Libya, Limited Government, and Imperfect Duties
Glenn Greenwald observes that we’re hearing a familiar false dilemma from advocates of intervention in Libya—the same one that was trotted out so frequently in the run-up to the war in Iraq: Either you support American military action, or you must be indifferent to the suffering of civilians under Qadaffi. Bracket for a moment the obvious empirical questions about the general efficacy of bombs as reliable means of alleviating suffering. What I find striking is the background assumption that whether the United States military has a role to play here is taken to be a simple function of how much we care about other people’s suffering. One obvious answer is that caring or not caring simply doesn’t come into it: That the function of the U.S. military is to protect the vital interests of the United States, and that it is for this specific purpose that billions of tax dollars are extracted from American citizens, and for which young men and women have volunteered to risk their lives. It is not a general-purpose pool of resources to be drawn on for promoting desirable outcomes around the world.
A parallel argument is quite familiar on the domestic front, however. Pick any morally unattractive outcome or situation, and you will find someone ready to argue that if the federal government plausibly could do something to remedy it, then anyone who denies the federal government should act must simply be indifferent to the problem. My sense is that many more people tend to find this sort of argument convincing in domestic affairs precisely because we seem to have effectively abandoned the conception of the federal government as an entity with clear and defined powers and purposes. We debate whether a particular program will be effective or worth the cost, but over the course of the 20th century, the notion that such debates should be limited to enumerated government functions largely fell out of fashion. Most people—or at least most public intellectuals and policy advocates—now seem to think of Congress as a kind of all-purpose problem solving committee. And I can’t help but suspect that the two are linked. Duties and obligations may be specific, but morality is universal: Other things equal, the suffering of a person in Lebanon counts just as much as that of a person in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Once we abandon the idea of a limited government with defined powers—justified by reference to a narrow set of functions specified in advance—and instead see it as imbued with a general mandate to do good, it’s much harder for a moral cosmopolitan to resist making the scope of that mandate global, at least in principle.
Jack Conway’s Ugly Campaign
Kentucky attorney general Jack Conway’s Senate campaign, previously chided here for a TV ad’s “dishonest twisting of [Rand] Paul’s statements,” has released another one that is so bigoted it caused even liberal partisan Jonathan Chait of the New Republic to blanch. Chait writes,
The trouble with Conway’s ad is that it comes perilously close to saying that non-belief in Christianity is a disqualification for public office. That’s a pretty sickening premise for a Democratic campaign. [Not that Rand Paul has in fact demonstrated any non-belief in Christianity, but Conway is dredging up allegations from Paul's college days.]
Here’s the ad:
It puts one in mind of Bob Schieffer’s stunned question to David Axelrod: Is that the best you can do?
Rand Paul is not a perfect libertarian, as Cato colleagues and others have noted. And surely Jack Conway could engage him in robust debate on legitimate issues from Obamacare to the national debt and the Iraq war. But looking at the actual ads Conway has chosen to run, I’ll repeat what I said about the previous ad: “the attorney general of the Commonwealth of Kentucky should be embarrassed.”
Shifting the Blame for America’s Health Care Woes
I must be losing my touch. I’ve let nearly two months pass without responding to Ezra Klein’s defense of RomneyCare, ObamaCare, and other centrally planned health care systems. (For those who want to get up to speed: his original post, my reply, and his response.) So here goes.
Klein notes that he and I had each used flawed measures of RomneyCare’s impact on health insurance premiums in Massachusetts. Fair enough. But Klein ignores the study I cited by John Cogan, Glenn Hubbard, and Dan Kessler, which estimates that RomneyCare increased premiums in Massachusetts by 6 percent. The CHK study has limitations, but it is the best estimate available. I hope Klein addresses it.
Klein’s fallback position is that even if RomneyCare increases premiums, that’s not an indictment of the law because cost-control was not one of its goals. Never mind that Mitt Romney boasted, “the costs of health care will be reduced.” Klein knows political rhetoric when he sees it. Yet he oddly sees no parallels between the phony-baloney promises of cost-control used to sell RomneyCare and the phony-baloney promises of cost-control used to sell ObamaCare — despite ample assistance from people like Medicare’s chief actuary and Alain Enthoven (“the American people are being deceived“).
Then Klein throws down his trump card:
[E]ven a cursory read of the evidence would show that whatever the drawbacks of central planning, it covers people at an extremely low cost. Romney Care’s cost problem is a result of pasting a coverage-oriented quick fix atop our insane health-care system. Compare its costs to the British system, the French system, the German system, or any other system, and whatever your conclusions, you won’t walk away unimpressed by the ability of centralized systems to cover whole populations for much less money than we spend.
Oy, where to begin? First, Klein violates Cannon’s First Rule of Economic Literacy: he writes that centrally planned systems cost less, when what he means is that they spend less.
Second, the phrase “whatever the drawbacks of central planning” is some serious hand-waving. Those “drawbacks” include (among other things): the Medicare program’s suppression of comparative-effectiveness research, error-reduction efforts, care coordination, and other delivery innovations; Canada’s human-rights violating Medicare system; and the suppression of untold innovations in health insurance and medical treatment by government price controls. Other than a few drawbacks, Mrs. Lincoln…
Why Politics Is Stupid
Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait argue the only way government could reduce inefficient Medicare spending was to create a new health care entitlement program. Think about that.
The worst part is, they’re not entirely wrong. And that same system will now be controlling your health care and an ever-growing share of your income.
The New Republic and Guilt by Association
I watched with interest the J Street debate between Matt Yglesias and The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait over the question “what it means to be pro-Israel.” Matt’s a very efficient thinker, and Chait’s a particularly sharp debater. I witnessed him slug it out at length in a debate with David Boaz a while back, not something I’d like to do.
Chait made a straightforward argument: to be pro-Israel, someone has to accept two premises. First, one has to believe that historically, Israel is the more sympathetic party in the Middle East. Second, one has to believe that the U.S. should not be even-handed in the Middle East, but rather should be on Israel’s side.
But what was most interesting about his argument was his accusation of guilt by association against J Street. It was a problem, Chait argued, that J Street had been embraced by people who did not meet his definition of pro-Israel. Chait rang the alarum that “The American Conservative magazine, which was founded by Pat Buchanan, …has been saying nice things about J Street.” In addition, “the famous Walt and Mearsheimer have been saying extremely nice things about J Street — embracing J Street.”
Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, WRONG!!
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review quotes Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele on how Congress should go about reforming health care:
Having Congress reshape health care puts “the wrong people at the table,” Steele said. He said stakeholders — “doctors, lawyers, health care employees, insurance companies” — should develop a solution and present it to Congress, rather than the other way around.
Steele needs to brush up on his Adam Smith:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
Like I said, Jonathan Chait was on to something.
Chait Calls Out Conservatives on Rationing
I’ve been struggling with how to respond to an article by The New Republic‘s Jonathan Chait, who accuses conservatives of hypocrisy and Republicans of whorishness when it comes to wasteful spending in Medicare and other government health programs. I have grudgingly decided that a good fisking is the only way to go.
Chait writes:
Two weeks ago, President Obama offered to cut several hundred billion more dollars out of the Medicare and Medicaid budget to help make room for health care reform. This sort of gesture ought to appeal to conservatives, right? Apparently not. The Heritage Foundation warned, “At a time when Medicare is dangerously close to bankruptcy, it is shortsighted to funnel funds into the creation of another government-run program instead of shoring up Medicare.” A National Review editorial complained, “These cuts in Medicare and Medicaid payments are nothing more than reimbursement reductions with no empirical or economic basis to justify them.”
A couple of problems here. Chait takes the National Review quote out of context. The magazine’s most recent issue states: “Republicans should not have only harsh words for Obama’s ideas. If he truly believes that he can squeeze hundreds of billions of dollars from federal health programs, then he should be encouraged to do so. But the savings should be banked before they are spent.” The Heritage quote is odd in that it suggests that conservatives should make “shoring up Medicare” a priority. But it makes essentially the same argument. Chait gives a false impression when he suggests that all conservatives are knee-jerk opponents of reducing wasteful Medicare spending.
No empirical basis to justify them? Since when do conservatives require an empirical basis to justify cutting social spending?
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