Thoughts on Daniel Klein's studies of economic literacy

A little while back economist Daniel Klein, a professor at George Mason University and editor of Econ Journal Watch, and Zeljka Buturovic, a researcher at Zogby International, published an article entitled "Economic Enlightenment in Relation to College-going, Ideology, and Other Variables" which presented data from a survey about how people of different ideological stances view economic questions that, Klein argued, inidcated that people who identify as politically left-wing showed less undertsanding of basic economics than those identifying as libertarians or conservatives. He's now calling his own prior claims "partially vitiated" in a new article by  Buturovic and himself, "Economic Enlightenment Revisited," based on the results of another survey which he believes shows that people of different ideologies are in fact about equally likely to believe falsehoods about economics, depending on how comfortably the answer to a particular question fits with their other beliefs. He attributes his prior results to a survey that was biased by including too many questions on issues the Left tends to be bad on and his own eagerness to believe something that supported his own assumptions. (Klein is himself a libertarian.)

I greatly admire Klein's willingness to publicly state that he believes himself to have been mistaken on a matter that he had been quite outspoken about. However, after reading his new article, I don't think he actually was wrong; at any rate, I don't think the additional data he presents tells against his own prior conclusion in the way he believes.

In each study, Klein gave the test subjects a list of statements about economics, such as "free trade causes unemployment." The survey subjects, all of whom were American adults, would then write an answer stating that they (strongly or somewhat ) agreed or disagreed with it, or weren't sure. Klein then compiled the figures for how often respondents of different political persuasions agreed with false statements or disagreed with true ones to get a sense of how well people of different beliefs understood economic issues. Conservatives and libertarians did better than liberals on the first survey. Concerned about the possibility that this result might be caused by an ideological slant to the survey items (cherry-picking subject matter so that most or all of the statements concerned areas people on the Left were especially likely to get wrong, for instance) rather than an actual difference in knowledge, he did a second survey, this time with questions intentionally designed to poke at potential conservative or libertarian blind spots. This time the results were reversed, with conservatives and libertarians scoring much lower than on the first survey.

I agree that the first survey is imperfect. In particular, the survey item "Third-world workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited" is problematic because, depending on how one interprets the word “exploited, ” agreement can be either a sign of economic ignorance (i.e. you believe that the workers would benefit economically if they had to fall back on whatever second-best option they had themselves judged inferior to the sweatshop) or an answer to a question- in this case, a moral one- other than the one the survey meant to ask and is intended to assess. (Though if you changed it to something more economics-specific, such as whether sweatshop make their workers worse off than they would be in their absence, I imagine the percentage of wrong answers would still be pretty high.) I also like the fact that the second survey includes an item about the economic effects of immigrant workers, an important and heated subject that was absent the first time around.

However, the first and second sets of questions differ in some important ways that are likely to make the first set more genuinely revealing than the second, because there were serious problems with the second set that make it questionable whether it measures what it is supposed to be measuring.

The first issue is that with the exception of the statement about sweatshops noted above the first survey consists of fairly clear, unambiguous statements like "Rent-control laws lead to housing shortages." This isn't the case with several statements on the second survey, and the result is that several statements on the second survey can't be trusted to measure what they're supposed to.

If some of my points here seem like semantic hair-splitting, it's because such hair-splitting is incredibly important in order to make sure that a survey is actually measuring what it's supposed to. Klein and Buturovic's interpretation of the new data hinges on certain quite specific assumptions about how survey takers interpreted the survey statements. If some of the survey statements are worded in a way that allows for multiple plausible interpretations of what's being asked, some of which could entail a different answer from the one treated as correct by the survey for reasons unrelated to economic ignorance, then responses to that statement on the survey can't be presumed to measure what it's trying to measure, especially if members of some of the the different groups being assessed are especially likely to take a particular interpretation. This is, I believe, the case on at least three of the survey items. One could argue about whether the word meanings I think were most likely being used by the typical respondent are the best way of using those words or not, but like the interpretation of “exploit” in the first survey that's not a question of economics.

Two statements to which the majority of libertarians gave what was judged to be a wrong response response were "Drug prohibition fails to reduce people’s access to drugs" and "Gun control fails to reduce people’s access to guns." The survey treats these statements as false, since prohibition makes the prohibited item more costly, so agreeing with them is counted as an incorrect answer in the respondent's score is.

But is it false? It depends on what "reducing access" means.

It could mean increasing the overall cost of getting drugs or guns, which is presumably the intended interpretation- but it could also be taken to mean, and in typical language is probably more likely to be taken to mean, eliminating the ability to acquire something at all or at least making it so insurmountably difficult that it is effectively impossible. Klein and Buturovic do acknowledge this problem, somewhat, but argue in defense of their interpretation of the responses that “it is reasonable to include price effects as a dimension of 'access'.”

It is reasonable, but it's also quite reasonable not to and instead treat access as basically binary, and I think it very likely that this is what most respondents- of all ideological types- were doing. In typical usage the latter meaning is probably more common- it would sound odd to most people if I said that an increase in the price of a particular class of products that I had previously been able to buy had lowered my “access” to them, unless the increase was so large that paying it was now completely out of reach. Gun and drug laws in the United States have done no such thing. Some illegal guns can be bought for less than $100, sometimes significantly less, and even people who literally own nothing but the clothes on their backs can and frequently do support illegal drug habits. The non-monetary cost of is high, due to prohibition- you have to be willing to break the law and possibly associate with dangerous characters- but it's also one that anybody can pay if they choose.

Klein and Buturovic also state they believe that their interpretation would be sound even if one doesn't interpret “access” in the way they had in mind. They don't specify what they mean by this. My assumption is that they're referring to the marginal gun owner or dug user in the absence of legal restrictions- even if “access” is treated as purely binary the total number of people with access in that sense would be decreased by prohibition because there would be some people for whom drugs or guns are now completely inaccessible who would have had access if the laws were less restrictive. Again, this is a perfectly valid way of interpreting the statement, but it's not the only valid way or the typical way. In contexts like this the word “people” is almost always means, and will be taken to mean, people in general or on average or the great majority of people- almost no one will interpret “reducing people's access” to mean depriving a few extreme outliers of access or slightly lowering the total sum total of people who have it.

Guns are readily accessible even in jurisdictions that forbid them, some of them at prices so low that anyone who can't afford one now likely couldn't have afforded one even in the total absence of gun control, and illegal drugs are so ubiquitous that the government can't even keep them out of its own prisons. In everyday English the statements "Drug prohibition fails to reduce people’s access to drugs" and “Gun control fails to reduce people’s access to guns” are true, even if there are other valid ways of interpreting the statement under which it would be false. In the absence of any indication that the respondents were assuming the definition the creators of the survey had in mind, there's no reason to assume that choosing “agree” indicates economic ignorance.

Another statement on which the study indicates libertarians were more likely than liberals or progressives to give the wrong answer was "A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person,” which the study treats as true.

If we take this to be basically a statement about the declining marginal utility of money, then this is true, but in that case it would be better to phrase such a question in terms of a single person at different levels of wealth rather than two different people. As is, the statement entangles declining marginal utility, a pretty fundamental concept that can rightly be considered a matter of basic economic understanding with the more complicated and contested subject of the validity of interpersonal utility comparisons. People who would choose “disagree” because the question uses two different men and they don't think such comparisons are possible or meaningful may or may not be correct, but even if they're mistaken being on the wrong side of a complex philosophical dispute is quite a different thing from not understanding basic economic concepts.

The other and probably bigger problem is, again, one of ambiguity: There are common uses of “means more” that do not entail that the statement is true. To say that "a dollar means more" to person A than to person B can just as easily be taken to mean that A is more frugal than B, or drives a harder bargain, or is more miserly, or makes wealth a greater priority in his life, none of which necessarily suggest that A has less money. My suspicion is that the differences in answers between people of different political persuasions boils down to philosophical differences, with libertarians being more likely to think of people in terms of their actions and liberals/progressives more likely to think of them in terms of their needs. In any case, agreement and disagreement are both defensible answers to the question as written.

Aside from ambiguous language, there's another problem with comparing some of the statements from the first survey with the second one. The statements about economics in the first survey were, with the exception already noted, quite straightforward claims on the effects of economic policies, and "agree" and "disagree" each represented distinct , dichotomous positions. You believe that minimum wages or free trade cause unemployment, or that they do not, for instance, and disagreeing with a statement from the first survey is a pretty clear statement of what you do believe. Thus, disagreeing with a wrong statement is a pretty solid indication that your beliefs on the subject are in fact correct, while agreeing with a wrong statement means that you are solidly wrong, as opposed to largely but not entirely correct, and that those who disagreed are closer to the truth than you are. This is not the case with some of the second survey.

After the gun control and drug prohibition questions, the statement which the greatest number of libertarians gave a response counted as wrong to was “When two people complete a voluntary transaction, they both necessarily come away better off.” This is something that had no analog of the first survey- it is an incorrect statement designed to closely mimic a correct one. All voluntary transactions take place because both participants believe they will come away better off from it, and- since they have direct knowledge of their own preferences, usually know more about their own situation than anyone else, and have more incentive to figure out whether the transaction is a good idea or not than anyone else- they are usually correct. The great majority of voluntary exchanges do benefit the participants- but not all, since sometimes people do things that, with the benefit of hindsight, were not a good idea even according to their own preferences and values at the time. Agreeing with the statement from the survey is thus pushing things too far.

Disagreeing with the statement, on the other hand, can mean believing anything from "They almost always come away better off" to "they never come away better off." We have no reason to believe that the typical person who correctly chose "disagree" did so because their own beliefs about the benefits of voluntary exchange are more accurate than people who chose "agree." Indeed, I would be surprised if this were the case. The claim that all voluntary exchanges turn out to be mutually beneficial is too strong, but it comes much closer to the truth than the belief common among statists, particularly of a leftist bent, that people frequently or routinely enter into voluntary agreements that cause them harm.

To a lesser extent I would make the same criticism of another item, "When two people complete a voluntary transaction, it is necessarily the case that everyone else is unaffected by their transaction." This is false, but there's no way to tell whether a person who answered "disagree' and got marked as correct was merely thinking "No, transactions can have externalities," or believes that externalities not only exist but are so common and so large that most or all seemingly private agreements are actually a public/government concern,, or chose "agree" because they believe that they or society as a whole is harmed in some moral or spiritual sense if voluntary interactions they don't like are allowed to occur.

The fact that at least one of the questions on the second survey was, by design, a "trap" set for people of a particular ideological bent in a way none of the first survey's items were is a serious problem. This is especially the case when the format is a essentially a series of true/false questions where a correct answer of "false" encompasses a broad spectrum of widely held possible answers, a great many of which are even less accurate than the false statement in the survey. Such a survey item is worse than useless for assessing how knowledgeable different groups are, because the best way for a particular group of people to be rated as highly enlightened on the subject by getting the correct answer is abject ignorance- it's only when you're in the ballpark of being right that you're at risk of agreeing with the not-quite-right claim and being marked as wrong in the survey results. It's like a test of scientific knowledge where respondents have to agree or disagree with the statement “The Earth is 5 billion years old,” which overstates the Earth's age a bit- giving the wrong answer requires knowing that the Earth is several billion years old, while someone who believes that the entire universe is only a few thousand years old will give the correct answer by disagreeing.

I think Klein and Buturovic's concern about possible bias against people on the political Left in the original survey led them to overcompensate in the second survey, resulting in the problems described. If anything, the fact that Klein and Buturovic's attempts to balance against possible bias against people left of center required them to downplay the first survey's focus on straightforward claims about the effects of economic policy in favor of more abstract and/or ambiguously worded questions and come up with questions that were specifically designed as traps for other ideologies only seems to underscore the results of the original survey; at any rate, it doesn't make Klein's original conclusion that people on the Left knew less about economics seem less plausible.

So I think Klein is wrong now about being wrong before. He attributes what he believes to be his error to confirmation bias, pouncing too eagerly and uncritically on data that seemed to reinforce his existing beliefs. Based on the two survey articles, my own impression is just the opposite. Klein goes so far to guard against his own possible bias against liberals and progressives that he ends up biasing things in their favor and against his own (at the time) interpretation of the first survey. Given Klein's demonstrated willingness to scrutinize his own position and even publicly criticize his own past conclusions, this is unsurprising. Monitoring yourself for bias in your own favor involves the same trade-off as detecting other things: the more vigilant you are to ensure that nothing gets past you and the more sensitive you are to possible signs of your quarry, the greater the chance of a false positive. The direction in which I believe Klein has actually erred is just the sort you'd want in a person involved with a publication like Econ Journal Watch- would that more people's mistakes were the result of going too far to be fair to their opponents!- but in this case his desire to ensure a level playing field has backfired.

Kick him when he's down

There's a very interesting article by Art Carden and Steven Horwitz at The Freeman Online called "Eugenics: Progressivism’s Ultimate Social Engineering" about Progressive Era legislation and the arguments made in favor of it by its original supporters, some of whom supported economic statism not because they didn't understand what its real effects would be but precisely because they did. As Carden and Horwitz put it it:

In other words, what we today think of as the unintended consequences of laws supported by today’s well-meaning but economically uninformed Progressives were actually the intended goals of some of their intellectual ancestors a century ago. Early Progressive economists understood the effects of these interventions, but they thought those effects were desirable.

For instance, one of the principle arguments against minimum wage laws is that increasing the minimum wage will make workers whose productivity is not high enough to make them worth hiring at the new minimum unemployable. Thus, they are deprived of both their wages and the opportunity to gain skills and experience that might help them improve their lot. The victims will be disproportionately found among those who are already at a disadvantage, which opponents of minimum wage laws regard as a bad thing- but not everyone has agreed.

As you probably already know,  many leading Progressives were eugenicists. (As were as many of their close cousins, such as Fabian socialists in Great Britain. For the purposes of this post, I'm using "Progressive" in a somewhat broadened sense so that I don't have to write "anti-market, anti-individualist, nominally democratic advocates of extensive government economic planning and social engineering controlled by expert government technocrats" over and over.) They supported government action to control the gene pool by discouraging or preventing people they typically considered inferior and thought America and the world could do with less of- blacks, Chinese, Southern and Eastern European immigrants, the mentally ill, the psychologically abnormal or socially maladjusted, people with congenital disabilities or deformities- from reproducing

As Horwitz and Carden explain it, the problem they faced was that too many of the people eugenicists considered unfit weren't, and were doing too well in the relatively free markets in the United States at that time. They were successfully competing with (the right kind of) white workers, which lowered the latter's wages through competition and- even worse- allowed them to survive and raise families, propagating bloodlines the eugenicists would have preferred to see die out. Restrictions on immigration, while popular among eugenicists, would not solve the problem of the millions of immigrants who had already arrived, the black population, or “defective” persons of more acceptable racial stock who were able to find employment.

Making these things a problem that needed to be solved required some rather extreme liberties to be taken with the English language. This resulted in idiosyncratic definition for words like “unemployable” and “parasitic,” by which Progressive eugenicists meant something like “Not making enough to singlehandedly support a family at a standard of living native-born whites would consider acceptable." (Called, familiarly enough, a “living wage.”) Thus, an itinerant worker with no permanent abode who supported himself doing odd jobs was “unemployable” no matter how much work he did, a “parasite” taking work from the more deserving. If an immigrant family was completely self-supporting but depended on the wages of more than one family member, it was a family of unemployable parasites no matter how much work they were actually doing.

(This also reflected the disapproval of many Progressives for native-born white women working outside the home, something that simultaneously roused conservative- which many Progressives were, in a paternalist, aristocratic way- fear of weakened traditional roles, chivalrous horror at the prospect of subjecting women to the cold, unfeeling world away from hearth and home, and eugenic objections to having the “Mothers of the Race” distracted from their more vital task of outbreeding the mercilessly industrious wolf baying at America's door.)

The industrious and frugality common among immigrant workers was seen not as a benefit for the country, but a curse, because these were seen by eugenicists as inherent racial traits that would allow these groups- considered morally and intellectually inferior to the Anglo-Saxon but better-suited to drudgery, subordination, and squalor- to outbreed their superiors, damaging the gene pool and eventually bringing about the “race suicide” of the higher races. Too many of the unfit were working hard and being productive, and free markets were rewarding that behavior.

It wasn't just a matter of race or ethnicity, of course. The free market was also doing too much to support defective members of the white, Western/Northern European-derived population as well. Many "feeble-minded" or otherwise unacceptable people were still capable of working, taking wages away from the sort of workers the eugenicists liked and- in the worst cases- propagating their own kind. People who are self-supporting are people who aren't desperately crawling into the government's waiting arms, and that was a problem.

Some of the commentary on this issue was amazingly perverse. Consider what Sidney and Beatrice Webb had to say, in their classic Industrial Democracy, on the matter of how "the sick and the crippled, the idiots and lunatics, the epileptic, the blind and the deaf and dumb, the criminals and the incorrigibly idle" and the "deficient in strength, speed, or skill" were best dealt with:

These physical and moral weaklings and degenerates must somehow be maintained at the expense of other persons. They may be provided for from their own property or savings, by charity or from public funds, with or without being set to work in whatever ways are within their capacity. But of all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites the most ruinous to the community is to allow them unrestrainedly to compete as wage-earners for situations in the industrial organisation.

Note, again, the perversion of language: A disabled person who supports himself by working for wages in a competitive market, like any other worker, is being "maintained at the expense of other persons."

And yet, if you accept the premise that the class of workers that eugenicist Progressives and socialist considered "fit" favor ought to have a monopoly on wages, without competition from their inferiors, it actually makes sense. In that case, the wages earned by the defective worker actually rightfully belong to his betters, and archaic individualist quibbling about the fact that he earned them with own productive labor for a willing employer doesn't change that.
 
(It also makes sense if you hold whoever you've identified as defective in such contempt that their attempts to participate in human society as if they were actual people are an unacceptable affront to you, of course.)

That was the problem. Minimum wage laws offered a possible solution. Workers from “unfit” populations were generally less valuable to employers than native white labor on an hour-to-hour basis ,for various reasons, but since they were generally willing to work for less there were many situations where hiring them made economic sense. If working for such low wages became illegal, they would be stripped of their advantage, becoming less attractive compared to costlier higher-skilled workers or, if their value to an employer is less than the minimum, completely unemployable. They can't work, can't earn a living, can't support themselves, can't propagate their kind. It would also, by creating a readily identifiable, economically dependent class of permanent “unemployables,” make it easier to single such people out for stricter control, isolation from society at large, or sterilization.

In short, if making a living was especially hard for you, the goal of many Progressives was to make it even harder -ideally, impossible- until they had forced you out of the labor force entirely and stripped you of whatever income, autonomy, and dignity being able to work had given you. This would raise wages for the workers who were left, redistributing resources upwards. The fact that minimum wages are disproportionately harmful to the employment prospects of the most disadvantaged members of society was a benefit because it was the most disadvantaged members of society that eugenicist Progressives wanted to harm.

The “problem” that the minimum wage was supposed to solve for many of its supporters was that a free market in labor was too good for the people on the bottom. Even in an only relatively free market operating in a society where racism was rife in both law and culture, there was still too much money being made by the poor, too much opportunity for outsiders, too much of a tendency to reward people for their productivity instead of irrelevant characteristics, too much acceptance of difference, too many chances to gain experience, skills, or savings that might allow the people so many "reformers" despised to make better lives.

The advocates of this were not fringe figures. Eugenics was a recurring theme of the still-extant and eminently respectable American Economic Association, a progressive institution through and which proclaimed at its birth that “the doctrine of laissez-faire is unsafe in politics and unsound in morals.” Proponents of the idea included: Richard T. Ely , the Progressive leader and Social Gospel leader who was a founding member of the American Economics Association and the Christian Social Union, served as AEA president, and actually has a feast day on the Episcopalian liturgical calender. Henry Rogers Seager, another president of the American Economics Association and one of the country's most influential proponents of social insurance- his entire book on the subject is available at the Social Security Administration's official website, in honor of his memory. Sidney Webb, pillar of the Fabian Society, Labour MP and author of the original version of Clause IV of the Labor Party's constitution. And many more.

(If this post seems especially acerbic and unpleasant, I imagine that's why. Spending hours immersing yourself in the thoughts of people who despised you and what you are to the point of making ridding the world of your kind an integral part of a political philosophy to which they dedicated their lives can do that, particularly when the people in question are widely hailed as moral visionaries and their efforts to create a world that nobody would have to share with anyone like you are considered a noble struggle for decency, humanity, and "social justice.")

It's bitterly amusing to think that Herbert Spencer- a libertarian who endorsed charity and mutual aid, and believed that a free society based on voluntary interactions would lead people to develop greater and greater sympathy for others by making fulfilling the needs and desires of others essential to your own economic self-interest- is slandered so often by people on the Left for supposedly believing that the "unfit" should be abandoned to their fates so that they would be removed from the gene pool. Slandered, in other words,by people whose own recent ideological forebears would in many cases have considered even the position falsely attributed to Spencer to be too kind, and wanted the state to actively prevent the "inferior" from being able to support themselves out of the fear that they wouldn't die out if left on their own.

I should note that I certainly don't think that the typical American left-liberal or self-identified progressive today would endorse the sort of program that originally accompanied and animated some of their ideas, or is driven by the same  motives. Instead, it's an example of how incredibly flexible justifications for statism can be: Liberal/progressives support for the minimum wage is rock-solid a century later despite the fact that the arguments given in its support have not merely changed but actually inverted.

Still,  the fact that so many early Progressives were both economic statists and eugenicists was not an aberration or a fluke or an incidental result of the fact that racism in general was more acceptable at the time. Why would someone who had a strong confidence in the desirability of “rational” government management of society under government-appointed intellectuals, trusted in the mainstream science of his times as a guide for his country's technocrats, and rejected the classical liberal/libertarian conception of rights have been anything else? The eugenicists were more consistent thinkers than most people are today; they did not declare that coercive government management of human life was better than the chaos of laissez-faire, reject individualist objections to using state coercion to interfere in peaceful people's lives, and then arbitrarily declare that the gonads were off-limits just because. Coercive eugenics was simply Progressivism applied directly to the human body.

What I hadn't previously appreciated was the way in which Progressive support for eugenics not only sprang from the same basic philosophical roots as Progressive economic statism, which is immediately obvious, but helped motivate it. Makes sense, in retrospect, but it's still a bit jarring to learn; residue of public school propaganda about American history that still hadn't been scraped out, perhaps. (I recall once saying to someone that the purpose of liberal economic interventions like minimum wages seemed to be singling out people with almost nothing and taking it away from them, but it was supposed to be a joke.)

Of course, the fact that many of some form of market intervention's biggest intellectual advocates happened to be despicable assholes with appalling motivations who supported the law precisely because they knew that it would serve the appalling motivations that made them despicable assholes in the first place does not, in itself, prove that the intervention is a bad thing. But a huge amount of economic statism's persuasive appeal, at least in the United States, is built less on the arguments for individual policies than it is on the popular mythology of the noble, righteous reformers who fought to create the modern interventionist state and saved us from the horrors of laissez-faire, and one of the most pervasive and pernicious effects of that mythology is that it encourages the presumption that greater government interventionism in the economy is something that favors the weak against the strong.

I strongly encourage you to read the entire article, available at The Freeman. There are several papers written or co-written by Thomas C. Leonard available online, Economics and Eugenics in the Progressive Era, Excluding Unfit Workers: Social Control versus Social Justice in the Age of Economic Reform, and More Merciful and Not Less Effective: Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era, that are also worth checking out.

Letting the mask slip

Sheldon Richman's article The Anti-anti-authoritarians is the best summary and analysis of Tea Party-related events and commentary that I've read. I first read it some time ago, but the combination of the recent elections and the subject of my last post brought it back to mind. As Richman puts it:

It’s easy to point out flaws in the Tea Party. What is getting old quickly is the political elite’s criticism, which exhibits an intolerance and bad faith that it often attributes to the Tea Partiers. You don’t have to read too much of this criticism to see that the powers that be and their fawning admirers in the media and intelligentsia dislike one thing in particular: the movement’s apparent anti-authoritarianism. To be sure, at best it’s an imperfect anti-authoritarianism...

But let that go for now. What’s noteworthy is that the movement’s anti-authoritarian tone has establishment statists so upset. They seem really worried that this thing could get out of control. Any legitimate criticism they may make of the Tea Party movement is undermined by their abhorrence with anti- authoritarianism per se. They are anti-anti-authoritarian.

Richman then goes on to cite some choice examples that nicely demonstrate the traits that have characterized establishment response to the Tea Party phenomenon: the authoritarianism, the sneering elitism, and the baffled, almost panicky inability to comprehend the idea of actually wanting to reduce state power. Towards the end, he sums it up perfectly:

Here, apparently, is the Tea Party’s greatest offense: it resents the elites who presume to run their lives. How dare these know-nothings resist our good intentions and earnest efforts?

As I’ve said, the folks who identify with the Tea Party are far from consistent about this. Some of the contradictions are stunning. Still, it’s revealing that their critics are so concerned that through the Tea Party, anti-authoritarianism, anti-elitism, and anti-corporatism appear to be on the rise.

I would describe my own attitude towards the Tea Party movement as positive but not strongly so, due to the mixture of good and bad traits Richman describes in the article, and due to my memories of the Clinton years. I've seen these bursts of anti-statism on the Right rise and then fizzle out before, so I remain skeptical.

Still, they are vastly more attractive then their typical opponent in politics or the media. If nothing else, they've provided a valuable lesson by getting the mainline Left to drop the "Dissent is patriotic" pretense of the Bush era and show its fascistic true colors again. The snarling contempt and berserk, hysterical rage and hatred with which so much of the political and media establishment has responded to virtually any serious opposition or defiance, the relentless smearing, vilification, dehumanization, and demonization of dissenters, and the open calls for censorship and prosecution of Obama critics have been most instructive.
The Right in America did not cover itself in glory with the way it approached political disagreement in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, to put it mildly. However, I'll say this in their defense: when conservatives started responding to anyone who disagreed with them by shrieking like the Daleks on Dr. Who, it was in the aftermath of a terrorist attack that utterly destroyed two of the most prominent buildings in America's largest city, blasted a gaping hole in the side of the Pentagon, and killed nearly 3,000 people. Liberals are doing it with equal or greater intensity because citizens are holding peaceful rallies against deficit spending, health care nationalization, and corporate welfare, there's a cable news channel where people say unpleasant things about Dear Leader, and an ultimately unsuccessful minority in Congress caused sweeping legislation desired by the Democrats to take slightly longer to get through Congress by having the outrageous temerity to actually not vote in favor of it.

On a related note, there have been good recent posts at The Agitator (Progressives for State-Sanctioned Corporate Monopoly) and Coyote Blog (Fiat Garbage), both talking about the relationship between progressives and wealthy, privileged business interests. Warren Meyer at Coyote Blog sums it up pretty well:

If you can understand why progressives attack any corporation that they voluntarily do business with for having too much power, but defend any corporation backed by government authority, you will start to figure out exactly what progressives are really after.

What they say in their posts about the present day is also true historically: progressivism/left-liberalism/moderate statist leftism has never been nearly as hostile to Big Business, socioeconomic privilege, concentrations of wealth, or powerful megacorporations as the popular image suggests. All of those things are fully compatible with an ideology based on elite management of society- what isn't is an economy overrun with independent, competing enterprises that arise, change, grow, shrink, and die according to voluntary consumer choices that the ruling elite can't control or predict. Speaking of which, at the Center for a Stateless Society's site Kevin Carson has a relatively recent paper, "The Thermidor of the Progressives" (PDF file), that is very interesting reading on this and related subjects. Probably my favorite quote:

Concurrent with the conventional liberal model of industrial organization there is, in every aspect of life, a managerial-professional priesthood controlling the range of services available and reducing the average person to client status. Mainstream liberalism extends beyond a Schumpeterian affinity for large organizations to an affinity for the professionalization of every aspect of life even in the realm of individual exchange and social relations. As with large-scale organization, the affinity seems to a considerable extent to be aesthetic: regulation and licensing—any regulation, any form of licensing, as such—is “progressive,” and any opposition to it is “right-wing.”

I've said it before, and I'm sure I will again- statism and control is not progressivism's means to some other end. It is progressivism's end. If it conflicts with the supposed goal of aiding and defending the poor and underprivileged, it's the latter who are expendable. Few of the rank-and-file would be on board with this if they really understood it, I'm sure- but no successful statist ideology is short of people good at making sure it isn't understood.

Nothing new under the sun

Contemporary American politics makes a great deal more sense in light of the realization that Barack Obama's most devoted fans and fiercest critics are united by a shared delusion: the belief that Obama is really, really interesting.

How this manifests among his supporters is apparent enough in the starry-eyed adulation he been able to inspire in so many people. How this manifests among his opponents was especially driven home recently by the now somewhat notorious Dinesh D'Souza article in Forbes, in which D'Souza argued that Obama's politics are the result of the anti-colonialist ideology of Obama's Kenyan father. As D'Souza summarizes:

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder...

For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.

Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s...

Equipped with this window into the president's soul, D'Souza purports to explain a variety of Obama's political positions, from economics to his interest in using NASA for outreach to the Muslim world.

There are two problems with this thesis. (Three if one counts D'Souza's questionable attempts at psychoanalysis, which takes a somewhat troubled young man's youthful romanticizing of his absent biological father and turns it into The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.)

The first relates to Obama's military and foreign policy. In the real world, where the sitting president of the United States of America is the actual Barack Obama and not a cunningly disguised George McGovern wearing a Barack Obama mask, Obama has maintained tens of thousands of troops in Iraq, significantly escalated military operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan with considerable cost in human lives, and is loudly rattling his saber at Iran. If he's grieved by the fact that the United States has military bases spanning the globe, well over one million men under arms, and an annual military budget that accounts for two-fifths of the planet's military spending, he 's been remarkably restrained in his complaints about it.

If Obama really views America's military as "an instrument of neocolonial occupation," as D'Souza claims, that's actually a rather decisive refutation of the idea that he's driven by anticolonialism.

In his discussion of domestic matters, D'Souza is at least reasonably accurate about describing Obama's actual policies. (Though it should be noted that, contrary to both D'Souza and some of Obama's own apologists, the rich aren't Obama's only tax targets: Obama signed a bill that more than doubled federal cigarette taxes. Like most lifestyle choices that progressives cluck their tongues at, cigarette smoking is disproportionately common among people at lower income levels.) However, he is no more effective in making his case for Obama the anticolonialist.

D'Souza's claims about Obama's desire to use NASA as a way to forge closer ties with Muslim countries is nicely representative of how he goes wrong:

No explanation other than anticolonialism makes sense of Obama's curious mandate to convert a space agency into a Muslim and international outreach.

Please. This is generic off-the-shelf liberalism- government programs will bring people together in a United Colors of Benetton-esque fraternity of cooperation and mutual understanding. Give me half an hour at any university in this country and I could round up dozens of lily-white progressives who would think that using NASA as a way to reach out to the Muslim world is a splendid idea.

The problem is that D'Souza asks the wrong questions: Why would Obama blow hundreds of billions of dollars on a dubious "stimulus" program during an economic crisis? Why would he try to make banks that had declined bailout money due to the strings attached take it anyway? Why would he try to tighten the government's grip on health care? Why would he want to raise taxes on higher income brackets?

Why on earth wouldn't he? He's blowing hundreds of billions on the stimulus so that he and his political allies can fund pet projects, justify the exercise of greater influence and power over society and pass out government swag to friends, allies, and supporters. He's doing the standard, normal thing for someone with political power to do - he's just able to do more because of the circumstances he finds himself in.

He wants to raise taxes on higher income brackets? So does every other center-left politician cultivating his "friend of the people" persona. He wants to increase federal involvement in this or that sector of the economy? He'd be a bizarre anomaly if he was a major American politician who didn't.

The same can be said of questions raised by faltering or disenchanted Obama supporters: Why hasn't he shown interest in liberalizing drug laws? Why isn't he renouncing the Bush era's offenses against civil liberties and separation of powers? Why is he handing out wagonloads of boodle to big corporations?

Why would it be otherwise?

The problem D'Souza has- and that many conservative critics of Obama have, and that many liberal admirers of Obama have- is this: He thinks there must be some interesting, unusual, or complex explanation for what is actually entirely mundane, typical behavior with a mundane, typical explanation.

The conservative reaction to Obama's programs are remarkably similar to the liberal reaction to George W. Bush, which also tended to ridiculously exaggerate the novelty of what Bush was doing by acting as if incremental changes building on established precedent were new and shocking.

Torture? President Bill Clinton signed an executive order authorizing "extraordinary rendition" in 1995- Bush's innovation was the idea of having it done in-house instead of subcontracting it out to the Third World. Bush killed hundreds of thousands of people by invading Iraq... not at all like his immediate predecessor, who had the good taste and discretion to kill hundreds of thousands of people through low-key methods like starvation and water-borne disease. Bush's encroachments on civil liberties weren't just built on the foundation of past encroachments by past administrations of both parties- they were, in many cases, the same law enforcement powers that Clinton had tried and failed to enact after the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing.

That's easy to forget, amidst all the hysterical squealing about Bush's supposed radical right-wingerness. In domestic policy, much of said squealing is the result of outright falsehoods- specifically, the ludicrous but impressively durable myth that Bush was a proponent of laissez-faire or presided over a reduction in the government's domestic size or regulatory power. This belief is actually very much like D'Souza's belief that Obama is anti-military- it's not only false, it's very obviously false, but the truth is incompatible with each side's mental image of the other side and so cannot penetrate their skulls.

Liberal treatment of Bush's foreign policy is generally much like D'Souza's interpretation of Obama's domestic policy- based on a reasonably accurate account of what Bush actually did but distorted into nonsense by the assumption that the Bush administration's polices and ideas, a Wilsonian crusade to spread the blessings of democracy through military force that would probably have met with the approval of many of the original Progressives, represented some sort of radical and novel right-wing extremism. (You don't get a vote in favor of your war from the number two contender for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination and President Obama's current Secretary of State without bipartisan appeal.)

Bush was able to push the limits further than Clinton because Bush had a bigger, scarier terrorist attack. Likewise, Obama has a bigger, scarier economic problem than his predecessors, and that provides opportunity. Each man chose to avail himself of the opportunity not because there is anything unusual or special about either of these politicians, but precisely because there isn't. No need for any unique wickedness from either of them. No need for any sort of exotic political agenda, be it Marxism, anticolonialism, neoconservatism as it exists in the liberal imagination*, secret adherence to Islam, or the machinations of the vengeful shade of Saul Alinsky.

*(Not to be confused with neoconservatism as it exists in the real world, where it's a movement founded by New Deal-style liberals, Trotskyites, anti-Soviet social democrats, and technocratic center-leftists who started identifying with the conservative movement because they were were appalled by the New Left's antimilitarism, cultural radicalism, and hostility to Cold War consensus liberalism.)

Acknowledging the incremental rather than revolutionary nature of what you condemn is potentially awkward for people in the political mainstream, because doing so will entail condemning your own side in the process. Everything that both the mainstream Right and mainstream Left profess to oppose, they both helped to create and preserve. If you don't want to face that, or don't want other people to, or are so deeply immersed in mainstream political assumptions that ideas like "Republicans aren't consistent or principled supporters of the free market or opponents of big government and government regulation" or "Democrats aren't consistent or principled supporters of peace and civil liberties or opponents of the rich, powerful, and privileged" makes your brain start giving Bad command or file name error messages, you'll need to replace the most plausible, obvious, and parsimonious explanation with something more baroque.

Not actual opposition to plutocracy, but an incredible simulation

America's political culture and national self-image romanticizes the underdog, the rebel, the Common Man, the Little Guy, the bold voice speaking against the powerful. Thus, in any endeavor to use the force of government in the pursuit of wealth, privilege, and power, it helps to have some sympathetic people who fit or at least resemble that description in the vicinity. It always makes me chuckle when some earnest statist claims that libertarians are the dupes or tools of greedy businessmen, and part of the reason for that is nicely illustrated by this story from my home state of Illinois.

MUNDELEIN, Ill.—Robert Brownson long believed that his proposed development here, with its 200,000-square-foot Wal-Mart Supercenter, was being held hostage by nearby homeowners.

He had seen them protesting at city hall, and they had filed a lawsuit to stop the project. What he didn't know was that the locals were getting a lot of help. A grocery chain with nine stores in the area had hired Saint Consulting Group to secretly run the antidevelopment campaign...

P. Michael Saint... is founder of Saint Consulting Group, which specializes in using political-campaign tactics to build support for or against developments. Many of its efforts to block projects are clandestine.

As Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has grown into the largest grocery seller in the U.S., similar battles have played out in hundreds of towns like Mundelein. Local activists and union groups have been the public face of much of the resistance. But in scores of cases, large supermarket chains including Supervalu Inc., Safeway Inc. and Ahold NV have retained Saint Consulting to block Wal-Mart...

Supermarkets that have funded campaigns to stop Wal-Mart are concerned about having to match the retailing giant's low prices lest they lose market share...
In Mundelein, a town of 35,000 about 20 miles northwest of Chicago, it was Supervalu, a national grocer based in Eden Prairie, Minn., that hired Saint to work behind the scenes, according to Saint documents. Supervalu's objective was to block Wal-Mart from competing with its nine Jewel-Osco supermarkets located within three to ten miles of the proposed shopping center...

Mr. Saint... founded his firm 26 years ago. It specializes in using political-campaign tactics—petition drives, phone banks, websites—to build support for or against controversial projects...

For the typical anti-Wal-Mart assignment, a Saint manager will drop into town using an assumed name to create or take control of local opposition, according to former Saint employees...

Safeway, a national chain based in Pleasanton, Calif., retained Saint to thwart Wal-Mart Supercenters in more than 30 towns in California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii in recent years...

The article goes on to discuss the methods used by Saint's company to delay or block the construction of stores that would compete with the company's clients, frequently revolving around the creation, funding, and control of ostensibly grassroots organizations whose rank-and-file members are ignorant of where their leadership and funding is actually coming from. It also describes some specific examples, including a darkly humorous, Peter Sellers-esque account of Saint's company creating a front group of local citizens in Pennsylvania to block a proposed Wal-Mart on behalf of competitor Giant Food Stores, and then having to suddenly destroy it's own creation when Giant's parent company decided to build its own enormous store on a site directly opposite the lot where the Wal-Mart would have gone.

Arguing ad hominem is a logical fallacy, and the fact that a political cause is supported by and serves the financial interests of a national retail giant with over $40 billion in yearly revenue that wants to use government power to block competition doesn't prove that the cause is wrong. This stiory does, however, nicely illustrate the nature of the lie on which so much of modern politics is built.

One of our great cultural myths in America is that of heroic, public-spirited struggle waged by plucky grassroots bands of We the People against the depredations and greed of some Heartless Corporation. The reality is much less romantic: The heroic struggles between Concerned Citizens and Greedy Plutocrats lionized in our civic mythology and in mainstream accounts of history are in fact usually, at best, battles between Greedy Plutocrat A and Greedy Plutocrat B, in which one side or the other is just better at finding frontmen and dupes. Frequently it doesn't even rise to that level, where the Concerned Citizens are at least actually hurting the target of their ire, and instead serves the purpose of aiding the very companies or industry being righteously railed against at the expense of the general public. (Kevin Carson's work is a valuable resource on this sort of thing.)

My favorite recent example of this principle at work is the controversy over net neutrality, and the way that controversy is usually framed. Opposed to net neutrality, we are told, are the big, greedy telecommunications companies like Comcast, who will choke off the free flow of information unless the government saves us from them. They are opposed by a plucky band of grassroots freedom fighters... Well, a plucky band of grassroots freedom fighters and various multibillion dollar corporations that stand to benefit financially from net neutrality, like Google (revenue of $23.6 billion in 2009), Amazon.com ($24.5 billion in 2009), eBay ($8.7 billion) and Sony ($78 billion). Again, the fact that various business interests are on your side for their own self-interested reasons doesn't mean that you're wrong, but it does mean that the story is more complicated than what many people like to believe.

There are good criticisms to be made of internet service providers, which are frequently the beneficiaries of government-granted monopolies or other governmental barriers to competition. If ISPs really are in a position to harm consumers by controlling what their customers can access online and are likely to take advantage of that, as neutrality advocates claim, freeing the market for internet services would break these monopolies and deal with the problem.

But the fact that current ISPs are the creatures of state intervention is seldom discussed, and it's not hard to see why. Government-enforced uniformity of bandwidth pricing would benefit big players like Google and Amazon.com, who would be natural targets if ISPs started to engage in price discrimination and don't want to see telecommunications companies taking a slice of their pie. Deregulation of ISPs, on the other hand, would benefit (aside from consumers) small internet firms currently being blocked from trying to compete with the big monopolies in many markets, and companies that do not currently exist but would if regulations were not hostile to entrepreneurs entering the market- in other words, it would benefit people who don't have deep pockets or political muscle or executives who get invited to Presidential galas in return for big donations.

Combine that with many people's kneejerk "The government must fix it" response to any potential problems and the prejudices and self-interest pervasive among politicians, intellectuals, and the media, and it's not surprising that few if any of the people and organizations oh-so-concerned about the possible depredations of companies like Comcast show interest in actually going after the source of their power, and that only "solutions" that increase government power are proposed and agitated for.

Similarly, there are certainly good criticisms to be made of Wal-Mart, such as the company's use of eminent domain and the fact that it's market share has probably been inflated by the way many government regulations disproportionately hurt smaller firms, but the vast majority of the store's critics never use arguments like that. They can't, since their ideology is based around the belief that the interventionist state is a good thing and simply can't process the idea that it might be the problem and not the solution, or that it could be the ally of powerful business interests and not their enemy. Instead we get a relentless torrent of economic ignorance, elitism, xenophobia, and class snobbery.

The story of "progressive" and populist politics in the United States is, at its core, a story of fake rebellion, dressing up the strengthening and enrichment of privileged interests as a battle to protect the weak and vulnerable from the strong. The central delusion of modern statism- that the concentrated coercive power of the state can be trusted to protect the weak and restrain the strong- ensures that it will remain so.

Who needs the Pinkertons when you have the Democrats?

As has likely been apparent from several recent posts, the aspect of the health care legislation being advocated that I find most interesting is the insurance mandate, which would make it illegal to not have health insurance. If we're lucky, the recent election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts will throw a wrench into the "reform" process, but I'm not getting my hopes up too high. (A good rule of thumb is that if your hopes involve phrases like "If the Republicans are principled and resolute," you're fucked.) In any case, there's another aspect of the mandate that is worth exploring.

One side effect of so many people getting their health insurance through their employer is that it often weakens the bargaining position of employees relative to their employers. For many people, leaving their job- whether by quitting or by being fired-not only cuts off their income, it deprives them of their insurance until they get their own policy or a new job.

The whole point of insurance is to secure yourself against unexpected catastrophe, so losing it can often entail serious costs beyond its monetary value- fear, insecurity, lost peace of mind. This can and often does make the prospect of temporary unemployment more daunting than it otherwise would be. As a result, it can become easier for a boss to cow workers into accepting mistreatment, and harder for workers to walk away from a bad job (or credibly threaten to do so).

Which makes it interesting, I think, that the government does so much to encourage precisely this arrangement, through the tax structure and through various state-level regulations. The government started the practice of getting health insurance from your employer more or less by accident, when businesses competing for workers during the Second World War started offering insurance to workers in order to get around wage controls. It then became encouraged through the tax code, and now it is pretty much taken for granted as the right way to do things.

Indeed, when the supposed of the working man attack this or that business, "They don't give their employees health insurance" is usually near the top of the list of charges. In most cases, I think this is the result of simple ignorance, since the idea that we live in a universe of scarce resources, and that therefore the money to pay for additional employee benefits has to come from somewhere- monetary wages, quality of working conditions, new hiring- is something a lot of people don't really understand.

There's also a contingent, much less common in my experience, that acknowledges the trade-off and is instead motivated by paternalism- workers should not be permitted to sacrifice employer-provided insurance in favor of higher cash wages, because they don't understand what's best for them. (It's always important to remember that most laws framed as restrictions on employers can be described as restrictions on workers with equal accuracy.)

That said, if I've figured this effect out, I find it hard to believe that companies big enough to have some muscle in Washington haven't. Which in turn makes me wonder how much of the political support for the tax code's favoring of employer-provided health insurance over other compensation, and more recently the idea of mandating employer provision of insurance, is motivated by precisely this.

Which brings us to the proposed universal mandate, under which everyone must have insurance. Despite the psychological factors described above, people are sometimes willing to accept the risk of temporarily going without insurance. But once health care is "reformed," being uninsured will be not merely a risk, but a crime. Everyone must pay, either to the insurance companies or to the government in the form of fines. (Which will almost certainly go up if their initial level is low enough that large numbers of people choose to pay the fine rather than hand over their money to the insurance industry.)

The upshot is simple. If you are insured through your employer, the proposed mandate is, in effect, a tax on quitting your job. Like so much that is ironic in politics, it would be funny if it weren't so sick: The people who shout loudest and longest about protecting the common man from the oppression of merciless plutocrats are the champions of measures that will bind more workers to their current jobs and bosses, and will chain you more tightly the more vulnerable, desperate, or impoverished you are.

I suppose straddling the line between socialism and fascism counts as "bipartisan"

The debate over health care has had me thinking about the question of where to draw the boundary between a a private firm intertwined with or heavily regulated by the government and an arm of the state that merely maintains the forms of the private sector. It's been frequently pointed out, correctly, that the obvious purpose of the "public option" is to serve as a Trojan horse for single payer. Even without the public option, though, the "reforms" that seem most likely to pass would effectively eliminate private insurance.

The most frequently referenced issues, now that the public option seems to be out of the running, are the insurance mandate and insurance for people with preexisting conditions. The mandate is basically a payoff to the insurance industry: The government imposes new controls on them requiring them to do things that do not make financial sense if you're actually in the insurance business, and in return the government will force everyone to buy their product. The insurance companies get more money, the government gains greater control of health care, and the benevolent champions of the working man in Washington, D.C. get to impose a large, regressive I-swear-it's-not-a-tax on everyone.

In this scenario, in what meaningful sense is the insurance industry "private" any longer?

The insurers would be government agencies in everything but name, and the insurance they “sell” would simply be a welfare program (albeit one that, like social security, would produce a net transfer of wealth from the relatively poor to the relatively rich) disguised as a commercial transaction. They would exist to serve purposes chosen by the government, their activities would be controlled by the government, and their funding would be given directly to them by the entire population under threat of government force. They would have some internal autonomy and some scope to compete with each other, but that means little to this issue. Even communist countries experimented with letting the managers at state-owned factories make some independent decisions. They'll be about as "private" as a public school district.

The only notable difference, so far as I can tell, is that the people in charge of distributing insurance will be making a hell of a lot more money than your average Department of Health and Human Services manager.

The "uninsured Americans" Trojan horse

One of the main issues that allegedly motivates calls for health care "reform"- be it instituting single-payer, a "public option," insurance mandates, requiring insurance companies to accept all patients or charge the same amount regardless of risk, or some combination- is the problem of people who can't get insurance because they are poor or already too sick to get insurance. The problem, we are told, is that people with preexisting medical conditions can't get insured, and thus are either deprived of medical treatment or are impoverished paying for it. Similarly, people too poor to have insurance let problems fester untreated because of the expense. The extent of this problem is exaggerated greatly, since the most commonly cited statistics lump people who can't get insurance together with people who have simply chosen not to, but it does exist.

As is so often the case, this is a problem with roots in previous government interventions. The tax code and various government regulations encourage people to use insurance for everything medical-related, including routine and foreseeable expenses, which encourages greater consumption and less concern for cost, which drives up the price of medical services, which increases the amount of money the uninsured have to pay out of their own pocket. Another contribution to the plight of the uninsured comes from all the various conditions and treatments the law says insurance companies MUST cover, which outlaws stripped-down insurance polices that would be within the reach of more people.

Fixing that is out, needless to say, since the people who most loudly profess their concern for the uninsured are generally the same people who would scream bloody murder at the thought of people who can't afford gold-plated insurance buying a more modest version they can actually afford. To many people, actually getting the disadvantaged more access to medical care is less important than being able to boast about being the sort of big-hearted idealist who believes the disadvantaged should have access to the best medical care imaginable, and big-hearted idealists don't lower themselves to facing the unpleasant tradeoffs that exist in a world of scarce resources.

It's certainly a plight that ought to inspire sympathy, harming people whose lives are already harder than most. It's not surprising that this issue would loom large in any criticism of the existing system. There's a question that is almost never raised, however: What does any of this have to do with the proposed reforms?

As a libertarian, I think these people could be helped far more effectively and justly through market processes and civil society, if only the government would get out of the way, but what if I were a statist setting out to aid the uninsured? For a moment, let's take it as given that any sort of deregulation is off the table, and that this is a problem that requires a government solution. In that case, the solution to the problem is quite obvious: Set up a government assistance program, funded out of general tax revenues, for people who can't get insurance and have it buy them medical care as if it were an insurance company. It would, essentially, be a “public option” specifically for people who are currently shut out of private sector insurance due to poverty or illness.

Problem solved, and with far less government expense, distortion of the marketplace, inconvenience to the general public, or divisive political acrimony than any of the actual major proposals. There is potential for fraud and abuse, but no more so than any other welfare program and probably less than many. As government solutions go, this is relatively simple, and it's really just a logical extension of things the government already does now. It's modest size and consistency with the precedent set by existing forms of government assistance would make it far less controversial than what's actually being proposed.

Supporters of greater government involvement in health care have other arguments for their program, of course, but the issue of the involuntarily uninsured is simply irrelevant to the question of whether the health care system as a whole needs some sort of radical change imposed by the government. If you're really concerned about a small segment of the population being deprived of a resource and want the government to make sure they have access to it, give them the resource. When faced with the plight of people who can't afford food, liberals generally advocate giving them food stamps or monetary benefits. They don't use the needs of the desperately poor to argue that the government should nationalize agriculture or run Public Grocery Stores to compete with Wal-Mart and Safeway.

This ought to be a political slam dunk, winning support in Congress from every Democrat and many moderate Republicans. Libertarians and some fiscal conservatives might object, but there would be nothing like the storm of controversy that has raged. It wouldn't preclude further legislation creating other government interventions relevant to other problem areas of the health care system if they are needed. If Obama had proposed it upon taking office it would have almost certainly passed already; that is surely a selling point given how frequently we're told that getting help to the uninsured is a dire necessity that must be accomplished quickly, before more lives are lost. The need to help people who can't get insurance is cited by liberal supporters of health care reform more than any other issue, and this would address that problem quickly and without holding the issue hostage to far more intense arguments over proposals for more sweeping government intervention.

There are limitations to my proposed alternative It wouldn't turn every American into a captive customer of the insurance industry. It wouldn't allow the government to turn private insurance into a concealed welfare program where taxes paid to support beneficiaries are disguised as payments to supposedly private companies for their services. It wouldn't give the government greater control over everybody's personal health care choices. It wouldn't create a means for the government to crowd private insurance out of existence altogether.

It would, in short, solve (as well as a government solution can, anyway) the problem that provides the lion's share of the justification for a major increase in the government's involvement in medicine care without setting the stage for the destruction of private sector health insurance and total state control of medicine. And what “reformer” worth his salt would want that?

The Berlin Wall and the fruits of liberty

20 years ago as of Monday, the citizens of East Berlin penetrated the Berlin Wall and gained access to the West. The wall's physical destruction would not be completed for weeks, but its power was broken. My paternal grandmother was born in Germany, usually spent a few months out of the year staying with her sister in West Berlin, and had relatives who had escaped from East Germany. She lived just long enough to see the Wall destroyed before passing away in March 1990. One of her relatives gave me a piece of the Wall, which I still have.

At Econlog, David Henderson has a post about how he explained the event to his 4-year-old daughter back in 1989. I recommend the whole thing, but what jumped out at me the most was a brief aside. Recounting his discussion with his daughter about all the East Germans crossing the border for the first time, Henderson remarks in passing:

The media reported a few days later that the candy shops in West Berlin had sold out.

Something about this little detail was very striking to me. In my experience, most discussions of Communist oppression focuses heavily on a few specific areas, and above all on censorship and control of ideas. (Things that directly impinge on the psychological and material interests of intellectuals and journalists, in other words.) The material deprivation caused by Communism does get some attention, but much less. Acknowledgment of it, not surprisingly, mostly involves the striking, dramatic, and visual- people standing in line for hours to buy bread, the dull grayness of Eastern Bloc cities.

What doesn't get much attention is the day-in, day-out lack of things that make life in a wealthy country like the United States more pleasant for the great majority of the population. I do not use scratchy, sandpaper-like toilet paper. Barring natural disaster or freakishly cold winter temperatures, I take it for granted that water will come out of my sink's faucet when I turn the knob. If my shoes are worn out or my clothes are torn up, I'm confident that replacements will be readily available for me to buy. On Halloween, like the one that just passed, candy is so cheap and plentiful that children can go door to door asking to be given candy for free. and most households will cheerfully oblige them.

There are few things more revolting to me than the spectacle of some hyperprivileged Western leftist who enjoys a degree of wealth and material comfort that would be the envy of almost every human being who has ever lived pontificating on the evils of "greed" and "consumerism" and praising some oppressive, impoverished socialist hellhole for its superior spiritual values or sense of community or committment to "social justice" or whatever, and this is a big part of the reason why. The difference between a country with a comparatively free market and the sort of society they defend isn't just a matter of whether people have colossal gas-guzzling vehicles or plasma TVs or "McMansions" or the opportunity to buy, to use the sort of epithets anticapitalists like to trot out, "cheap junk" and "stuff they don't need." (It's depressing how much antimarket rhetoric boils down to whining that other people don't share your personal tastes and dressing it up as moral indignation.) It's about whether people beyond some small political elite get to enjoy the innumerable little improvements to their daily lives that free markets provide with such ease and abundance that we don't even stop to think about them.

Review of Economics for Real People

We're always on the cutting edge here at The Superfluous Man, and so I'm happy to bring you a review of 2004's Economics for Real People: An Introduction to the Austrian School by Gene Callahan. In all seriousness, though, it's an excellent book for anyone who wants to explore the subject of economics and is looking for a place to start. It's also great for anyone who wants to get an overview of some of the distinctive features of Austrian economics and the ideas of important figures like Ludwig von Mises without the risks involved in carrying around economics treatises so massive that they threaten to collapse into singularities and gradually consume the earth from the inside out.

Suite101 made me submit an actual photo of myself- never a good idea- for my profile and said I was supposed to smile in it. That's something I try to avoid in daily life, because I look like a complete jackass whenever I smile. (I also sometimes have an annoying, shrieky, mad scientist-like laugh that I find embarrassing, so I pretty much do whatever I can to avoid ever displaying any positive emotions whatsoever when other people are present.)

I bring this up because I wanted to prevent anyone who saw my profile picture from getting the impression that I write while popping Quaaludes and/or sitting in a big cloud of marijuana smoke. Not the case. I achieve that dopey, confused look with no performance-enhancing substances of any kind.

Fall guys

The public uproar over the bonuses for the executives of AIG must be one of the most ridiculous cases of misdirected anger in my lifetime. I'm not going to get all weepy over the hurt feelings of millionaire recipients of government boodle, but it’s a very sad example of how sound and potentially antistatist public sentiments, like “government giveaways to big business are bad,” get redirected so that they are harmless to the rulers. The government loots the nation of billions upon billions of dollars to give to wealthy cronies in an orgy of handouts and corporate welfare, and the lion’s share of public indignation on the subject is directed towards the beneficiaries of one tiny fraction of it, who received it due to a preexisting contract with a firm that was given government money. It’s as if everyone who thinks the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea ignored the existence of George W. Bush, selected a Marine gunnery sergeant at random, and declared him single-handedly responsible for the hundreds of thousands of deaths wrought by the war.

Today Bureaucrash, tomorrow the world!

My apologies for my absence from this site. I haven't been idle, however- I'm now one of the regular bloggers on Bureaucrash. It's given me a chance to do some "entry-level" writing on libertarianism, which I haven't really done since college. I'll have something substantial here soon, but in the meantime you can check out my posts on Obama's fear-mongering, the real effects of recent "consumer protection" laws, and the innacuracy of government drug testing.