Stupidity, Dishonesty and Cowardice

"I cannot tell a lie"

Another video has surfaced of Jonathan Gruber saying cringe-worthy things about Obamacare.  Gruber is an MIT economist and health care expert who worked as a number cruncher for the White House during the push to enact Obamacare.  Here’s what he said last year regarding the way political pressures distorted the legislative process:

This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO [Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. So it’s written to do that.

In terms of risk-rated subsidies, in a law that said health people are gonna pay in — if it made explicit that healthy people are gonna pay in, sick people get money, it would not have passed. Okay, lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to get anything to pass.

Conservatives are up in arms, particularly over the “stupidity” part, convinced that Gruber’s comments expose the dirty truth of modern liberalism:  It’s a conspiracy of snooty technocrats confident their superior brains and sociological analyses authorize them to control the everyday lives of the smelly masses, the rednecks and rubes too foolish to make the right choices, too stupid to know what’s good for them.

But let’s ignore that ridiculous argument and consider what Gruber was actually saying: that for any legislation to pass it must be politically presentable, it must not afford its opponents an easy target. And that applies to Obamacare in two ways.  First, Democrats could not allow the individual mandate to be seen – by the CBO or the public – as a tax.  Second, the essence of Obamacare is a transfer of health insurance dollars from the young, rich and healthy to the old, poor and sick; the public would never have allowed such governmental redistribution, so it had to be disguised.  And Gruber was also saying that it was easy to slip those two deceptions past an American public that doesn’t closely follow healthcare policy debates.  Charles Krauthammer charges that, “in order to get it passed, the law was made deliberately obscure and deceptive.”  Is he wrong?

It’s true, as Brian Beutler protests, that Obamacare’s legislative process was more transparent than most (compared to say Bush’s 2003 Medicare expansion or the run up to the Iraq War).  And it’s true, as Neil Irwin concedes, that certain aspects of the law itself (not the process) were deliberately obscured; and that is a “commonplace” tactic that's been employed by both parties on many occasions.  So who’s responsible for the fact that the American public does not really understand Obamacare?  Andrew Sullivan blames liberals and the administration for not making a better and clearer case for the law.  But many pundits, such as Paul Krugman, Jonathan Cohn, Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait, have been explaining it clearly for years.  Gruber himself even wrote a comic book to make it easily understandable!  And conservatives, of course, have invested an enormous about of time and energy lying about the very law they now accuse of deceit and deception.  The national press did a bad job of covering all this, as they always do, by focusing on optics and neglecting substance.  But if any individual wanted to know more about the law, they could have quickly and easily done so – as long as they turned off Fox News.  The one actual, explicit lie used to sell Obamacare was the president’s promise that, “If you like your health plan, you can keep it.”  He knew it was a lie when he said it, but he also knew that admitting that 7 or 8 million people would have their policies regulated away – even though they’d be replaced with better ones – might have put the whole law in jeopardy.  The entire structure of American political discourse worked against an honest assessment of the law.

But let’s make the real confession.  There is one fundamental lie liberals have made and continue to make about Obamacare, and it’s a lie of omission.  The components, the details, the numbers have been endlessly examined, analyzed and debated.  But the real meaning of the law has, for the most part, not been adequately addressed.  What is its deeper significance?  What is it really about?  Redistribution.  Both Gruber’s confession and conservative complaints really boil down to this one point: Obamacare severs the connection between income and healthcare coverage; it indirectly redistributes money from the rich, young and healthy to the poor, old and sick.  The “indirectly” in that last sentence is what the current controversy is really about.  Gruber both regrets the necessity of that indirection and gloats over its devious utility.  And that gloating gives conservatives cover to deplore its dishonesty, though in reality they only lament its effectiveness.

But should we deplore its dishonesty?  Only if we care about American democracy.  Only if we wish it to be more rational and effective.  Sullivan puts it nicely:

If someone were willing to explain the ACA in simple, clear and honest terms, I think most Americans would back it . . . I refuse to believe that a democracy has to operate this way for change to occur. Gruber’s arrogance and condescension are just meta-phenomena of this deeper dysfunction. Someone needs to treat Americans as adults again before this democracy can regain the credibility it so desperately needs to endure.

But is Sullivan right that Obamacare could have withstood a thoroughly candid presentation?  Would a majority of Americans have supported it, even knowing the governmental redistribution that lay at its heart?  The answer is not clear, but I think probably not.  The idea of redistribution, explicitly promoted, would probably have been too unnerving.

We see that the distrust of Obamacare is primarily ideological.  American instincts are generally conservative: they fear centralized authority, they mistrust regulation, they insist that each person is the master of his own fate.  But American instincts constantly conflict with American interests.  Modern society would not be livable without the welfare and regulatory state that liberals have created and conservatives threaten, and Americans affirm that every time they deposit their social security checks and present their Medicare cards.  American conservatism evaporates at the door of the unemployment office.  Put more prosaically, the American people are ideologically conservative but operationally liberal, as has been noted many times.

That’s the real reason public policy is often deceptive.  Social Security pretends to give you back the money you paid in, but it actually pays more, relative to income, to those who made less.  So liberal laws must be dressed up in conservative clothing.  Many liberals, possibly including Obama himself, would have preferred single payer healthcare but considered it politically unpalatable, so they offered a market-friendly program cooked up in a right-wing think tank and instituted by a Republican governor.  Many Americans dislike Obamacare (some hate it for the evil Satanic, Islamic, Communist conspiracy it is!) while they like most Obamacare provisions.  Kentuckians, for example, hate Obamacare but love Kynect, their state’s implementation of the Obamacare exchange; but they returned to the Senate Republican Mitch McConnell, who has explicitly vowed to repeal Obamacare yet who refused to condemn Kynect when cornered in front of a Kentucky audience!  In the last election people all over the country voted for liberal policies like marijuana liberalization and minimum wage increases while voting into office conservatives staunchly opposed to those very policies.  Huh?

In effect, Americans want to be lied to.  They want it both ways: to enjoy their liberal dessert while believing it’s sturdy conservative fare.  This is the real deception at the core of this debate: the American people are kidding themselves.  They’re not stupid, as Gruber and some liberals believe, nor are they solid conservatives.  They’re inconsistent, and unaware of it.  And that encourages politicians and pundits to see what they want to see.  Conservative operatives dream of an America utterly given over to its deepest conservative instincts, but they’re woken from the dream by picketers angrily cursing any cuts to Medicare.  And liberals can never understand why Americans don’t follow them out of the laissez-faire wilderness into the social democratic Promised Land.  A consummate seduction of the American public eludes them both, though conservatives whisper sweet poetry and liberals offer alluring gifts.

But you don’t practice politics with the public you wish you had.  Ultimately, Americans want to be told the truth.  And they deserve the truth.  Liberals need to come clean.  The Democratic Party is the party of redistribution, and it should damn well act like it!  That’s not socialism or authoritarianism – conservative paranoia to the contrary – it’s the pragmatic amelioration of the worst inequities of modern society.  An economy that provides more and more to those at the top but demands more and more from everyone else does not satisfy the demands of democracy and justice.  Unfair economics is as destructive to democracy as dishonest politics.  If liberalism is not about justice for working people then it becomes little more than a loose confederation of identity groups, fighting over the scraps of a long gone shared prosperity.  It abdicates its claim to universalism, it loses its fire and its soul.  And so it has.

Gruber thought he bravely spoke the truth of American politics, that the people are so stupid that good policy must be deceitful policy.  But Gruber’s story is really one of liberal cowardice.  And there’s so much of our current misfortune that would be greatly improved with just a little more liberal courage.  Human nature being what it is, game-playing cannot be removed from politics.  But why can’t liberals successfully balance cunning and conviction?  And can they do the ceaseless, thankless work of educating the public about what they stand for and why?  And most importantly, can they learn to trust the people again?  The people are not stupid, they have as many practical instincts as conservative ones; they are amenable to prudential, fair, liberal policy that would benefit them and strengthen the country.  They’re merely waiting for leadership that both works for them and respects them.  Conservatism, in its modern incarnation as plutocratic propaganda factory, does neither.  Timid liberalism can only do the former.  Only confident and candid liberalism can do both.

Freedom, Work, Drudgery and Danger

American coal miners

If you won the lottery, would you still work?  No, you’d have the freedom to indulge yourself in worldly pleasures: travelling, socializing, thrill-seeking, etc.  But eventually you would probably find a life of indolence and hedonism unsatisfying, and would long for activity that both engaged your talents and benefitted society.  Without your millions, of course, you would be compelled to work, and the extent that a job gratified your talents would become secondary to the extent that it gratified your need for food and housing.  That is, most people work to survive and only a lucky few find work that’s deeply satisfying.  Does a garbage man find as much satisfaction in his work as an architect?  How about a cafeteria worker or a data entry clerk or a coal miner?  No, most of the work that most people do is drudgery, and most people would happily give it up if not compelled to it by economic necessity.  It’s true that all honest work imparts dignity and there is some satisfaction in simply doing your job well.  And in a society of equal opportunity – something to which our society provides at best a rough approximation – anyone with sufficient talent and determination can become a successful architect or neurosurgeon or musician.  But the great majority of people work not for the satisfaction or the dignity.  They work because survival obligates them to a life of unsatisfying and unforgiving drudgery.  For most people, work is coercion.

But imagine if some of that coercion could be lifted.  Imagine a person working an unsatisfying job only for the health insurance provided by her employer (that’s how most Americans get health insurance).  Maybe she or someone in her family requires expensive medical treatment, or maybe independent medical insurance is prohibitively expensive.  But now imagine a change in the system allows her to get cheap but good health insurance somewhere else.  Now she can afford to quit her job and give up the modest pay.  Maybe she wants to quit so she can stay home with her young children or her aging parent.  Maybe she wants to go back to college or start her own business.  Maybe she wants to retire a few years early.  Or maybe she wants to keep her job and simply work fewer hours and spend more time with her family.  Maybe she’s just happy knowing that her expanded health care options give her more choices and more opportunities, more control over her own life.  Isn’t it a tiny bit like winning the lottery?  That is, aren’t we imagining she has more freedom?

Well, you don’t have to imagine.  According to a report by the non-partisan and broadly respected Congressional Budget Office (CBO) there are millions of people who will work less or not at all because they can now obtain cheap and dependable health insurance through Obamacare.  As Josh Barro explains, “Broadly, one key goal of health policy should be to let people make work decisions without worrying about how those decisions affect their health insurance.”  That wasn’t the central intent of the health care law, but it sure seems like a positive development.  Well, there are many conservatives who adamantly don’t think so.  Welcome to the latest battle in the Obamacare wars.

At first many conservatives, blinded by Obamacare-hatred into abandoning either understanding or scruples, proclaimed that the CBO is reporting that Obamacare will destroy millions of jobs.  Some Republican politicians eagerly misrepresented the issue for electoral gain.  Even the supposedly liberal mainstream press thoughtlessly parroted stories about “lost” jobs.  There are no lost jobs, of course, only defecting workers, as clarified in this exchange between conservative Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan and CBO director Douglas Elmendorf as the latter appeared before the House Budget Committee:

"Just to understand, it is not that employers are laying people off," Ryan said.

"That is right," Elmendorf said.

There is a huge difference between being fired and quitting, as anyone who has actually held a job knows.  As Elmendorf testified:

The reason we don’t use the term “lost jobs” is there is a critical difference between people who like to work and can’t find a job — or have a job that’s lost for reasons beyond their control — and people who choose not to work. If someone comes up to you and says, “The boss says I’m being laid off because we don’t have enough business to pay,” [then] any other person feels bad about that and we sympathize for them having lost their job. If someone says, “I decided to retire or stay home and spend more time with my family and spend more time doing my hobby,” they don’t feel bad about it — they feel good about it. And we don’t sympathize. We say congratulations.

Exactly!  But some conservatives are so sure that no Obamacare news is good news they simply pretend that the “lost jobs” tale hasn’t been thoroughly debunked and persist in their misrepresentations.  Consider the semantically-challenged David Harsanyi:

“Obamacare is inducing labor demand to shrink!” doesn’t have the quite the same punch as “Obamacare is costing us jobs!” though both are accurate.

No, normal English usage compels us to call the first sentence accurate, the second one inaccurate, and Harsanyi’s point ridiculous.

Some conservatives deny that even though Obamacare will let some people quit their jobs, that won’t constitute an increase in their freedom.  Charles C. W. Cooke writes in the National Review Online that whatever else one can say about taxing one person to subsidize another:

one cannot claim that it makes either man “free” — at least not without twisting the word and the concept that it represents beyond all meaningful recognition.

That’s because the need to scramble for survival does not constitute coercion in any sense:

Does the Obama administration really plan to make the case that negative liberty is but a mirage and that, the state of nature’s “forcing” one to work being akin to actual compulsion, the state must step in everywhere to liberate the citizenry from reality’s harsh claims? One suspects not.

Let’s overlook Cooke’s rather slapdash treatment of the theoretical concepts of negative liberty and the state of nature, and rephrase his position in everyday terms: He seems to be saying that the brutish struggle for existence is an unavoidable reality of even a thoroughly free life; alleviating that brutishness does not increase one’s freedom, only one’s comfort.  Every person, every creature, in every situation, must struggle for sustenance and shelter.  This feels intuitively plausible: it seems a little odd to think of the demands of one’s own biology as coercions.  But this argument overlooks two important points.  First, there’s no reason an increase in comfort can’t yield an increase in freedom.  To the extent that it’s actually possible to moderate the struggle for survival such that one’s biological needs don’t consume one’s resources to the same degree, those needs can be coherently thought of as coercive.  If survival didn’t compel one to spend so much time hunting down wooly mammoths or waiting on tables then one would have more options, more control over one’s life, more freedom.  Second, in modern society both the freedoms and constrictions of economic life are not just natural, but social as well; they manifest the rules we’ve agreed to live by.  There is a difference between the hinter-gatherer chasing down prey on the savannah and the worker who through lack of independent means is forced to sell his labor on the open market.  In the modern world economic survival can be made less or more harsh by (among other things) actions of society or the state.  Marginally liberating individuals by subsidizing their health insurance is not like trying to counteract all of “reality’s harsh claims”; it’s not like trying to repeal old age or gravity; it’s more like a hunter-gatherer discovering a grove of abundantly productive fruit trees.  It’s more like winning a lesser lottery ticket.

But, though Cooke’s logic does not convince, it does illuminate.  Misapprehending capitalism, a social institution, as a purely natural phenomenon – like the struggle for survival – is a widespread conservative fallacy.  Perceiving all political and social issues as amenable to black-and-white moralistic solutions is another.  Put the two together and you have conservative economics.  To Cooke, when the state tries to revise the natural workings of the market it commits both arrogance and immorality.  His conservative colleague, writer Michael Goodwin, likewise considers it a sin, and the abetting of sin: Choosing to work less hours because the government subsidizes your health insurance is shameful, if not downright un-American!

In [the old, pre-liberal] America, work, any work, was honorable while being on the dole was cause for shame. Still is.

That is, liberals are blind to the moral nobility of self-sufficiency; that’s probably why they’re always plotting to ensnare people into government bondage:

This anti-job, pro-dependency tilt is the crux of the nation’s polarization. In essence, it pits those who believe in the sanctity of work against those who believe in penalizing wealth and redistributing its fruits.

Sanctity!  Goodwin beats even Cooke in the competition for most abstractly moralistic understanding of labor in the modern world.  Cooke may believe it’s natural but Goodwin actually believes it’s holy!  Goodwin attempts to describe the essence of our national polarization, but instead he embodies it.  Conservatives issue furious sermons about the naturalness and sanctity of the free market while ignoring its actual results.  Liberals actually perceive capitalism’s “harsh realities” – its coercion, its amorality, its inability to deliver universal healthcare – and hope to moderate them in limited and prudential ways that increase individual comfort and freedom.  Moralistic, dogmatic platitudes vs. pragmatic, prudential solutions.  That’s the real crux of our polarization.  Here it pits the absolutist, pre-ordained certainty that the state can’t possibly make anyone freer against the practical reality that sometimes it does just that.

And there’s all the usual handwringing about the evils of redistribution.  As Repair_Man_Jack of redstate.com puts it:

The freedom to sit on your butt and do nothing at another citizen’s expense is expressly parasitic and malignant.

Well, at least he concedes it’s freedom!  But all social insurance requires redistribution, from Social Security to unemployment insurance to student loans to Medicare and Medicaid.  Every government activity, even the provision of education and highways and the military, includes those who pay who will not benefit and those who benefit who have not paid.  You can’t have anything like universal healthcare without some redistribution; the young, healthy and affluent have to help pay for the old, sick and poor.  And once you subsidize the old, sick and poor they may find less need to hold a job or work so many hours.  To pay for Obamacare you do have to marginally increase someone’s taxes and that does marginally decrease that someone’s freedom.  That is, you’re redistributing not only money, but freedom.  You’re marginally increasing the coercion on the taxed worker so that the Obamacare recipient can work less.  But much of the revenue for Obamacare comes from taxes on the upper economic strata (and much of the rest from hospitals and insurance companies), that is, on those who already have the most freedom.  Even the extravagantly hated individual mandate to buy health insurance is really only a tax on not buying it, and a minor tax at that.  And everyone may someday need government-subsidized healthcare; indeed, every American who lives to 65 qualifies for Medicare, a program even Tea Partiers seem to love.  Why is Obamacare is any less defensible?  If you believe they’re all indefensible and the entire welfare state should be repealed, you’d better be prepared for the quite harsh economic and social conditions that prevailed before its creation.  Would that represent an increase in freedom? The person who worked 14 hours a day in deadly conditions his entire life without hope of retirement might have found some appreciation in the purely abstract freedom of his condition, but it’s doubtful that offset the all-too-real crushing coercions he actually lived under.

But from the perspective of the highly moralized conservative point of view, redistribution is robbing Peter to pay Paul, and it not only cheats Peter, it diminishes Paul.  As Jonathan Chait explains, Obamacare recipients have become the new welfare queens.  To John Podhoretz such recipients risk the loss of self-sufficiency:

This is the classic problem of a government handout: It can become more alluring to those who receive it than the prospect of a life lived without it.

Charles Krauthammer puts it rather less kindly:

In [Obama’s] new opportunity society, you are given the opportunity for idleness while living parasitically off everyone else.

Repair Man Jack gets downright visceral:

So behind all the benevolent language about being free to quit is a call to greater personal dependence instead of responsibility. Why isn’t this relief from responsibility good? It is antipodal to good because it takes a free-minded, productive and independent citizens and turns them into the human equivalent of intestinal parasites. These parasites then degrade and eat out the sustenance of others.

Jack’s fascination with intestine-eating aside, a person who works less or quits their job because of government subsidies is not a parasite.  What have we come to that American workers actually need to be defended against such vile slander?  These are people who have been working or looking for work, not looking for a handout.  Health insurance subsidies do not “turn them into” anything other than healthier, more secure, more autonomous Americans. Are people who retire on Social Security parasites?  What about capable and healthy retirees?  Should Social Security be repealed so they’re forced to get off their lazy butts and go hustle for jobs?  Or consider the G.I. Bill, which provided government-sponsored mortgages, business loans and college tuition for servicemen and women returning from World War II – did it turn them into parasites?  And just because Obamacare allows a person to quit her job doesn’t mean she has stopped working (especially if she is merely working fewer hours).  A person who stays home to take care of her children or her parents or her home is still working and still contributing to society.

But, though government assistance need not transform one into a parasite, you need not be a raving hysteric to appreciate that it might weaken one’s self-sufficiency, it might weaken one’s work ethic; indeed, it might weaken everyone’s.  Andrew Sullivan almost agrees with Goodwin about the crux of our polarization:

It’s struck me that there is an underlying anxiety to several of our current debates on economic and social issues. That anxiety is that the American work ethic – unparalleled in the developed world – is under threat. That’s the real critique of Obamacare

Though it’s not clear he’s on Goodwin’s side of that polarization:

The Protestant work ethic we have, for example, is the imperative for industrious striving, self-advancement and material gain. It is emphatically not about being happy. And at some point, if those two values are not easily compatible, something will give.

The Puritan work ethic has, to a great extent, served us well, though it does have the downsides that Sullivan touches upon.  But that work ethic doesn’t seem dead just yet.  There is an ongoing tension in American public life between the pragmatic need to ameliorate the excesses of capitalism and a political folk culture that worships self-sufficiency, and that tension is not about to ease any time soon.  And even if the liberal view of capitalism came to dominate it would not necessarily mean the death of the work ethic.  One of liberalism’s fondest dreams is that working people be fairly rewarded for their labor.  Second-guessing capitalist outcomes looks like an attack on the work ethic only if you believe the harshness of the market is a necessary corrective to the enervating human desire for sponsored comfort.  To conservatives, the unforgiving necessity for hard work is positively beneficial in that it polices a naturally weak and unambitious populace.  But American workers want just what liberals want for them: to work hard and to reap the benefits, one of which might be working fewer hours because of a health insurance subsidy.  Should we really fear that when the workers in question leave their jobs they will so casually fall into inactivity, despondency and sloth?  At base, the fierce conservative attack on the welfare state is about the Puritanical dread of corrupting, lazy irresponsibility.  They’re convinced the freed man won’t feel the need for work, the urge to create and produce and contribute we ascribed to the lottery winner; instead he’ll embrace indolence, hedonism and immorality.  So the workforce must be kept hungry; not because hungry workers will work for less (though the investor class does not object), but because hunger keeps them busy, it keeps them honest.

We see the political forces arrayed against freedom for the American worker:  There is an ideological worldview that sees exemption from wage labor as unnatural and morally debilitating, a culture that equates moral value with economic value and freedom with self-sufficiency.  There is the warped version of the work ethic that’s convinced that inside each worker is a welfare cheat just aching to jump out.  And there is the ferocity of a partisan movement in the grip of these mythologies, righteous in its insistence that moralistic absolutes override the bread-and-butter concerns of people’s actual lives.  And, most fundamentally there are the ideological blinders that prevent the clear apprehension of the coercion that plays such a large part in the lives of working people.  Cooke finds:

a great deal of truth in The Economist’s observation that “a job is an economic transaction between a seller and a buyer of labour, and can be ‘destroyed’ if either seller or buyer walks away.”

It may seem here that Cooke is toying with the pretense of some of his less scrupulous conservative colleagues that the CBO report proves Obamacare is destroying jobs.  But it’s not mendacity that tempts him to support the Economist’s laughable “observation”, it’s the constrictions of his own ideology.  In real life, no job is destroyed when a worker walks away; there is always a line of people eagerly waiting to take his place (especially during a weak recovery).  A job is a thing an employer dispenses; it cannot be destroyed by a seller of labor.  Labor is a buyer’s market; in the real lives of most people, the employer holds the power.  CBO Director Elmendorf reminds us how we pity the man who’s been fired, but congratulate the man who quits.  That’s because the quitting man has acquired the economic power to meet the boss as an equal, as one who is free of the boss’s power.  Such a man has shed one of life’s coercions.

But there is no room in conservative ideology to address that coercion; that’s why conservatives have been so exercised by a provocative tweet from the Huffington Post’s Congressional reporter, Michael McAuliff:

There's an irony in the GOP complaining that ACA lets people quit jobs. I mean, what's wrong with freedom?

Conservatives can’t imagine a subsidy recipient has been freed from a compulsion whose existence they can’t even perceive!  In their worldview it’s not only acceptable, but essential that families mold individuals, schools indoctrinate them, religion restrain them, mores chasten them, and the market allocate them.  But interference from the federal government is the darkest tyranny!  What’s actually wrong with freedom – actual individual freedom – in the conservative mind is that it dis-empowers families, schools, religion, mores and the market.  The freedom that conservatives genuinely value is the unconstrained power of those institutions to exert their traditional moral authority over their charges, to manage them.

To be fair, there is another side to such freedom that conservatives value at least as much: the individual self-sufficiency those institutions are charged with instilling and enforcing.  To a conservative, individual freedom without individual responsibility is no freedom at all.  Overlooking the semantic confusion, liberals value their version of freedom because it allows individuals to pursue their own goals and develop their individual talents and personalities.  Conservatives value their version of freedom because it produces righteous and responsible providers and protectors (yes, it still includes a profoundly male tone).  But it’s a strange sort of freedom that requires ongoing and overpowering direction and enforcement from social institutions like the church and the market.  Once again, it’s not clear how much conservatives trust truly free individuals to make their own choices.  To a liberal, if a subsidy allows an individual to develop herself more, then she simply is more free, regardless of the financial source for the subsidy.  To a conservative she has forgone her freedom, her autonomy, for a gilded cage.

Comprehensive freedom from work is, of course, both impossible and undesirable, while comprehensive freedom from drudgery is merely impossible.  The struggle for existence and the capitalist need for wage labor are, obviously, the most important and most inescapable enemies of freedom from drudgery.  But if we can allow workers to work marginally less and in such a way that it barely affects either the economy or the social fabric, then what is so wrong with that?  At bottom, conservatives reject the notion that such workers are more free because they’ve confused freedom with responsibility.  Freedom seems to be merely their word for the arrangement of interlocking, constraining institutions that punish irresponsibility and thereby enforce morality.  The conservative sensibility, with its overwrought Puritan anxieties, can’t seem to escape the fear that real freedom – freedom to say “No” to the boss or the patriarch or the minister – is dangerous.  That’s because real freedom means the redistribution of power – the power to quit without starving, power over your own time and energy – and that threatens traditional authority and the view of moral order it represents.  That’s what’s wrong with freedom, as far as conservatives are concerned.  But given the overwhelming necessity of work and the coercion it entails, respect for the labor of our fellow Americans should prevent us from begrudging them the small slivers of power and freedom we might provide.  Their respite from drudgery represents a small victory for everyone who labors.  Let’s trust them to enjoy it and cultivate it and profit from it as they will.

Redistribution, Yes!

Ida May Fuller, the first Social Security recipient

The present skirmish in the Obamacare wars concerns whether those in the individual healthcare insurance market will be able to keep their existing plans.  Most people get their health insurance through their employer or through the federal government (i.e. Medicare or Medicaid), but 9% buy it as individuals directly from insurance companies.  As Obamacare swings into operation it’s causing many of those individuals – it’s hard to say exactly how many – to lose their plans, forcing them onto more expensive plans.  It seems unfair, and it’s proving to be a political disaster for the president, especially considering his repeated promises that this would never happen. Throw in the ongoing fiasco of the federal government’s insurance exchange website and not only does Obamacare begin to seem fundamentally flawed, but – as some kind conservatives have helpfully suggested – so does liberalism itself.

Hardly.  As the indispensible Jonathan Chait has explained in numerous clarifying pieces, if you wish to make sure that (nearly) everyone has adequate health insurance then there must be some mechanism for making the young, healthy and affluent help pay for the old, sick and poor.  For example, Obamacare forces insurance companies to cover people in the individual market with pre-existing medical conditions, most of whom have been denied coverage or forced to pay exorbitant premiums.  How is that additional coverage paid for?  Partly it comes from subsidies to poorer individuals from Medicaid, which is, of course, funded by taxpayers.  But Obamacare also raises the regulatory standards of health insurance plans with the specific intent of forcing healthy individuals to pay for better plans so that insurers can provide care for more expensive patients.  (It also does so to protect consumers from unreliable plans, like those with lifetime caps and serious lapses in coverage.)

But all this is true of employer-based health insurance as well; i.e. it forces those who need health care less to pay for those who need it more (subsidized by taxpayers).  Such plans usually have a set price, regardless of age, sex or medical status, thus allowing a large group of people to pay for the small number which will actually need expensive care.  Such risk-pooling is the basis of all health insurance – indeed, of all insurance.  Obamacare, as Ezra Klein says, “basically makes the individual market more like the group markets.”  That is, it makes it more redistributive.  Yes, redistribution rests at the heart of any insurance system, public or private.  And we’re all willing to contribute to those systems because the future is uncertain; even the best actuarial tables cannot predict with any certainty who will need the benefit of insurance.  We buy fire insurance even though, as Chait so eloquently puts it, “fire insurance is a bad deal for people whose houses don’t burn.”

But let’s take that one step further: Redistribution rests at the heart of all liberalism.  This is liberalism’s open secret, and one’s view of this principle makes or breaks one’s support for the entire liberal welfare project.  Every worker pays Medicare taxes, but Medicare only supports those over 65.  Medicaid only covers those below a specified financial threshold.  Even Social Security provides slightly higher benefits to lower wage workers (relative to their lifetime income).  For political reasons liberals generally attempt to disguise the redistributive aspects of their programs; for example, Social Security taxes are paid into individual accounts.  But to modern liberalism a secure retirement is an individual and social good that humanitarianism simply and firmly demands.  Could we consider ourselves a just society if there were people who had worked their whole lives who were forced to retire in destitution?  It was exactly destitution to which all too many workers were consigned by pre-welfare-state laissez-faire capitalism.  Relative poverty causes so much harm, we should feel ashamed if it denied people the requisites of even a modestly fulfilling life: nourishment, education, decent housing, a secure retirement and medical care.  And if those with less can’t pay for those minimal goods, then – as long as it’s practical and sustainable – those with more must foot the bill.  This is the essence of modern welfare state liberalism: Taxing the affluent at higher rates and spending that money on insuring that working and poor people posses the minimal requirements of civilized life.  (This is the crucial distinction between welfare liberalism and socialism, which advocates the equalization of most or all social goods; liberalism merely advocates minimal standards and for a much shorter list of goods.)  Redistribution is part of the rationale even for infrastructure and public institutions, such as roads, bridges, hospitals, universities, crime control, emergency management.  Such things are generally regarded as benefitting everyone, but they’re partially funded through progressive taxes, and there are such things as private highways, private police, etc.

Since conservatives generally equate what you deserve with what capitalism allocates to you, they consider any non-capitalist redistribution to be inherently unjust.  Pragmatic conservatives – quite a rare species! – may tolerate a very short list of public goods and social insurance programs, but only for the sake of market efficiency or social comity.  But, as conservatives, they would never concede that anyone has a moral claim on some good for which he could not pay, such as a poor person who cannot afford a college education.  But if you accept that there are some goods for which everyone should be forced to pay, even those who will never directly benefit from those goods, then you have accepted the rationale for the welfare state.  All that’s left at that point is to argue over which goods should be on the list.  Should we have public healthcare but not public housing?  Should we have food stamps but not public day care?  We have moved from the realm of moral justification to that of policy detail.  To be sure, the devil is in the details; even liberals like Ezra Klein dislike Obamacare’s employer mandate, for example.  But if you accept, for instance, that people without children should pay taxes for schools, or people who don’t drive should pay taxes for highways, then you support the welfare state in principle.  However much you feel the urge to make moral complaints about liberal social policies, you can reasonably make only practical or economic ones.  You are a redistributionist.  Accept it.

Most Americans – with their sober and practical generosity – easily accept the logic of liberalism.  That practicality lets them support universal healthcare in general while still seeing Obamacare’s faults.  Most of Obamacare’s complexities and confusions result from using private institutions – i.e. insurance companies – for public ends.  Thus, its redistribution involves the regulation of private insurance plans in addition to the typical liberal funding mechanism of direct taxation.  But given the moral urgency of universal coverage and the redistribution it demands, the only alternative would be a single-payer scheme, in which the federal government acts as the health insurance company for all Americans and pays for the system out of progressive taxes.  Once again, we can argue over policy details, but let’s have the adult version of that argument, in which we accept the necessity of federal government redistribution. Conservatives may rail against redistribution in principle, while they lambaste Obama for cutting Medicare funds. And liberals may tout the benefits of tight regulations on individual plans while swiftly running from any redistributionist rhetoric.  But, outside the Tea Party’s tightly sealed ideological ghetto, everyone in America actually supports redistribution. They support it because human decency demands it.  They support it because they know that someday they may come to need it themselves.  They may consider it a necessary evil or a positive good, but they understand, intellectually or viscerally, that modern life would be intolerable without it.  That is the open secret not just of liberal politics, but of all American politics.

Toward a Smarter Welfare State

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.” – President Eisenhower

The recent government shutdown and debt ceiling standoff have deepened and illuminated the most important division within conservatism, that between the pragmatists and the radicals.  The latter were only too happy to use any means necessary – even the threat of economic conflagration – to slay the monsters of Obamacare and debt, while the pragmatists understood that political battles are won with more than the simple iron resolve that moral certainty bestows.  That is, the radicals have jettisoned pragmatic considerations almost entirely, as if process and outcome were dirty words, corruptions that only inhibit the full manly functioning of righteous moral strength.  How can you compromise when your enemy is the socialist vanguard pointing like a dagger at the heart of Americanism?  But alas, the real world – a Democratic Senate and president, an anxious business community, an unconvinced public – turned out to be less than tractable to idealistic holy war.  As the pragmatists perceived all along, bravado has its limitations.

But the differences between the pragmatists and radicals are more than merely tactical or stylistic, they are substantive as well.  In the past few weeks a few thinkers on the right have explicitly endorsed the welfare state as created by liberals in the 20^th century.  Here’s Arthur Brooks, president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute:

One of the things, in my view, that we get wrong in the free enterprise movement is this war against the social safety net, which is just insane. The government social safety net for the truly indigent is one of the greatest achievements of our society. And we somehow want to zero out food stamps or something, it’s nuts to want to be doing something like that. We have to declare peace on the safety net.

And James Pethokoukis, Brooks’ colleague at the AEI, acknowledges that without federal welfare programs our recent economic troubles would have impoverished many Americans:

The pain from the Great Recession, as bad it was, would have been far worse for middle- and low-income Americans if we were still in a sort of 1920s, Coolidgean world that many on the right these days seem to long for.

Even hard conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer agrees:

There’s no question of accepting the great achievements of liberalism — the achievements of the New Deal, of Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare.  The idea that you rescue the elderly and don’t allow the elderly to enter into destitution is a consensual idea [accepted by] conservatives, at least the mainstream of conservatives.

When such important conservatives urge a declaration of peace on the social safety net, it’s news!  Until now this has been the position that dare not speak its name, at least not sincerely.  Conservatives constantly issue protestations of support for programs like Social Security and Medicare, but haven’t we known all along they didn’t really mean it?  Liberals, at least, have long suspected as much.  If Brooks, Krauthammer, et al. are urging conservatives to accommodate the New Deal doesn’t that mean that until now they’ve been waging war against it?  Haven’t they been trying to roll it back since, well, since it was created? Certainly Red State writer Erick Erickson understands that the founders of modern American conservatism hoped to roll it back:

The present editors of National Review, over the last several years, have made it clearer and clearer that they now speak mostly for the well-fed [i.e. accommodationist] right and not for conservatives hungering for a fight against the leviathan. They have made their peace with the New Deal, moving beyond Buckley. For that matter, Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and most of the defunders have largely made their peace with the New Deal. And still National Review is too timid to join the merry band of defunders themselves too timid to approach the parameters under which William F. Buckley started his charge.

To Erickson even the rabid radical insurgent Senators throwing their own bodies into the gears of the welfare state – pledging their sacred honor and risking almost certain presidential candidacy – have too easily resigned themselves to the slow suffocation of liberty that is the welfare state.  Has extremism for its own sake become Erickson’s pre-eminent value?

If the radicals consider Cruz and Lee to be too accommodating then they naturally perceive the welfare state concessions of Brooks, Krauthammer et al. as nothing more than abject surrender to the statist enemy.  To Andrew C. McCarthy of National Review, it’s obvious that all real conservatives oppose the safety net; to accept it is to “deviate significantly from . . . the tradition of Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan.”  No real conservative could accept “redistributionist schemes that fleece some citizens for the benefit of others.”  McCarthy’s definition of conservatism precludes support for any program based upon progressive taxation, i.e. everything on Krauthammer’s list.  The entire liberal welfare state project is just a huge scam:

The New Deal and its Great Society successor programs, by contrast, are frauds designed to create permanent dependency on government (and fealty to the party of government).

The welfare state is a devious instrument designed to enslave the population.  The well-off are tied down by taxes and regulation and their lessers are urged to discard their self-sufficiency and lounge lazily in the gilded cage of government largesse.  And liberal politicians sit at the top, laughing malevolently as they corrupt the moral principles Americans once held dear:

There is no disciplining or escaping Leviathan. And if, as is inevitable, federal officials expand their outlandish schemes and promise favored constituencies more than they can deliver, they just borrow or print ever more money: Government borrows from its tapped-out self, monetizing its debts, degrading our currency to reward sloth and punish thrift even as it steals from future generations.

Even a onetime moderate like Mitt Romney seemed to actually believe such foolishness, or pretended so to raise money.  But does this McCarthyite nonsense represent the mainstream of conservatism?

Reihan Salam – a genuinely thoughtful conservative, one always worth reading – puts all this in perspective:

Recently, a friend of mine observed that conservatives can be divided into roughly three camps with regards to the idea of a federally-financed social safety net: (1) there are those who oppose it on normative grounds and who believe that political efforts should be geared towards rolling it back; (2) there are those who oppose it on normative grounds yet who recognize that its political entrenchment can’t be wished away, and so they believe that political efforts should be geared towards containing its size, restraining its worst excesses, improving it at the margins, and rolling it back when the opportunity presents itself; and (3) there are those who affirmatively believe that the federal government ought to play a role in financing the safety net, yet who are keen to make it as fiscally sustainable, work-friendly, and pro-growth as possible.

Both the first and second groups – call them purists and pragmatists, respectively – wish to cleanse America of the corruption that is the liberal welfare state; but the pragmatists, daunted by its deep popular support, wish to fight it with prudence and stealth.  The third group – call them technocrats – wants to remake it in conservative fashion.  The purists and the pragmatists differ only in means; the technocrats differ from the other two in ends.  Most of the Tea Party clearly falls into the first group, while most of the GOP establishment falls into groups two and three (or is it only group two?).  Indeed, the goal of the Tea Party is to make the Republicans exclusively purist!  And the purists seem to have trouble distinguishing the pragmatists from the technocrats.  McCarthy, for instance, seems to think the establishment is entirely made of technocrats:

It is not an exaggeration to say the GOP establishment is more sympathetic to Obama’s case for the centralized welfare state than to the Tea Party’s case for limited government and individual liberty.

No, it is quite an exaggeration, as any liberal can attest.  Salam’s categories are quite illuminating. Consider that while many conservatives denounced Romney’s 47% remarks, many supported them.

But the purists are indulging themselves in one great denial fantasy.  Simply put: the welfare state is here to stay.  Conservatives typically make a great show of accepting the sad inevitabilities of human existence – notably social inequality – while decrying the liberal urge to improve society as foolish utopianism.  But isn’t the welfare state, even with its systemic downsides, part of the fabric of society, and a beneficial part, at that?  Doesn’t it make capitalism more humane?  Doesn’t the public – even the Tea Party with their “Keep Government out of my Medicare” signs – demand its continuance? Aren’t purist conservatives – wide-eyed idolaters of virtuous, anarchic capitalism – the true utopians?  The group we’re calling conservative pragmatists are only pragmatic about methods; there is nothing pragmatic about hoping to repeal the New Deal.  Not because the American people would loudly object; but because modern capitalism unfettered by a strong, countervailing welfare state would cause intolerable economic and social suffering.  Indeed, it was the concession to pragmatism – a classic conservative principle from Aristotle to Burke – that brought liberals from their classical free market idealism to the modern welfare state meliorism they now advance, if sometimes in excess.

Ah yes, liberal excess.  Wouldn’t conservatives better serve their country by making themselves the skeptical interrogators of liberal schemes rather than romantic, bomb-throwing revolutionaries determined to blow them up?  Do they wish to destroy America in order to save it, or do they wish to really make it better?  Conservatives are painfully aware that the real world, with its overwhelming complications and obstinate unpredictability can confound the noblest and best researched reform plans.  Humans have a way of undermining the most incisive sociology.  Which isn’t to say that no program can be well designed or positively beneficial; many are.  It’s to say that of all the contributions that conservatives might be disposed to make to our arguments over the structure and scope of our national welfare state, the most helpful is keeping liberals humble.  Constructive conservatism can keep liberal feet on the ground.  And it could force liberal awareness of the genuine moral dangers – dependency, rent-seeking, alienation – lurking behind all welfare programs; not in order to sabotage those programs, but to strengthen them.  Together, hopeful liberalism and cautious conservatism could forge a smarter welfare state.

And liberals must learn not to confuse constructive, technocratic conservatives with the pragmatic or purist ones.  Not all conservative welfare proposals are demolition plans in disguise.  Though, sad to say, many are.  Does anyone really believe that George W. Bush proposed the partial privatization of Social Security in 2005 in order to save Social Security rather than starve it of funds?  And no reasonable person can mistake Paul Ryan’s plan to turn Medicare into a system of ever-less-valuable vouchers for a plan to save that program, despite protestations to the contrary.  Even if ideologues like McCarthy find Ryan’s proposal much too welfare-friendly, the numbers simply prove otherwise.  And all the recent supposed panic over the size of the national debt is primarily a technocratic excuse for the purist desire to reduce spending; if the debt was their real concern conservatives would be only too happy to raise taxes as well. Liberals can be forgiven for not trusting technocrats when the principal intent of the pragmatists is to trick people into thinking they’re technocrats!  The best recent example of liberals reaching out to conservative technocracy is the Obamacare saga.  President Obama, the Conciliator in Chief, crafted a market-friendly health insurance program originally proposed by seemingly genuine technocrats in reputably conservative think tanks, successfully launched in Massachusetts by its genuinely technocratic Republican governor, and supported by a whole host of (quite transparently) pragmatic conservative heavyweights.  What did liberals get for their attempted compromise?  Purist stonewalling, mendacious propaganda and McCarthyite paranoia.  At any stage in the legislative process conservatives could have joined in and helped improve Obamacare; even now they stubbornly refuse to do so.

How can liberals hope to deal in good faith with a party so dominated by purists and pragmatists?  A party in which the purists think their own pragmatists are traitors to the essence of America?  A party whose pragmatists deliberately conceal their true purist intentions?  Genuine conservative technocracy seems as elusive a mirage as the purist dream of a dismantled welfare state.  We seem to be stuck for the foreseeable future with a Republican Party and a conservative movement in thrall to populist Tea Party purism.  And we see now that the real conservative divide is not, as is normally understood, that with purists on one side and pragmatists and technocrats on the other.  Rather it’s between those who would – with whatever tactics – undermine the welfare state and those who would improve it, between conservatism as a small-government crusade and conservatism as accommodation to the real world.  But this is quite an uneven division; adult conservatism seems to exist only among a very few thoughtful writers, like Reihan Salam, Conor Friedersdorf, Daniel Larison, Russ Douthat, David Brooks.

If there is hope it resides with what some have called Sam's Club Republicans; that is, working class whites with generally conservative instincts who nevertheless wish the federal government would do more to ameliorate their tough economic conditions.  Such a group might make a respectable constituency for a genuinely technocratic Republican Party.  For the moment they seem to lack the populist passion displayed by their upscale, better-educated Tea Party overlords; but a smart politician might appeal to them with a technocratic program that satisfies both their instincts and their interests.  There are perfectly workable and sustainable conservative technocratic proposals, as Obamacare itself is beginning to show (alarmism to the contrary). Widespread support for a moderated welfare state would go a long way toward marginalizing Tea Party purism and easing the unbearable polarization that causes us so much grief.   The welfare state – fought for by working people, desperately needed by the poor, embraced by a middle class frightened of capitalist cruelty, wrangled from hard struggle against concentrated wealth and privilege – is too precious, too necessary to be lost.  The good news is that it won’t be.  The bad news is that one of our two major parties is dominated by those who don’t think that’s good news.  At least – and at last! – Arthur Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, Andrew McCarthy and Reihan Salam have made all that quite clear.