Our Northern European Future, continued
Obviously, I have a lot of problems with this approach. I dislike the idea of having governments allocate funds to political parties. I also think that contributing money to a candidate or a political organization is too tightly bound up in the idea of free expression to limit campaign contributions without doing serious violence to the spirit of the First Amendment.
That said, countries like Denmark and Finland have managed to preserve public funding without compromising political freedom. Every Scandinavian country, for example, is ranked favorably by FreedomHouse’s annual index of political freedom.
The quality of Scandinavian governance hasn’t exactly suffered, either. Nordic countries are routinely ranked as having some of the least corrupt governments on the planet. When Matthew Yglesias observed Danish political opinion coalescing around the idea of a revenue-neutral carbon tax, my first reaction was “Hey, that’s the same idea conservative economist Greg Mankiw proposed!” – except that both Mankiw and his critics acknowledge the impossibility of pushing through a reasonably effective green tax in an American political context. Indeed, Jim Manzi’s comprehensive case against a carbon tax hinges on his incredibly pessimistic (and probably accurate) view of Congressional special interest peddlers.
So as a purely empirical proposition, maybe campaign finance reform is a win from the perspectives of both good governance and political freedom. Libertarians and conservatives emphasize the influence of money in politics because it lends credence to the notion that we should downsize government. I find this analysis pretty persuasive, but it doesn’t look like we’re going to start cutting off federal agencies anytime soon. Given these circumstances, perhaps it’s time to give campaign finance reform another look.
October 8, 2009 13 Comments
A Realistic Health Care Alternative Going Nowhere
One of the criticisms levied at the alternative health care proposals discussed by E.D. and I over the last few weeks has been that these proposals, which rely heavily on vouchers and/or subsidies, are irrelevant to the debate that is actually taking place. Yet this is not really true – in fact, as it turns out, these proposals are quite similar to Senator Wyden (D-OR)’s bipartisan proposal, which has 14 co-sponsors in the Senate. A good summary of this proposal is here (Wyden’s proposal appears to rely on tax credits, as commenter Willybobo has advocated, rather than vouchers, but the premise is the same). A better discussion that places Wyden’s proposal and the more-dominant “public option” proposal in context is here.
Yet this proposal, despite bi-partisan support, has exactly zero chance of going forward. It has, so far as I can tell, been largely ignored by grassroots advocates of health care reform, who have largely jumped on the “public option” bandwagon, however flawed that legislation will be if it is to become law.
What is so particularly strange about this is that the legislation that is most likely to actually pass will ensure that our health care system places even more emphasis on employer-based health care coverage – even though the employer-based nature of our system is the single biggest cause of that system’s problems.
For all the comparisons between European and American health care, the employer-based nature of the American system is the one element that both sides of the higher echelons of this debate seem to ignore consistently. Yet it is the one element that actually distinguishes the American system from just about any system in the world – and not in a good way.
As Wyden points out in the Slate article above, the employer-based system traps people in jobs that they would otherwise leave, which reduces labor flexibility even as the capacity for employer mobility increases at breakneck speed. Beyond that, as I’ve tried to point out on numerous occasions and as our friend Kip recently pointed out, the employer-based system ensures that the consumer and the customer are two very different entities with two very different sets of interests. Meanwhile, the leading proposal adds ever-more complications to the already too-confusing tax code to raise money to pay for the additional expenditures – and, importantly, these complications are not just as a result of the surtax on the wealthy.
July 21, 2009 72 Comments
