I'm sorry, our isolations "spares us" from economic troubles? Our isolation is the primary reason our per-capita GDP is so low (about 60% of the US in Price-adjusted terms, give or take). If we are spared serious fiscal pressures in the future it will be because we've already been through this once so the public knows what happens when their government goes fiscally FUBAR, plus the bond markets pay more attention to how much our government spends.
And "pretty generous" is a deliberately vague term. Fiscal sustainability is a necessary precondition for a welfare system for me. I actually think you can do well enough acting under prudent fiscal constraints so long as you don't A) Divert most of your welfare effort to transferring money from young poor people to old rich people and/or B) try to make the middle class net welfare recipients. Save your resources for helping people who are actually poor and you can do a decent job of it.
And "marginal libertarianism" means working at the margins of current policy to change the world in libertarian ways (as opposed to agitating for radical change all at once), a concept I would have thought a conservative could appreciate.
1) I definitely agree about the drug war. Madness doesn't seem to cover it.
2) I definitely disagree about trade barriers. I'm an economist by training and I specialised in trade theory. Believe me when I tell you there really isn't a good reason to impede the flow of international commerce, barring a state or war or something similar.
3) By "education" I mean the current system. I don't have a fundamental problem with your government (at state or federal level) doing something with education, but the present system seems to have some pretty serious gaps, and I suspect it's contributing to declining social mobility in your country. My preferred starting point would be to develop some capacity for experimentation with curriculum, pedagogy and other aspects of schooling, either within government or in the private sector. Government doesn't do that type of experimentation well, but one way or another it needs to happen if there is to be change.
4) Working out where to start: I agree for the most part, but I would note that there is a place for division of labour here. Since I'm an economist I'm probably going to be more help on the welfare system than I am on the Drug War.
5) On dishonest libertarianism: I agree completely, while I'm concerned about taxes on occasion, my concern is about the deleterious incentive effects of high effective marginal tax rates (one reason I support lower rates with less deductions). Apart from that, the real rate of taxation is the rate of spending (as Milton Friedman put it). To talk about taxes and spending as if they were different things is pointless.
I feel similarly to you. My libertarianism is what James Hanley's taken to calling "marginal libertarianism", there are many policies that don't fit my views of what the proper role for government is, but I'd rather focus on the unconscionable ones (like the War on Drugs), the hugely costly and stupid ones (trade barriers, healthcare, education) and the ones that will end up causing a Budgetary crisis (and huge human misery as a result) if they aren't reformed (Medicare, Social Security). I'd be happy with a society with a pretty generous welfare state (I have some requirements around design, but that's more of a technical issue), and public funding for libraries, museums, scientific research and similar amenities, if in exchange we could look at the regulatory state with a lot more scrutiny (that doesn't mean no regulation ever, I just mean some careful thinking is in order), and stop the government from actively screwing its own citizens (or foreigners either for that matter).
Some of what I'd advocate could be uncomfortable for liberals, but I'm willing to accept some discomfort too. Do you think I could get a significant number of people to sign up for this?
I strongly endorse this position. I'd be much happier to argue specific policy issues and try to build coalitions on an issue by issue basis. But unfortunately politics is tribal, and failing to support "your side" is often viewed as a betrayal.
To be fair, Singapore has one significant natural resource: its location makes it a good location for entrepot trade, which is how Singapore makes most of its money. Still, I have to agree that Lee Kuan Yew may well be the closest real-world equivalent to Havelock Vetinari.
Actually foreign trade (including offshoring) does create demand. When you pay those foreign workers for their service, you are paying them in US dollars (directly or indirectly, it doesn't matter). What do they do with those US dollars but buy US goods.
I'm a government employee who personally knows people who lost their jobs due to Budget cuts in my country. It's not something I'd wish on anyone, but at the end of the day a lot of people in the private sector have lost jobs. Why should we be immune? The government is dependant on the private sector for revenue, when that revenue shrinks, what can you do?
I'm a free marketer and I'm on board with this logic. My opposition to negotiating an international carbon tax is that I think that the negotiations are doomed to failure and political capital should be spent on alternatives.
In fairness, the UK government is in a deep fiscal hole, and its better to cut back now, than have to suddenly shut things down when the money runs out.
That's not to say Cameron's cutting the right things, I don't have enough specific knowledge for that.
If I'm going to limit my policy advice to what I think politician would be willing to do, I might as well just shoot myself now :)
My whole point is that this is a stupid policy, designed to correct for previous stupid policies. The fact that this is also true of most enacted policy is irrelevant. After all I'm trying to change the political reality, in what miniscule way I can.
Tried and tested doesn't mean its good policy, it just means its not so bad that it causes the whole nation to collapse. Besides which I'm not suggesting mandates are necessarily a bad idea in all cases, merely that imposing one won't sole the US's health care problem.
The problem the mandate is trying to solve is that without it community rating and guaranteed issue will make the insurance market unviable. Rather than take the hint that community rating and guaranteed issue are a really bad idea, they decided to paper over the cracks by forcing healthy 20-year olds to pay far more for health insurance than it is worth to them.
The solution is to stop treating insurance like it was welfare. Insurance is a risk management tool, designed to accommodate risk-averse people who can afford the expected cost of a future event, but are worried about unlikely but highly adverse outcomes like your house burning down, or you getting cancer. If you can't afford the expected cost of those events then your insurance will be too expensive to afford and that's because insurance is not a subsidy.
Freddie is entirely correct that markets won't help produce certain distributional outcomes, that's not what they're for. But the solution is not to torture health insurance into the monstrosity that it has become in the US, but to use welfare. Because that's what you do when people can't afford somethign essential, you give them welfare. Or you don't, that's a political decision. But to try and turn insurance into a welfare system is the height of stupidity. And to try and paper over that stupidity with a mandate just piles one absurdity on top of another.
Constitutionality aside, the mandate suggests a real failing in the policy development process. It's like the policy developers just said "well if everyone bought insurance there'd be no problem, so let's just make them". This is precisely what Adam Smith was warning about when he criticised "the man of system".
The problem with the T-bills in the trust fund isn't that they're not legally enforceable, it's that the US government holds both ends of them. An asset is a claim on another party's future income. It doesn't work if the income you're claiming is already yours. If the trust fund's assets were to magically disappear in the night, the US government's assets would be less, but its liabilities would be lower by the same amount, making the net financial effect 0.
I'm playing Fallout New Vegas at the moment (I wanted to wait for it to be patched a bit before buying). I'm enjoying it a lot (a few residual bugs notwithstanding), and I'm glad to see much more of the spirit (and lore) from the first 2 Fallouts come to the fore than in Fallout 3, which I thought was a bit of a disappointment.
I assisted a lecturer like that at Uni. He put all his lectures online and if you wanted to ask questions, you asked an assistant. He even pushed all of his marking onto us (doing some marking was normal, but not all of it).
Do this day, I can't figure out what he did that justified his salary each year. Mind you, I was just doing that while I finished my Master's degree so I didn't see as a poor alternative to a career, but a good alternative to retail or fast food work.
The thing is that profit margins tend to converge on the rate of economic growth. Unless all those corporations are taking huge risks if they're getting rich fast then everyone is.
I think in part it's how government uses data. Data is most commonly used to support a pre-conceived notion, rather than a way of improving your knowledge base. I don't mean to pick on government specifically, since this is the way pretty much everyone uses data, but if you're using data that way a greater focus on data only makes it easier to win arguments, not actually make better policy. At that stage you can fairly dismiss pseudo-empiricism as a form of intellectual snobbery.
Now, I'd be really happy if government actually let data drive their decisions more, and I'm trying to help this happen in my own little way, but in practice government's don't use data much they abuse it.
No doubt this scenario is offered as one of panic, but if I could push a button and make it happen, I would. And then I’d retire to a chateau. Made of platinum ingots. On Alpha Centauri.
deserves to go down in the annals of blogging greatness.
I agree, New Zealand's left-right spectrum and the US's are practically orthogonal. And there are temporal changes as well. It's one of the reasons why trying to place fascism or communism on a political scale are pretty much pointless.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Government Spending and Liberty”
I'm sorry, our isolations "spares us" from economic troubles? Our isolation is the primary reason our per-capita GDP is so low (about 60% of the US in Price-adjusted terms, give or take). If we are spared serious fiscal pressures in the future it will be because we've already been through this once so the public knows what happens when their government goes fiscally FUBAR, plus the bond markets pay more attention to how much our government spends.
And "pretty generous" is a deliberately vague term. Fiscal sustainability is a necessary precondition for a welfare system for me. I actually think you can do well enough acting under prudent fiscal constraints so long as you don't A) Divert most of your welfare effort to transferring money from young poor people to old rich people and/or B) try to make the middle class net welfare recipients. Save your resources for helping people who are actually poor and you can do a decent job of it.
And "marginal libertarianism" means working at the margins of current policy to change the world in libertarian ways (as opposed to agitating for radical change all at once), a concept I would have thought a conservative could appreciate.
"
1) I definitely agree about the drug war. Madness doesn't seem to cover it.
2) I definitely disagree about trade barriers. I'm an economist by training and I specialised in trade theory. Believe me when I tell you there really isn't a good reason to impede the flow of international commerce, barring a state or war or something similar.
3) By "education" I mean the current system. I don't have a fundamental problem with your government (at state or federal level) doing something with education, but the present system seems to have some pretty serious gaps, and I suspect it's contributing to declining social mobility in your country. My preferred starting point would be to develop some capacity for experimentation with curriculum, pedagogy and other aspects of schooling, either within government or in the private sector. Government doesn't do that type of experimentation well, but one way or another it needs to happen if there is to be change.
4) Working out where to start: I agree for the most part, but I would note that there is a place for division of labour here. Since I'm an economist I'm probably going to be more help on the welfare system than I am on the Drug War.
5) On dishonest libertarianism: I agree completely, while I'm concerned about taxes on occasion, my concern is about the deleterious incentive effects of high effective marginal tax rates (one reason I support lower rates with less deductions). Apart from that, the real rate of taxation is the rate of spending (as Milton Friedman put it). To talk about taxes and spending as if they were different things is pointless.
"
This is a very interesting piece Jason.
I feel similarly to you. My libertarianism is what James Hanley's taken to calling "marginal libertarianism", there are many policies that don't fit my views of what the proper role for government is, but I'd rather focus on the unconscionable ones (like the War on Drugs), the hugely costly and stupid ones (trade barriers, healthcare, education) and the ones that will end up causing a Budgetary crisis (and huge human misery as a result) if they aren't reformed (Medicare, Social Security). I'd be happy with a society with a pretty generous welfare state (I have some requirements around design, but that's more of a technical issue), and public funding for libraries, museums, scientific research and similar amenities, if in exchange we could look at the regulatory state with a lot more scrutiny (that doesn't mean no regulation ever, I just mean some careful thinking is in order), and stop the government from actively screwing its own citizens (or foreigners either for that matter).
Some of what I'd advocate could be uncomfortable for liberals, but I'm willing to accept some discomfort too. Do you think I could get a significant number of people to sign up for this?
"
I strongly endorse this position. I'd be much happier to argue specific policy issues and try to build coalitions on an issue by issue basis. But unfortunately politics is tribal, and failing to support "your side" is often viewed as a betrayal.
"
To be fair, Singapore has one significant natural resource: its location makes it a good location for entrepot trade, which is how Singapore makes most of its money. Still, I have to agree that Lee Kuan Yew may well be the closest real-world equivalent to Havelock Vetinari.
On “The State of the Unions”
Actually foreign trade (including offshoring) does create demand. When you pay those foreign workers for their service, you are paying them in US dollars (directly or indirectly, it doesn't matter). What do they do with those US dollars but buy US goods.
On “The Ghost in the Square”
Seconded, those glibrarians are a scourge on our bibliographic discourse.
"
I'm a government employee who personally knows people who lost their jobs due to Budget cuts in my country. It's not something I'd wish on anyone, but at the end of the day a lot of people in the private sector have lost jobs. Why should we be immune? The government is dependant on the private sector for revenue, when that revenue shrinks, what can you do?
On “Important Poll to Determine the Respectability of our Readership”
I'm a free marketer and I'm on board with this logic. My opposition to negotiating an international carbon tax is that I think that the negotiations are doomed to failure and political capital should be spent on alternatives.
On “The Ghost in the Square”
Yeah, I agree that's strange. It's like some people haven't let go of the aristocratic disdain for the mercantile class.
"
In fairness, the UK government is in a deep fiscal hole, and its better to cut back now, than have to suddenly shut things down when the money runs out.
That's not to say Cameron's cutting the right things, I don't have enough specific knowledge for that.
On “Categorical Imperatives”
Ladies and gentlemen ... The Prisoners' Dilemma.
On “Bachmann, Burr, and Patriotism”
There. Are. Four. Lights!!!
On “The Mandate”
If I'm going to limit my policy advice to what I think politician would be willing to do, I might as well just shoot myself now :)
My whole point is that this is a stupid policy, designed to correct for previous stupid policies. The fact that this is also true of most enacted policy is irrelevant. After all I'm trying to change the political reality, in what miniscule way I can.
"
Tried and tested doesn't mean its good policy, it just means its not so bad that it causes the whole nation to collapse. Besides which I'm not suggesting mandates are necessarily a bad idea in all cases, merely that imposing one won't sole the US's health care problem.
The problem the mandate is trying to solve is that without it community rating and guaranteed issue will make the insurance market unviable. Rather than take the hint that community rating and guaranteed issue are a really bad idea, they decided to paper over the cracks by forcing healthy 20-year olds to pay far more for health insurance than it is worth to them.
The solution is to stop treating insurance like it was welfare. Insurance is a risk management tool, designed to accommodate risk-averse people who can afford the expected cost of a future event, but are worried about unlikely but highly adverse outcomes like your house burning down, or you getting cancer. If you can't afford the expected cost of those events then your insurance will be too expensive to afford and that's because insurance is not a subsidy.
Freddie is entirely correct that markets won't help produce certain distributional outcomes, that's not what they're for. But the solution is not to torture health insurance into the monstrosity that it has become in the US, but to use welfare. Because that's what you do when people can't afford somethign essential, you give them welfare. Or you don't, that's a political decision. But to try and turn insurance into a welfare system is the height of stupidity. And to try and paper over that stupidity with a mandate just piles one absurdity on top of another.
"
Constitutionality aside, the mandate suggests a real failing in the policy development process. It's like the policy developers just said "well if everyone bought insurance there'd be no problem, so let's just make them". This is precisely what Adam Smith was warning about when he criticised "the man of system".
On “Schilling on Social Security”
The problem with the T-bills in the trust fund isn't that they're not legally enforceable, it's that the US government holds both ends of them. An asset is a claim on another party's future income. It doesn't work if the income you're claiming is already yours. If the trust fund's assets were to magically disappear in the night, the US government's assets would be less, but its liabilities would be lower by the same amount, making the net financial effect 0.
On “Obama’s pep talk”
So your solution to economic problems is to make your country poorer? Curious.
On “Another Open Thread”
I'm playing Fallout New Vegas at the moment (I wanted to wait for it to be patched a bit before buying). I'm enjoying it a lot (a few residual bugs notwithstanding), and I'm glad to see much more of the spirit (and lore) from the first 2 Fallouts come to the fore than in Fallout 3, which I thought was a bit of a disappointment.
"
I've been playing Warmachine for about a year now (Cygnar). It's a really interesting game, you can never tell how it's going to end until it does.
I'm just painting up a little Malifaux at the moment. I haven't played it mcuh yet, but it looks really interesting.
On “Please Give to Your Alumni Organization!”
I assisted a lecturer like that at Uni. He put all his lectures online and if you wanted to ask questions, you asked an assistant. He even pushed all of his marking onto us (doing some marking was normal, but not all of it).
Do this day, I can't figure out what he did that justified his salary each year. Mind you, I was just doing that while I finished my Master's degree so I didn't see as a poor alternative to a career, but a good alternative to retail or fast food work.
On “The Moment of Impending Crisis”
The thing is that profit margins tend to converge on the rate of economic growth. Unless all those corporations are taking huge risks if they're getting rich fast then everyone is.
On “Little Republics & Little Platoons”
I think in part it's how government uses data. Data is most commonly used to support a pre-conceived notion, rather than a way of improving your knowledge base. I don't mean to pick on government specifically, since this is the way pretty much everyone uses data, but if you're using data that way a greater focus on data only makes it easier to win arguments, not actually make better policy. At that stage you can fairly dismiss pseudo-empiricism as a form of intellectual snobbery.
Now, I'd be really happy if government actually let data drive their decisions more, and I'm trying to help this happen in my own little way, but in practice government's don't use data much they abuse it.
On “The Moment of Impending Crisis”
That was epic Jason, and this line:
deserves to go down in the annals of blogging greatness.
On “Reclaiming Liberalism”
I agree, New Zealand's left-right spectrum and the US's are practically orthogonal. And there are temporal changes as well. It's one of the reasons why trying to place fascism or communism on a political scale are pretty much pointless.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.