(cross-posted from my blog)

Atrios:

One of my longstanding pet peeves is that everyone in the US pretends we don’t have an “industrial policy” because that implies naughty state intervention in certain sectors. But of course we have lots of naughty state intervention in certain sectors, we just don’t do it even notionally for any good reason. We prop up the single family homebuilding industry and the automobile industry (even before the bailouts). We prop up certain agricultural sectors. We favor big business over small. Now we’re massively propping up one skimmer industry – the financial industry – and are about to prop up another skimmer industry – health insurance.

This is actually related to one of my long-standing pet peeves, which is that everyone in the US pretends like we don’t have heavy government intervention in the economy, when in fact we do, but it’s in the form various tax breaks and incentives, and effectively hidden from plain sight.  In a lot of cases, the aim of liberals isn’t necessarily to massively expand the reach of government as much as it is to add some intentionality and rationality — as well as make explicit — the ways in which wealready intervene in the economy (health care reform is a perfect example of this, I think).  Of course, the concealed nature of our welfare state is the exact thing which makes it incredibly easy to demagogue liberal efforts to expand it; for the average American, an attempt to make spending explicit looks exactly like an attempt to massively expand the scope of spending.

I read this post over at The Dish and quite honestly thought it said “Obama” and not “Osama.”  Which changes everything, of course.  Read the following passage substituting the word Osama with Obama:

Paul Cruickshank thinks that if Osama is ever captured we should put him on trial:

It would be nothing short of a watershed moment, doing much to restore the public’s confidence in American institutions and the rule of law after years of being told that they were too quaint for the challenges of a new era. And it would go a long way, too, in restoring the moral high ground for the United States in the court of global opinion.

And you know what? It was surprising but not that surprising when I first mis-read this.  The right-wing is so far gone at this point it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if some member of the birther fringe wanted to capture Obama and put him on trial – “doing much to restore the public’s confidence in American institutions.”  It isn’t that far from what some on the right are already saying about our Muslim, fascist commander in chief who, despite government’s incapacity to do anything right, will somehow take our country from us and turn it into a socialist, European, Islamic hellhole (yes, Denmark).

And isn’t this belief in the all-powerful president strange also?   When it comes to domestic policy, the president sets the agenda but not much else.  He’s not really a “decider” so much as a guide.  He doesn’t really enact anything.  He can sign his veto and therefore halt legislation, but he can’t single-handedly tear up the fabric of our society. [Read more →]

“This, then, is the fundamental conservative problem: you can either have universal coverage or you can have a quasi-free market.  There’s no way to have both, but no one is willing to say publicly that it’s OK to leave millions of people without healthcare.  So instead conservatives hem and haw and nibble around the edges with things like HSAs and tax exclusions, even though these ideas don’t do anything to make healthcare coverage more widely and securely available.  No free market solution can do that.” ~ Kevin Drum

Well, the man’s got a point, doesn’t he?  Read the rest of the post to see exactly how any attempt to expand Medicare or start a new public plan with the intent of covering all the uninsured in America is almost sure to end up tightly regulated and far, far from a market solution.  Which is sort of obvious, I realize.  But it’s illustrative of the direction these things will go….

First of all, I can live without a purely market solution.  I’ve always supported safety nets, and so some government involvement, I believe, is necessary.  (Indeed, for markets to work well, I think safety nets simply must exist, otherwise when specific industries fail, or when downturns in the economy inevitably come about, the backlash and push toward more government intervention is much stronger.)

My goal is not so much to come up with the perfect market solution, free of all government tethers, as it is to avoid a system prone to massive cost inefficiencies, regulatory capture, and anti-competitive practices.  Granted, that is largely what we have now, so if the alternative is simply more of the same plus a few million more people covered, that’s a good thing.  But it’s hardly the best thing.  A government further bloated by big entitlements is going to be an expensive one to maintain (and so far nobody is proposing meaningful defense cuts as one potential redirection of revenue.)

So what if Americans were given a choice to opt into the public plan or take a voucher that could be used to buy into a co-op or purchase a private plan?  Money for vouchers would then be diverted out of the public plan’s budget.  This would help drive competition and would decrease to some degree the chance of capture within the public plan. [Read more →]

So Dan Miller critiqued me and conservatives in general for not talking about health policy enough, and he’s right.  We haven’t.  Part of this is because when it comes to government planning there is just so much to talk about.  If I were a progressive blogger I could talk about how we could plan this or that development, or structure this or that plan around our education system, or shape this or that policy to use the government to at once cover more people and save money doing etc. etc. etc..

Lots of charts and numbers and predictions would be at my fingertips.  Conservatives scorn social planning and therefore dismiss a lot of this wonkishness.  So you don’t have the elaborate plans that liberals do when it comes to something like health care.  (Ironically the most effective rebuttal to Waxman-Markey was via Jim Manzi who used lots of charts and other wonkish communication tools…)

Now, this is okay up to a point – conservatives shouldn’t want to map out everything as much as liberals do, because part of what conservatism stands for is organic, market-driven growth and individual choice.  But the problem with leaving it at that is that we are in fact stuck with a pretty massive state and we do need to have an exit strategy if we want to deregulate or have a shot at changing entitlements to better fit a conservative model – because, quite frankly, entitlements are popular.  They can be better managed then they are.  They can make better use of market solutions.  But they’re more than likely not going away, and maybe they shouldn’t.  We need safety nets.

Things like vouchers, and direct-payment rather than relying on lots of red-tape-adorned bureaucracies are good ideas that need to be more fleshed out.  Viable alternatives that don’t leave people thinking their health care or their social security would be left as vulnerable to a crash as their 401k’s were are important to articulate.

Conservatives need more wonks, plain and simple.  But the job of conservative wonks should be to plan out the gradual dismantling of big government without falling prey to all sorts of pitfalls that we’ve seen in the past – like hiring private contractors to do government work, both domestically and increasingly overseas.  Deregulatory capture is something I’m interested in but don’t know much about – though I think I know enough to believe that it’s a very real threat.

In any case, not to ramble, but I think a lot of things – from conservative takes on community-building and new urbanism to health care and better schools – all have a need of more in-depth, critical thought from the right of the aisle.  Blaming those damned liberals for everything will simply not do.  I think this is what I was touching on a bit in my post on distrust of government.  Sure, we should distrust it for its inefficiency and the ease with which it is manipulated by special interests, but we should also work to figure out how the bloody clock ticks.  If you can’t figure that out, then any attempt at dismantling it will fail.

Exit question: Why didn’t the Democrats just push Medicare expansion instead of a brand new program?  Wouldn’t that have been a lot safer and cheaper?  This has been raised in the comments and elsewhere.  I’m curious to know if this sort of thing would have been acceptable for progressives.  Certainly it would have been (I imagine) more palatable for conservatives.  It’s more palatable to me – just expand existing programs to cover essentially everyone who isn’t covered now, and then maybe start scaling toward more market-oriented solutions.  Try to get those benefits taxed to help pay for it, etc.