It's backed by force, and (I'd argue) the most basic functions are the ones that depend most strongly on force, and that has a lot to do with why I object to the common libertarian and, for that matter, conservative contention that there's some connection between the scope of services a government provides and the danger it poses. The powers a government has that allow it to enforce the basic laws necessary to maintain order and defend itself from being overthrown are really the ones that make it possible for it to round people up and kill them.
The additional amount of force and potential violence that a government needs to, say, administer a robust welfare state, is pretty small. I'd argue that applies to many regulations. I do agree with many folks of a more libertarian bent than myself that the actual regulatory structures we have in the US tend to rely on criminalization gratuitously, making our governments in particular more violent than they should be.
Yeah, I totally missed the boat on Japan (don't know which other system I was confusing it).
In any event, this is why I was acknowledging up front that there's debate about where the boundaries are. Supplemental insurance is very common, as is substantial out-of-pocket cost. Medicare--which is often what progressives use as a starting point for single payer--has coinsurance and copays, too, and that reflects the fact that they are usually arguing for the government to act as a really big insurance company.
The Sanders plan purports to eliminate out-of-pocket costs entirely while keeping many other features of that model. I don't think doing so is necessary for a plan to be any of universal, single-payer or, well, good. Indeed, I think having modest out-of-pocket costs at the point of service is probably for the best.
I would argue the UK, South Korea, Canada, Australia and Japan all qualify as single-payer systems, though there's room for debate about exactly where the boundaries are.
Nonetheless, my biggest, fondest dream is not a single-payer health care system. Multi-payer systems work well in many countries.
Jaybird:
I appreciate that Libs are about as well-represented in government as Cons.
That said, if it’s fair to point to the Republicans when we talk about what Conservatives, in practice, are like, I’d like to know why we can’t point to the Dems when we talk about what Liberals, in practice, are like?
Because the Democrats are not a liberal party in the same way that the Republicans are a conservative party.
We're part of a coalition that includes a large number of self-described moderates and not a few self-described conservatives, as shown by polls like this one. The Democratic Party is more liberal than it was, but we're not even a majority, just a plurality. In the GOP, on the other hand, conservatives outnumber moderates and the tiny sliver of liberals by two to one.
This seems as good a place as any to bring up my biggest complaint about Bernie Sanders, which is that he's the Jack Kemp of the left. I get the same sense of sincerity and, yes, messianic zeal from him. I remember Dole's choice of Kemp as a VP really turned me off in '96, to the extent that I decided there was little value in replacing the marginally acceptable Clinton and sat out the first Presidential election where I was eligible to vote.
My policy preferences have changed a lot since I was in my late teens, but I still worry about that kind of zeal. Suffice it to say that, liberal as I may be, I am distinctly not feeling the Bern.
Saying that liberals haven’t proposed total gov’t control is kinda like say the repubs haven’t proposed nazism.
No it isn't, if the charge is that liberals want no limits on government. The charge that conservatives want no limits on government wouldn't be correct, either, although as a liberal, I think conservatives often try to limit government in ways that are pointless or counterproductive, while removing limits on government that really should be there.
I'm not at all surprised that trying working out what the "floor" should include was ugly[1]. One other nice feature of UBI is it offers some wiggle room around questions of whether to include "luxuries" or just "necessities", and which is which, since by giving people an amount of money you let them work some of that out by themselves. Still, it's hardly a panacea. There would be some nasty politics around people using their UBI "wrong", both in the sense of spending it on stuff large numbers of voters abhor and in the sense of horribly mismanaging their funds and wrecking their lives in the process.
[1] A lot of the most important political questions are unavoidably not-so-pretty.
That’s not really my idiom, so you’ll have to talk to someone whose it is.
OK.
The original linked piece was by someone (Gary Shapiro) who was trying to use that idiom as a way of making the Republican Party appeal to some new classes of voters--including a disproportionately large number of the childless voters you were dismissive of. If large numbers of existing Republican voters have problems with that approach, or at least problems with applying that approach in a way that would actually appeal to voters, that constrains Mr Shapiro's approach in important ways that he should, ideally, be aware of and up front about.
Second,yes you can. You simply have to model my expected behavior — and alternatives that you may have to compensate for.
Let's just say the distribution of possible behaviors on the New Jersey Turnpike has tails too long for there to be a well-defined expectation value. I want all the mechanical assistance I can get.
More seriously, it's public roads and we already mandate insurance. I'm not saying @damon's wrong about these particular technological trade-offs, but I'm not saying he's right, either.
I'd say "equality" isn't really a sensible societal obligation. It may be a valid aspirational goal (and I think it is), but it is almost certainly going to be in sufficient tension with other important societal goals that we'll consistently have to compromise around it.
On the other hand, making sure that there's a certain floor below which no one has to live seems much more likely to be attainable.
So much for taking a bold stand against the "nanny state".
Now, maybe you are fine with not doing that, object to the characterization, or whatever, but if you and likeminded people are too important to the GOP coalition to do without, well, Mr Shapiro should say so. It's better than peeing on our legs and saying it's vape juice.
Reject it our not[1], it's just not a free market in any respect. It's about as far as you can get from a free market without having a straight-up command economy. You have the government imposing very expensive requirements to enter the market and then effectively rewarding companies with a monopoly on a drug once they clear that hurdle. I don't disagree with @brandon-berg's basic contention that the US is effectively allowing healthcare systems in Canada and Europe to free-ride on the costs of drug development, though.
I think my biggest problem with McArdle's piece is that the argument she makes seems to assume that these steps are mutually exclusive. However, there's no reason you can't do them in concert, and in several instances doing one will make it politically (and even practically) easier to do the other, or take some of the sting out of the downsides.
For the most obvious example, take UBI. If we have a reasonably robust UBI, the rationale for one of the most popular and widespread forms of labor regulation--the minimum wage--essentially vanishes. Now, maybe getting rid of it won't cause a major upswing in employment, but it's not crazy to think that employment will increase without it, making it possible that more people can avoid the corrosive emotional and psychological effects of going without work. A UBI will also make it easier for people to get post-secondary education in a timely and effective manner. Sure, it still won't be for everyone, but at the margins it will help.
I'm not saying this because I think UBI is necessarily a good idea. I'm saying it because there isn't going to be a single simple thing that addresses the problem, nor should their be. We're probably going to need to do many things in concert to make the economy work for a larger fraction of Americans.
So, like more of the same I’m dealing with currently?
If you see it that way. I just don't see where you'd have an expectation that they wouldn't behave that way.
They aren’t interested in saving the barn. That’s the lie they tell you to get your compliance and complicity.
I expect some are interested, and others aren't.
On the other hand, my "compliance and complicity" (which I guess means "paying taxes" and "obeying laws that are often kinda stupid") is not obviously working out too horribly.
Sure, if the most important thing is maintaining a specific virtue, like pacifism, then I think it's entirely consistent. Maybe that's what's going on here, and suggesting that @damon should participate in the American political process to preserve his life, liberty and property is like suggesting that the Doukhobors should shoot people for the Tsar.
If that's the case, and he's right about the whole system being on the road to ruin, I wish him all the luck in the world. He's certainly going to need it.
If, on the other hand, the fundamental problem has a somewhat different shape to it--and I think it does--withdrawing from the political process seems like a very bad way to defend the things he values. That's true if he only values his own rights, or if he values everybody else's, too.
Damon:
I never said I’d avoid the consequences of the barn burning. I just said I wasn’t going to lift a finger to fix it. I’m fully aware of what the consequences could be and frankly, I’m cool with it. You are under the impression that the barn can be saved. I’m not. I’ve resigned myself to that fact. Might as well get whatever enjoyment out of it that you can.
So if someone believes there's some hope of saving the barn, and all it requires is for them to take what remains of your property and liberty, they should just go ahead, right? Accepting your hypotheses about the nature of the barn and the people who care about keeping it from burning, that seems like a particularly likely outcome, after all.
It's never happened to me either; it mostly seems to happen in places with a lot of population density and not much money for elections. Having locally run elections allows for a lot of disparities.
I guess so. I just don't see why anybody else would care more about your property than you do.
Care about whatever you like, and accept responsibility for whatever you like, but the consequences of the "mess" aren't going to pass you by because you throw up your hands and say you have nothing to do with any of this. If you choose to be one of those men who just wants to watch the world barn burn, that's on you, but it seems like one of the least rewarding things one could do with it to me.
As a wacky off-the-wall idea, maybe we should focus less on trying to prevent employers from knowing things about employees, and more on making the employment process transparent to those employees (and everybody else). That could, at least conceivably, allow for the market to correct things better, instead of having to rely on small-bore and error-prone regulatory and legislative fiddling.
Turning this wacky, off-the-wall idea into a feasible public policy is left as an exercise to the reader, since the writer doesn't have a clue as to where to start.
Neither piece suggests that the GOP might need to make substantive changes to its platform to appeal to new voters. In the case of Gary Shapiro's Spectator piece, this struck me as particularly egregious, because there are several high-visibility, high-salience areas where the GOP cannot be plausibly argued to favor "choice" as an underlying principle. Maybe upending those would be too damaging to what remains of the GOP's existing coalition, or would be personally abhorrent to Mr Shapiro, or would actually harm their efforts to reach out to new voters in urban centers. I could believe any or all of those things, but I'd have to see an argument first, and the fact that I didn't signals a significant weakness.
I can easily believe that, say, the anti-abortion plank of the GOP platform is to important in whatever respect to get rid of. But to go on at length about which party will supposedly let you vape without addressing the issues of choice involved in, say, smoking weed is remarkably silly.
On “Seeing Through the Unseen”
It's backed by force, and (I'd argue) the most basic functions are the ones that depend most strongly on force, and that has a lot to do with why I object to the common libertarian and, for that matter, conservative contention that there's some connection between the scope of services a government provides and the danger it poses. The powers a government has that allow it to enforce the basic laws necessary to maintain order and defend itself from being overthrown are really the ones that make it possible for it to round people up and kill them.
The additional amount of force and potential violence that a government needs to, say, administer a robust welfare state, is pretty small. I'd argue that applies to many regulations. I do agree with many folks of a more libertarian bent than myself that the actual regulatory structures we have in the US tend to rely on criminalization gratuitously, making our governments in particular more violent than they should be.
"
Yeah, I totally missed the boat on Japan (don't know which other system I was confusing it).
In any event, this is why I was acknowledging up front that there's debate about where the boundaries are. Supplemental insurance is very common, as is substantial out-of-pocket cost. Medicare--which is often what progressives use as a starting point for single payer--has coinsurance and copays, too, and that reflects the fact that they are usually arguing for the government to act as a really big insurance company.
The Sanders plan purports to eliminate out-of-pocket costs entirely while keeping many other features of that model. I don't think doing so is necessary for a plan to be any of universal, single-payer or, well, good. Indeed, I think having modest out-of-pocket costs at the point of service is probably for the best.
"
I would argue the UK, South Korea, Canada, Australia and Japan all qualify as single-payer systems, though there's room for debate about exactly where the boundaries are.
Nonetheless, my biggest, fondest dream is not a single-payer health care system. Multi-payer systems work well in many countries.
"
Because the Democrats are not a liberal party in the same way that the Republicans are a conservative party.
We're part of a coalition that includes a large number of self-described moderates and not a few self-described conservatives, as shown by polls like this one. The Democratic Party is more liberal than it was, but we're not even a majority, just a plurality. In the GOP, on the other hand, conservatives outnumber moderates and the tiny sliver of liberals by two to one.
"
This seems as good a place as any to bring up my biggest complaint about Bernie Sanders, which is that he's the Jack Kemp of the left. I get the same sense of sincerity and, yes, messianic zeal from him. I remember Dole's choice of Kemp as a VP really turned me off in '96, to the extent that I decided there was little value in replacing the marginally acceptable Clinton and sat out the first Presidential election where I was eligible to vote.
My policy preferences have changed a lot since I was in my late teens, but I still worry about that kind of zeal. Suffice it to say that, liberal as I may be, I am distinctly not feeling the Bern.
"
Saying that liberals haven’t proposed total gov’t control is kinda like say the repubs haven’t proposed nazism.
No it isn't, if the charge is that liberals want no limits on government. The charge that conservatives want no limits on government wouldn't be correct, either, although as a liberal, I think conservatives often try to limit government in ways that are pointless or counterproductive, while removing limits on government that really should be there.
On “Megan McArdle: Listen to the Victims of the Free Market”
Transaction costs and specialization?
"
I'm not at all surprised that trying working out what the "floor" should include was ugly[1]. One other nice feature of UBI is it offers some wiggle room around questions of whether to include "luxuries" or just "necessities", and which is which, since by giving people an amount of money you let them work some of that out by themselves. Still, it's hardly a panacea. There would be some nasty politics around people using their UBI "wrong", both in the sense of spending it on stuff large numbers of voters abhor and in the sense of horribly mismanaging their funds and wrecking their lives in the process.
[1] A lot of the most important political questions are unavoidably not-so-pretty.
On “The GOP, Reform, and the Urban Vote”
That’s not really my idiom, so you’ll have to talk to someone whose it is.
OK.
The original linked piece was by someone (Gary Shapiro) who was trying to use that idiom as a way of making the Republican Party appeal to some new classes of voters--including a disproportionately large number of the childless voters you were dismissive of. If large numbers of existing Republican voters have problems with that approach, or at least problems with applying that approach in a way that would actually appeal to voters, that constrains Mr Shapiro's approach in important ways that he should, ideally, be aware of and up front about.
"
Second,yes you can. You simply have to model my expected behavior — and alternatives that you may have to compensate for.
Let's just say the distribution of possible behaviors on the New Jersey Turnpike has tails too long for there to be a well-defined expectation value. I want all the mechanical assistance I can get.
More seriously, it's public roads and we already mandate insurance. I'm not saying @damon's wrong about these particular technological trade-offs, but I'm not saying he's right, either.
"
I just assumed; apologies if I got it wrong....
On “Megan McArdle: Listen to the Victims of the Free Market”
I'd say "equality" isn't really a sensible societal obligation. It may be a valid aspirational goal (and I think it is), but it is almost certainly going to be in sufficient tension with other important societal goals that we'll consistently have to compromise around it.
On the other hand, making sure that there's a certain floor below which no one has to live seems much more likely to be attainable.
On “The GOP, Reform, and the Urban Vote”
I can pay attention to my driving, but I can't pay attention to Kim's driving for him.
"
So much for taking a bold stand against the "nanny state".
Now, maybe you are fine with not doing that, object to the characterization, or whatever, but if you and likeminded people are too important to the GOP coalition to do without, well, Mr Shapiro should say so. It's better than peeing on our legs and saying it's vape juice.
"
Reject it our not[1], it's just not a free market in any respect. It's about as far as you can get from a free market without having a straight-up command economy. You have the government imposing very expensive requirements to enter the market and then effectively rewarding companies with a monopoly on a drug once they clear that hurdle. I don't disagree with @brandon-berg's basic contention that the US is effectively allowing healthcare systems in Canada and Europe to free-ride on the costs of drug development, though.
[1] There really are some arguments in favor.
On “Megan McArdle: Listen to the Victims of the Free Market”
I think my biggest problem with McArdle's piece is that the argument she makes seems to assume that these steps are mutually exclusive. However, there's no reason you can't do them in concert, and in several instances doing one will make it politically (and even practically) easier to do the other, or take some of the sting out of the downsides.
For the most obvious example, take UBI. If we have a reasonably robust UBI, the rationale for one of the most popular and widespread forms of labor regulation--the minimum wage--essentially vanishes. Now, maybe getting rid of it won't cause a major upswing in employment, but it's not crazy to think that employment will increase without it, making it possible that more people can avoid the corrosive emotional and psychological effects of going without work. A UBI will also make it easier for people to get post-secondary education in a timely and effective manner. Sure, it still won't be for everyone, but at the margins it will help.
I'm not saying this because I think UBI is necessarily a good idea. I'm saying it because there isn't going to be a single simple thing that addresses the problem, nor should their be. We're probably going to need to do many things in concert to make the economy work for a larger fraction of Americans.
On “The GOP, Reform, and the Urban Vote”
Why not go with my example of a pretty basic issue of choice[1] that Mr Shapiro failed to address, and IMO conspicuously so: ingesting marijuana?
[1] Whether or not it is an issue of "social liberty" seems largely tangential.
On “A Desperate Plea for a Renewal of Citizenship”
So, like more of the same I’m dealing with currently?
If you see it that way. I just don't see where you'd have an expectation that they wouldn't behave that way.
They aren’t interested in saving the barn. That’s the lie they tell you to get your compliance and complicity.
I expect some are interested, and others aren't.
On the other hand, my "compliance and complicity" (which I guess means "paying taxes" and "obeying laws that are often kinda stupid") is not obviously working out too horribly.
"
Sure, if the most important thing is maintaining a specific virtue, like pacifism, then I think it's entirely consistent. Maybe that's what's going on here, and suggesting that @damon should participate in the American political process to preserve his life, liberty and property is like suggesting that the Doukhobors should shoot people for the Tsar.
If that's the case, and he's right about the whole system being on the road to ruin, I wish him all the luck in the world. He's certainly going to need it.
If, on the other hand, the fundamental problem has a somewhat different shape to it--and I think it does--withdrawing from the political process seems like a very bad way to defend the things he values. That's true if he only values his own rights, or if he values everybody else's, too.
"
So if someone believes there's some hope of saving the barn, and all it requires is for them to take what remains of your property and liberty, they should just go ahead, right? Accepting your hypotheses about the nature of the barn and the people who care about keeping it from burning, that seems like a particularly likely outcome, after all.
"
It's never happened to me either; it mostly seems to happen in places with a lot of population density and not much money for elections. Having locally run elections allows for a lot of disparities.
"
I guess so. I just don't see why anybody else would care more about your property than you do.
Care about whatever you like, and accept responsibility for whatever you like, but the consequences of the "mess" aren't going to pass you by because you throw up your hands and say you have nothing to do with any of this. If you choose to be one of those men who just wants to watch the
worldbarn burn, that's on you, but it seems like one of the least rewarding things one could do with it to me.On “Morning Ed: Multiculturalism {2016.03.30.W}”
As a wacky off-the-wall idea, maybe we should focus less on trying to prevent employers from knowing things about employees, and more on making the employment process transparent to those employees (and everybody else). That could, at least conceivably, allow for the market to correct things better, instead of having to rely on small-bore and error-prone regulatory and legislative fiddling.
Turning this wacky, off-the-wall idea into a feasible public policy is left as an exercise to the reader, since the writer doesn't have a clue as to where to start.
On “The GOP, Reform, and the Urban Vote”
Neither piece suggests that the GOP might need to make substantive changes to its platform to appeal to new voters. In the case of Gary Shapiro's Spectator piece, this struck me as particularly egregious, because there are several high-visibility, high-salience areas where the GOP cannot be plausibly argued to favor "choice" as an underlying principle. Maybe upending those would be too damaging to what remains of the GOP's existing coalition, or would be personally abhorrent to Mr Shapiro, or would actually harm their efforts to reach out to new voters in urban centers. I could believe any or all of those things, but I'd have to see an argument first, and the fact that I didn't signals a significant weakness.
I can easily believe that, say, the anti-abortion plank of the GOP platform is to important in whatever respect to get rid of. But to go on at length about which party will supposedly let you vape without addressing the issues of choice involved in, say, smoking weed is remarkably silly.
On “A Desperate Plea for a Renewal of Citizenship”
What’s left, I’ll happily sacrifice to watch the quislings roast.
How dare anybody tell you what to do with your property, but eh, your property isn't all that important?
Makes sense to me.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.