal – electing Barack Obama president – and citizens were faced with the motivating factor of being directly involved in achieving this goal – voting, and convincing others to vote as they were – neither of these factors which were essential to the success of Obama for America are present for Organizing for America.

But this email demonstrates another problem, a problem inherent in the legislative-centered approach to policy that Obama has taken in general – and his rugby-scrum strategy for achieving health care reform in particular. How can he motivate the grass roots to back him if there is no clear bill or idea to rally behind?

Clearly, their strategy is to make this a binary question: Are you for or against health care reform? Everyone is for health care reform – as our system is quite obviously unsustainable. But there are many, many valid questions critics and supporters of the various progressive-type health care reform plans have:

  • Will this reform be sufficient to “bend the curve”?
  • Should medical malpractice awards be capped?
  • Should we be moving towards a single-payer system?
  • Would non-profit insurance organizations be a better approach?

On policy grounds, many of those who support health care reform disagree about how it should be done. Now, Organizing for America is asking them to push for reform, with details unrevealed and undecided. What they are asking for is, simply, a leap of faith – to trust that the Obama administration knows what they are doing, and that they will do the best they can.

They key fact that the Obama administration and Organizing for America are pushing is that this is the time. As the email quotes Obama: “[R]eform needs to ‘happen this year, or not at all.'”

The grounds for this claim are political rather than policy-oriented. As a matter of reflective policy-making, it would undoubtedly be better to gradually experiment with different approaches, testing them to see which are successful and gradually building support for a wholesale reorganization of health care. But politically, this is untenable. First – with the retirement of the worst generation of Americans and the exponential rise in health care costs, our federal deficit is set to explode in the next thirty years. The longer we wait, the harder it will be to reign in costs and “bend the curve.” This is a problem that should have been dealt with while the Baby Boomers were in power, when the problem first became evident – but, as usual, they abdicated their responsibilities. Second, Obama now has more going for him domestically than he likely will at any other point, including if he were to win a second term. Obama’s popularity is high; he has 60 Democrats in the Senate and a sizeable majority in the House (and the president’s party has traditionally lost seats in the first midterms after the presidential election); he has several key Republicans willing to compromise – and various business and other interests willing to support some legislation.

The difficulty Organizing for America faces is motivating the many policy-oriented and otherwise savvy Obama-supporters to support the administration on this issue without having set its position in advance. Organizing for America seems to have a clear idea of what it wants from the grass roots: pressure for the idea that we need reform now. What’s less clear is how to get the grass roots to buy into their part of the strategy. Buying t-shirts is what you do after you buy into the strategy – not before.

It’s not clear to me that Organizing for America has realized its job is no longer to preach to the converted – but to convert bystanders into activists.

[Image by tandemracer of her baby’s six-month doctor visit licensed under Creative Commons 2.0]

Categories
Barack Obama Catholicism Domestic issues Politics The Opinionsphere

Matt Yglesias’s Prejudiced Caricature of Catholicism

Dan Gigloff of US News reported yesterday that a number of anti-abortion groups – specifically citing the US Conference of Catholic Bishops – are opposing an Obama administration attempt to bridge the Culture Wars by offering a comprehensive package to reduce abortions including contraception and sex education. This prompted a few responses in the liberal blogosphere.

Matt Yglesias:

It’s precisely because of stances like this that it’s very hard to take the “abortion is murder” crowd seriously when they say abortion is murder. Their revealed behavior indicates that they don’t actually find abortion especially problematic, but just place it on a spectrum containing a general aversion to women controlling their own sexuality

Atrios:

Those People We Want To Find Common Ground With?

Aren’t interested. I’m shocked!

The fact that these two prominent liberals both take such idiotic positions astounds me. Though I have to give Yglesias credit for not faulting Obama for the outreach – as Atrios seems to be doing. Yglesias instead seems to be describing “the Obama Method” at work. And to be clear – I think Obama is doing the right thing here and should keep these two initiatives together. It’s smart politics – and it makes sense to the majority of Catholics and other religious who believe that abortion is awful but contraception isn’t.

But the fact that these two people – who I normally find to be intelligent and worthwhile commentators – cannot understand the position the bishops are taking perhaps explains why the Democrats have had such trouble getting the Catholic vote.

Let me start by way of analogy: Knowing that Yglesias and Atrios opposed wars of choice, I could ask them to support a bill that was meant to reduce wars of choice by supporting coups d’etat in countries who we might otherwise invade. To back up my push, I would show statistically – over history – that such coups would reduce overall violence in the globe. Now, if Yglesias or Atrios rejected this compromise, it wouldn’t mean they didn’t really oppose wars of choice. It would mean that they didn’t think two wrongs made a right. It wouldn’t mean they were appeasers and pacificsts. And for me to claim it did would be nothing but political theatre.

Back to abortion and contraception: the Catholic Church has officially opposed contraception and abortion through much of its history – and certainly for hundreds of years. The justification has changed over the years – evolved it is said – but the basic foundation has remained the same – and this foundation is not the subjugation of women as Yglesias flatly states. Yglesias reveals a prejudice here, grounded as most prejudices are, on ignorance.

The foundation of the Churhc’s policy is a perverse view of sexuality that sees its only redeeming value as procreation. Many Catholics do not live as if this were true – and many reject it – but it remains (with a few qualifications) the official position. This is why the Catholic Church opposes masturbation, blow jobs, dildos, plastic vaginas, anal sex, pornography, prostitution, etc. Given this, it is pretty clear why the bishops view both contraception and abortion as wrong. The Church has even condemned the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS – which is incredibly irresponsible – but it goes to demonstrate their consistency on this issue.

It’s not about oppressing women. And it’s not about bad faith. To suggest such indicates a kind of ideological blinkering I most often see on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. To top it all off, it certainly alienates Catholics – even the majority who disagree with the Church’s position.

It behooves intelligent liberals such as Yglesias and Atrios to actually respond to the Catholic bishops’ position on the merits rather than resorting to prejudiced caricatures.

[Image by Lawrence OP licensed under Creative Commons.]

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Barack Obama Conservativism Domestic issues Economics Financial Crisis History Liberalism Libertarianism Political Philosophy The Opinionsphere

A Generational Bargain (in which we are getting screwed)

[digg-reddit-me]Back when California’s looming bankruptcy was in the news, George Will wrote:

California’s perennial boast — that it is the incubator of America’s future — now has an increasingly dark urgency…California has become liberalism’s laboratory, in which the case for fiscal conservatism is being confirmed.

Will may be right about fiscal conservatism – but he’s wrong in laying the blame for California’s problems on liberalism. The fault in California, like the fault in America, is deeper – a refusal by the Baby Boom generation to make tough choices to create a sustainable world, economy, or government. Bill Maher summarized California’s trap best:

We govern by ballot initiative – and we only write two kinds of those: spend money on things I like and don’t raise my taxes.

California’s initiative system aggravated a tendency that has been dominant in American politics for some time now. The problem with California – and America – is a combination of two factors:

  1. a kind of accidental unholy alliance between liberals who push for more government spending to alleviate poverty and better the nation and conservatives who want to cut taxes – with neither group having the power or political will to be fiscally responsible at the same time as they push for their pet projects ((This is a bit unfair on the national level – as George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton – with opposition Congresses checking them – proved to be exceedingly responsible, putting America on a sustainable course after the tax-cutting, free-spending Ronald Reagan and before the tax-cutting, free-spending George W. Bush.))
  2. the deliberate plan of the right-wingers who want to “starve the beast” – by which they mean encouraging the irresponsible system above of  increasing spending while cutting taxes (and these right-wingers do this knowing that the system is unsustainable and will crash, which is the only way they see to get rid of popular programs.)

This is a story of the cowardice of politicians and the idiocy of people.

This idiocy – in almost all of its forms – can be traced to the ascent of the Baby Boom generation as they took power with the Reagan administration. By increasing spending exponentially while cutting taxes – creating enormous deficits – Reagan supercharged (stimulated) the economy out of the stagflation of the 1970s. At the same time, he began the American government’s practice of becoming dependent on East Asia – relying on Japan to lend vast amounts of its money as our trade deficit with them grew. Reagan also began the trend of deregulation of industries – allowing them to take greater risks and reap greater profits if they succeeded – which also allowed companies to kick off a merger boom, leading more and more companies becoming too big to fail while they were regulated less and less. All of these steps led to an economy focused more on finance than industry – leading, along with factors due to globalization, to America’s industrial decline. The dominance of the financial sector in the economy, which is well known for its boom and bust cycle, led to a series of economic bubbles – and in fact, an economy in which growth was maintained through bubbles rather than real worth.

Beginning with Reagan, president after president stimulated the economy constantly – to avoid having to take the fall. But this system was unsustainable. As the Baby Boomers “surfed on a growing wave of debt” – both public and private – they sought to use debt to meet their rising expectations in the absence of creating real value. This was the generational bargain at the heart of the Reagan presidency – a bargain that allowed America to spend the Soviet Union into the ground and jumpstart the economy from the stagflation of the 1970s – but that, unchecked, thirty years later, now threatens our future.

The Baby Boomers pissed away the prosperity their parents bequeathed them and squandered the opportunities presented to them – and now are busy using their children’s future earnings (our future earnings) to buy their way out of the mess they have created. They avoided the challenges of their times and found people to blame. They focused on OJ Simpson, Britney Spears, Madonna, and Monica Lewinsky – on abortion, Vietnam, gays, and religion – and not on global warming, on campaign finance, on the corruption of our political process, on an overleveraged economy.

After decades of avoiding systematic problems – as the solutions became embroiled in the ongoing culture war – we now must face them. With two wars in the Mid-East, a failing world economy, a growing threat of catastrophic terrorism, and whatever else may come our way, procrastination is impossible. Now it’s time for us to try to salvage this wreck. It remains to be seen if we’re up to it.

David Brooks explained this grave situation facing Obama and the difficult tasks ahead (focusing especially on the growing deficit). Brooks concludes with reasons for hope and despair:

The members of the Obama administration fully understand this and are brimming with good ideas about how to move from a bubble economy to an investment economy. Finding a political strategy to accomplish this, however, is proving to be very difficult. And getting Congress to move in this direction might be impossible.

Your cards do not improve if you complain about the hand you have been dealt. But it is essential to understand how we got here. We also must not be complacent now that a leader who we admire has been given power. Individuals are empowered to a greater extent than ever before in history – for good or ill. Which is why it is never enough to get the right man or woman into public office – even if this is a useful initial step. What we must do – as individuals – is to see the world around us clearly and take steps to effect what changes we can, to live the values we hold in our hearts, to reach out to those affected by our actions.

[Image by orangejack licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Barack Obama Domestic issues Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Are The Pieces Aligning on Health Care?

[digg-reddit-me]David Brooks’s column is quickly becoming one of the most insightful, inside looks at the larger plans of the Obama administration (which suggests a column kneecapping Obama is forthcoming so Brooks can maintain his conservative cred). His latest column is practically gushing – but it certainly paints a plausible picture of what the Obama administration sees as it’s game plan on health care. Brooks starts his piece with this half-jesting, half-admiring set-up:

Let’s say that you are President Obama. You’ve inherited a health care system that is the insane spawn of a team of evil geniuses from an alien power. Pay is divorced from performance. Users are separated from costs. Rising costs threaten to destroy your nation and everything you hold dear.

You also know that [the only] two approaches [to actually fixing this] have one thing in common. They are both currently politically unsellable. Others have tried and perished. There are vast (opposing) armies arrayed against them. The whole issue is a nightmare.

You are daunted by the challenges in front of you until you remember that by some great act of fortune, you happen to be Barack Obama. This calms you down.

He then goes on to describe a strategy which runs like this:

  1. Table-setting. Court everyone – get everyone to the table and agreeing on some basic meaningless “pablum.”
  2. Congress. Ask Congress to put something together, keeping your distance as they investigate and write many competing proposals.
  3. The Long Tease. Refuse to rule anything out or commit to anything – thus keeping all the interest groups at the table.
  4. The Scrum. At the end of the summer session, when Congress actually begins to assemble health care in a series of all-night sessions, take a stronger role. But be willing to compromise. This scrum needs to end quickly – and send the bill off to be passed before the interest groups have time to realize who has and hasn’t been taken care of.
  5. MedPAC. Include in the bill this medical equivalent of the Federal Reserve – an independent, technocratic body to oversee the industry. This is where the real reform will stem from.

This scenario sounds plausible – although a David Brooks column explaining it would seem to undermine the strategy itself.

So far, the Obama administration has been extremely impressive in how it has managed the health care debate. They make it seem as if things really are going according to plan so far – an extraordinary thing given the history of Washington and health care. For example, Ezra Klein provided some insight into why the American Medical Association quickly retracted it’s direct opposition to a public option in the health care debate, citing this Roll Call piece:

Top aides to Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) called a last-minute, pre-emptive strike on Wednesday with a group of prominent Democratic lobbyists, warning them to advise their clients not to attend a meeting with Senate Republicans set for Thursday.

[Meeting] with a bloc of more than 20 contract lobbyists, including several former Baucus aides…“They said, ‘Republicans are having this meeting and you need to let all of your clients know if they have someone there, that will be viewed as a hostile act,’” said a Democratic lobbyist who attended the meeting.

“Going to the Republican meeting will say, ‘I’m interested in working with Republicans to stop health care reform,’” the lobbyist added.

Ezra Klein explains what this means:

They’re saying that you’re either with health reform, or you’re against it. And if you’re against it, you can’t expect to be taken care of in the final legislation. They’re not going to save your seat at the table while you’re trying to burn down the room. And the AMA, it seems, got the message.

This hardball strategy with interest groups plus the extraordinary wooing of legislators by the Obama administration that Matt Bai described in a piece this Sunday, the general agreement among most Americans including business interests that our health care system is broken, the impending deficit crisis, Obama’s mandate, and the unusual role ultra-conservative Orrin Hatch appears to be willing to play to help his good friend Teddy Kennedy achieve a dying wish (Suzy Khimm in The New Republic describes it as, “a particularly senatorial way to pay tribute to a dying friend.”) – with all of these pieces falling together, the Democrats may finally be able to achieve what Harry Truman started all those years ago.

[Image by JonathanHannpberger licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Barack Obama Domestic issues Economics Financial Crisis Health care Iran Politics The Opinionsphere

Mirror Neurons, Iran’s Fissures, Yglesian Insights, The Deficit Crisis, Rare Minerals

Once again, it’s Friday, so it’s time for my weekend reading recommendations.

1. Mirror Neurons. Daniel Lametti explains the importance of mirror neurons in the Scientific American.

2. Iran’s Fissures. Roger Cohen has been prominently writing about Iran for the past year or so – predicting and pushing for a thaw in relations. Now, on the cusp of an important election, Roger Cohen discusses Iran:

Iran, its internal fissures exposed as never before, is teetering again on the brink of change. For months now, I’ve been urging another look at Iran, beyond dangerous demonization of it as a totalitarian state. Seldom has the country looked less like one than in these giddy June days.

3. Yglesian insights. Matt Yglesias’s blog has long been on my must-read list – but he’s offered some especially insightful observations in various contexts about the free market in recent weeks. Here Yglesias speculates about the advantages of non-profit-maximizing corporations in a free market:

After all, profit-maximization is not a natural form of human behavior. I think it’s best understood as a very idiosyncratic kind of pursuit. It happens to be one that’s economically rewarded because with money to invest tend to want to invest it with would-be profit-maximizers. Thus, in fields of endeavor where the ability to raise large sums of capital on reasonable terms is a huge advantage, a profit-maximization impulse winds up being a huge advantage.

In a later post about health care, Yglesias makes a related point:

[P]art of what’s wrong with the world is that the very same people who spend a lot of time cheerleading for free markets and donating money to institutions that cheerlead for free markets—businessmen, in other words—are the very people who have the most to gain from markets being totally dysfunctional. The absolute worst place on earth you can find yourself as a businessman is in the kind of free market you find in an Economics 101 textbook. 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.

4. How to tackle the deficit crisis. Set off by David Leonhardt’s excellent look at the forthcoming deficit crisis, the Opinionsphere quickly took this up as a theme of the week. Noah Millman at The American Scene had the best take on how to tackle the deficit crisis – once we decide to get serious. One of the main ways he suggests is to reform the tax code:

We have an income tax that is riddled with deductions that undermine its purported progressivity, and we rely on increasingly steep progressivity to justify every additional change to said code. A 1986-style reform that eliminated many deductions and lowered rates would not only be a likely booster of the economy, but would probably raise revenue – certainly on the corporate side.

5. China’s Great Game. And of course, the Financial Times reported that China has almost cornered the world market in rare minerals needed for most high tech products. I’m looking forward to some analyst really following up on this and explaining what implications – if any – this has.

Categories
Barack Obama Domestic issues Political Philosophy Politics The Opinionsphere

Equality of Result versus Equality of Opportunity

[digg-reddit-me]It is noteworthy that a certain type of older conservative or right-wing intellectual finds it necessary to insist repeatedly that Obama’s politics is “the same old” stuff as liberals tried earlier in history. These olders intellectuals try to place Obama in the context of typical big-government liberals – and they presume by doing so they are taking the wind out of his sails and making him a more prosaic and less historic figure.

Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote a column explaining that Obama was interested in “the same old equality of result.” He describes the debate going back to the Greeks between “the equality of result” and “the equality of opportunity” – and he identified France with the first and America with the second. His implicit question: Do we want to become France? George Will and others have described Obama’s administration as the third or fourth wave of liberalism. There is a strong need among this group to get across the message that Obama isn’t different – he isn’t change – he’s just more of the same stuff that they – as Republicans – defeated back in 1980 and 1984 and 1994 and 2004. 

But insistince does not make it so.

Obama’s liberalism is not the liberalism of the Great Society or of Jimmy Carter – or even of Bill Clinton. Hanson, Will, and others refuse to acknowledge that in the debate between equality of result and equality of opportunity, they already won. Obamaism is about expanding equality of opportunity – which would be clear if Hanson were doing more than reciting talking points. Look at the three specific programs Hanson cites before claiming Obama wants “equality of results”:

…creating a new health care bureaucracy, cap-and-trade, allotting trillions more for education…

None of these try to achieve an “equality of results.” They are about ensuring people equal opportunity to succeed – and ensuring the market properly prices activities which are damaging to society in general. For example, if you want everyone to have an equal opportunity to succeed, you need to make sure that everyone who is intelligent enough and works hard enough can get an education. Health care costs and concerns have made it much more difficult for smaller businesses to succeed – so Obama is proposing to open up the federal program. This will even the playing field in competition between big and medium- to small-sized companies to a significant degree. Cap and trade imposes a market mechanism to take into account the costs of polluting activities.

Hanson and the others of his generation need to understand that they won the opportunity versus results debate. Liberalism today has evolved to deal with the demands of the moment. 

Perhaps they should focus on their own political philosophy to see that it does as well.