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.

The Value Theory of Labor

What is the value of a person's labor?  This is the question at the heart of the debate over the minimum wage, a debate re-ignited by President Obama’s call to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 an hour.  Such a question may sound like an economic question, but it is in fact a political question.  Common sense says wages should be determined by the market; that is, the employer and the employee in question should negotiate a mutually agreeable wage based upon their particular interests.  But it is society as whole that determines what is common sense in such matters.  Economic decisions cannot be so cleanly removed from the moral and social assumptions that condition them.  And liberals and conservatives, of course, bring with them quite different assumptions, based upon quite different understandings of the nature of capitalist economic activity.  Both sides reference studies, pro and con, on the economic effects of raising the minimum wage, but that argument misses the deeper issues.  When we argue over the minimum wage we are really arguing over which moral understanding of capitalism should inform government policy.  That’s why liberals and conservatives cherry-pick the economic studies that buttress their respective positions.  We don’t practice economics, we choose economics, and for that we are all responsible.

Liberals believe that, ideally, economic activity should satisfy three considerations: economics, justice, and social stability.  First, it should pay economic actors (workers, employers, investors) their market value.  Second, it should benefit them enough to live decently; it should keep them out of poverty.  Work is itself a moral good, not merely an economic one.  Steady work makes a person more responsible and orderly and productive, and justice demands that its rewards should reflect that moral worth.  Every honest job imparts dignity, but meager wages insult that dignity.  Third, work which satisfies the second consideration will make society stronger.  A just economy makes a stable society.  A well-cared-for worker contributes socially; he plans for the future and raises his children to also be responsible and productive.  That is, a well-paid worker is a happy worker and a happy worker is a good citizen.  Obviously, though, in the real world it happens all too frequently that the second and third considerations are not satisfied.  It is a stark injustice for a person to be paid only $290 for 40 long hours of flipping burgers or mopping floors.  And if there were no minimum wage at all, he might make much less.  Honest work deserves more.  It earns more.

Of course, conservatives care just as deeply as liberals about economics, justice and social stability.  But we can clearly see the major difference between liberal and conservative views: To a conservative, a just wage is the market wage, there can be no discrepancy.  That is, there are no moral or social considerations that demand a worker be paid more than the market pays him.  The unfettered market delivers justice all by itself; it rewards virtue and punishes sin.  If a stock broker makes $300,000 a year and a cashier makes only $15,000 it’s because the stock broker is determined, hard-working and self-disciplined and the cashier is lax, lazy and self-indulgent.  Their wages represent their respective moral worth.  Any independent moral judgments or attempts to interfere in capitalism – such as mandating a minimum wage – only undermine the wonderful moral enforcement mechanism that is the free market.  Indeed, to even question the results of the free market is to undermine that moral enforcement.  This explains conservative temper in the face of liberal criticism of economic outcomes.  If you tell that cashier that his labor deserves more than $15,000 then you’ve removed his incentive to become as determined, hard-working and self-disciplined as the stock broker.  You’ve weakened him morally.  You’ve filled him with resentment and envy.  He’s now less of citizen, less self-reliant, more likely to become a ward of the state.  This is the crucial point: to a conservative, labor loses its social value if its moral value is not explicitly equated with its economic value.

Now, this conservative identification of economic and moral value is sometimes mistaken for amorality.  It may look as if conservatives applaud capitalism’s ruthless pursuit of profit, as if they’re refusing to make moral judgments about its materialism, destructiveness and chaos.  And that would be uncharacteristic, given the stern, black-and-white judgments conservatives typically make on other matters, such as drugs, crime, and sex and procreation (especially on sex and procreation!).  Indeed such moralism seems essential to conservatism.  But conservatives have not freed capitalism of moral judgments; instead they perceive capitalist outcomes in and of themselves as proper moral judgments.  Their Puritan moralism doesn’t overlook capitalism, it pervades it, it absorbs it.  Moralism is the way they understand capitalism; it’s the way they incorporate it into conservative ideology; it’s the way they profess capitalism while remaining conservatives.  But the result is that the workings of capitalism become sanctified, they come to define morality rather than the other way around.  Moralism becomes the servant of capitalism, God the servant of Mammon.  And, as we saw, capitalism becomes immune to criticism.  When was the last time you heard a conservative decry labor exploitation or growth in inequality?  Liberals are able to see capitalism as sometimes ruthless, destructive and chaotic; their ideology allows them to make such independent moral and social judgments.  They understand that capitalism is as imperfect as any human institution, that it takes as well as gives, that along with its enormous benefits comes the occasional loss.  On this issue, the conservative position is a caricature of the liberal one.

But conservatives also fear the instrument that liberals propose for making economics more just: the state.  But it’s not that they fear the loss of freedom that accompanies state intervention in the economy; more precisely, it’s not only that (fears of tyranny figure heavy in conservative lore).  What they really fear is losing the moral enforcement that only a free market can provide.  Reliance upon help from the state breeds dependence and dependence breeds irresponsibility.  Conservatives would oppose the minimum wage even if they were utterly convinced it reduced poverty, because poverty reduced by government rather than by individual effort has lost its moral force.  Poverty becomes merely an economic condition, rather than a moral one, and there would have to be unhappy consequences.  Here we see a central premise of conservative thought: policies based on false moral foundations cannot possibly have good practical results.  The moral structure of the universe has practical implications; good intentions and well-researched technocracy cannot override that structure.  Liberals, on the other hand, are more pragmatic.  Most liberals, if honestly convinced that the minimum wage harmed working people more than it helped, would abandon it and go searching for economic justice by other means.  Quite probably, some liberals would still want to keep it to send the message that society frowns upon unjust wages, but that’s not simply the left-wing version of conservative anti-pragmatism.  Conservatives don’t oppose the minimum wage because it sends the wrong message; they oppose it because morally faulty policy simply cannot work (thank God!).  To a conservative, moralism is the highest pragmatism.

But it’s ironic that the highly moralized conservative defense of capitalism fatally compromises that very morality.  When one’s morals cannot allow genuine criticism of economic reality then those morals have lost their independence, they’ve been co-opted.  Morals so subordinated to a human institution can make no credible claim to objectivity.  By defending all capitalist activity as an expression of God’s will, modern conservatism has made morality into the public relations firm for capitalist amorality, for its materialism and consumerism and thoughtless acquisition.  This is morality in the service of relativism.  It’s almost as if conservatives had become libertarians.  Conservatives and libertarians, of course, both support the free market and are thought to differ only in their views of social issues (e.g. the legality of marijuana use).  But the libertarian view of capitalism is essentially amoral; the highest good is freedom from forcible coercion and what people do with that freedom is not a libertarian concern.  This means that, unlike liberals and conservatives, libertarians want wages to represent only economic value, nothing more.  Non-economic considerations like justice and social stability simply don’t apply.  Conservatives defend the free market because it is just, libertarians defend it because it is free.

Modern liberals, on the other hand, perceive that all too often it is neither. They evaluate capitalism based upon independent moral ends; those ends to be achieved through pragmatic and prudential means.  Modern liberal pragmatism arises from that most conservative insight, that human frailty precludes perfect and definitive solutions. And the sources of modern liberal moralism are found in the animating principles of classical liberalism: humanitarianism, freedom from arbitrary power, individual control over one’s labor and one’s life.  Libertarianism springs from the same classical liberal ground, but its amoral embrace of the free market is just as corrupting as conservatism’s hyper-moral embrace.  Libertarian support of capitalism, based upon an explicit moral theory of laissez-faire, is less hypocritical and confused than conservative support, based as it is upon the conflation of objective morality with the workings of an all-too-worldly institution.  But neither ideology is capable of addressing the moral and social downsides of modern capitalist life.  It has fallen to liberalism to be the conscience of capitalism.  In the spirit rather than the letter of classical liberalism, modern liberals endeavor to protect the individual from the coercion of any institution which seeks to exploit him.  And in the spirit rather than the letter of classical conservatism, they’re willing to use the state – tamed by democratic accountability – to effect that protection.  Independent and humanitarian morality made effective through tentative and pragmatic policy, the prudent in the service of the good, surely that combination represents the best way to protect economics, justice and social stability.

The Party of Raging Irresponsibility

Waiting for the monsters

A monster is haunting the Republican Party, the horrible monster of debt.  The recent history of Republican irresponsibility and irrationality on budgetary matters is deplorable, and most of it is wrapped up in fear and obsession over the large and increasing federal debt.  In the Republican nightmare, the debt monster devours our fortune and our future; it bleeds our economic strength; it threatens our children and our seniors, it even threatens our freedom.  But, strangely, the party furiously resists tax increases, even though such increases help control the debt.  It demands that President Obama make huge cuts to government spending in order to help reduce the debt, while it vigorously protests Obamacare cuts to Medicare.  And it demands that Obama, not Republicans themselves, specify which additional spending to cut!  It agonizes that debt has grown beyond our ability to pay and that a severe debt crisis is imminent, but its response is to threaten to hold down the current debt ceiling, which would place the United States in financial default and lead directly to the very kind of debt crisis they claim they wish to avoid.  Such a crisis would also vastly increase borrowing costs, leading to even bigger deficits and debt.  (And, incidentally, it would devastate the world economy.)  The party worries that tax increases and huge deficits generate “uncertainty” among investors and bond-holders, but it seems unconcerned that threatening government shutdown and default might themselves cause considerable uncertainty.  And it argues every point – even when that point blatantly contradicts the previous point – with the most passionate urgency.  When it comes to budgetary issues, the Republican Party has become the party of raging incoherence.  The degree and intensity of Republican nonsense and foolishness over the debt raises the genuine question: Is the Republican Party, in its present incarnation, capable of responsible governance?

It’s obvious that Republicans and conservatives are cynically using debt worry as an alibi for proceeding with their pre-existing project of underfunding and weakening the welfare state.  That’s why their abject horror over the debt demands dramatic spending cuts but abhors any tax increases.  If debt was their truest concern they would demand both spending cuts and tax increases, especially since taxes are at their lowest point (measured as a percentage of GDP) since the 1950’s, due largely to George W. Bush’s irresponsible tax cuts.  It’s equally obvious that much of their (let’s call it) inconsistency is simple pandering and demagoguery.  It’s easy to score cheap political points by attacking and misrepresenting Obama’s cuts to Medicare.  It doesn’t hurt, of course, that seniors are a dependably Republican constituency.  And the debt panic is suspiciously recent. Many Obama-era deficit saints were Bush-era deficit sinners.  All the current Congressional Republican leaders – Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell – collaborated on George W. Bush’s long-term assaults on the budget: his huge tax cuts, his two unfunded wars and a his huge, unfunded expansion of Medicare.  It’s amazing the fiscal and moral Republican purification that a Democratic administration can bring.

It appears that many of the newer conservative members of Congress, particularly those on the Tea Party right, do honestly fear and hate the debt monster.  (Though, once again, steadfast contemporary conservative support for George W. Bush and his fiscal irresponsibility does bring into question the sincerity of that fear and hate.) But these same farther right reaches of the Republican Party are command central for present-day debt madness.  In fact, there seems to be a definite correlation between fear of the debt and the inability to coherently address it.  Apparently, the closer you study the monster the more he befuddles your mind.  And the larger and more evil he appears.  Before the rise of communism, right-wing Americans were convinced that the nexus of evil in this world was the Vatican.  After 1917 that nexus moved to the Kremlin.  For a while after 9/11 it seems to have moved to Mecca or Teheran, though hopes that it would be buried beneath the rubble of Baghdad seem to have been disappointed.  Now it is incarnated in the American social insurance state, safely ensconced in the west wing of the White House, well kept and fed by Barack Hussein Obama and his minions, while its bastard child, the voracious debt monster, roams the land, wreaking devastation and terrorizing good folk.

And conservative paranoia is intimately connected to conservative moralism.  If it’s dangerous for a family or a small business to be in debt, it must be dangerous for a government, too.  But it’s not just dangerous, it’s downright immoral.  We are stealing from our children!  We are profligate!  We are squandering our moral inheritance!  But, as Paul Krugman has said, “Economics is not a morality play.”  Government can borrow money (presently it can do so at extremely low rates) to stimulate the economy, it can print money, it can easily tolerate ongoing debt, it need not pay back its debt, it can address aggregate issues – like unemployment and decrepit infrastructure – that do not avail of moralistic solutions.  Let us accept that blinkered moralism and Puritan apocalypticism are not sound bases for fiscal policy.  Neither are cynicism, pandering and demagoguery; but these are unavoidable elements of democratic politics.  Simpleminded moralism and apocalyptic paranoia, on the other hand, seem to be unavoidable elements of American conservative politics specifically, particularly among the staunchest members of its populist base.  Indeed, the moralism seems essential.  Consider that during recent times of high unemployment, even when there was 1 job for every 5 unemployed workers, leading conservatives resolutely argued against extending unemployment benefits because doing so would reward and encourage indolence.  The paucity of jobs did not excuse anyone from taking all the responsibility for his or her economic situation.  Economic facts simply could not contend with the need for moral enforcement.

All these dark confusions obscure the truth about the debt, which though it is a real problem, is neither a deadly nor an insurmountable one (see Neil Irwin’s great summary).  The next twenty years will bring real budgetary challenges, mostly caused by rising medical costs and the retirement of the baby boomers; some relatively minor adjustments to social insurance programs may be needed, but nothing like the radical transformations such as those proposed by Paul Ryan’s Medicare voucher-ization plan.  Indeed, even though the current baseline predicts large deficits for years to come, the debt (as a percentage of GDP) seems to be stabilizing for the foreseeable future.  And contrary to conservative mythology, there has not been an Obama-directed spending surge.  And once the economy is back to full capacity, tax revenues will increase, while spending designed to ameliorate and cushion against recession – automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance and increased Medicaid – will discontinue.  In the mean time, investors are gobbling up US Treasury bonds – even 10 and 20 year bonds – at ridiculously low interest rates.  The world is practically begging us to take its money.  Absent self-inflicted wounds, such as forcing a debt crisis by failing to raise the debt ceiling, no debt crisis is imminent.  We are not turning into Greece, hysterics aside.

But there’s one more noteworthy component to the overwrought Republican debt terror: abject irresponsibility.  That is the deeper meaning behind the fight over the debt ceiling.  The Republican House has effectively just abandoned the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip by voting to suspend it until May 19, (a move some conservatives perceive as tantamount to abandoning conservative principles altogether!).  But for weeks past, just as in the summer of 2011, conservatives had threatened to not increase the debt ceiling, and their justifications reeked of irresponsibility.  Imagine the following scenario:

The Republican House and the Democratic Senate and President agree that for the current fiscal year the government should spend 3.8 trillion dollars and raise 2.9 trillion dollars in taxes.  The deficit – the missing 900 billion dollars – must be raised by the Treasury Department by borrowing from private investors.  But that deficit, that 900 billion, that new debt, will become part of the federal government’s ongoing debt, which is already at 16.3 trillion dollars, bringing the new total debt to 17.2 trillion.  But then imagine there is an obscure law, called the debt ceiling, which limits the total the government can borrow and which is currently set to 16.4 trillion.  And further imagine that the Republican House – the same Republican House that agreed to the 3.8 trillion in spending and 2.9 trillion in revenue! – threatens not to raise that debt ceiling unless the Democratic President agrees to spend substantially less than 3.8 trillion.

Well you don’t have to imagine that farcical fiscal scenario, it actually happened!  If that is not irresponsibility, then what is?  Obviously Republicans thought 3.8 trillion was too much, even when they voted for it.  It turns out they thought it was so dangerously excessive that they were willing to threaten the country with a default on its debt in order to force Obama to spend less this year and for years to come.  If they had made good on their threat not to raise the ceiling, they would have forced Obama to break one of two laws, either by not spending all the money the budget mandates (money he is legally obligated to spend) or by borrowing more money than the debt ceiling legally allows.  Is it irresponsible to pass two incompatible laws?  Without sufficient funds the Treasury Department would fail to pay all its bills, including redeeming existing debt and paying interest on that debt.  The U.S. government would default; it would become a deadbeat.  Not because no one wanted to lend it money, not because it simply ran out of options, but because part of the government – the only part controlled by Republicans – refused to abide by the implications of its own decisions and its own laws.  Republicans are terrified that we’re about to face a debt crisis, and there is a real danger of that actually happening, but only because of Republicans.  Behold the party of raging absurdity.

The consequences of the Republicans turning Uncle Sam into a deadbeat are too painful to imagine.  All over the country and the world investors, financial institutions and governments would be less willing to lend the government money.  Paul Krugman:

Failure to raise the debt limit – which would, among other things, disrupt payments on existing debt – could convince investors that the United States is no longer a serious, responsible country, with nasty consequences. Furthermore, nobody knows what a U.S. default would do to the world financial system, which is built on the presumption that U.S. government debt is the ultimate safe asset.

A default would also greatly increase our borrowing costs; that is, in order to lure more money from investors the government would be required to pay higher rates of interest.  Conservatives counter that limiting the government to spending only what it takes in would not necessarily lead to a default, since the Treasury could still pay debt costs and cut other spending.  But that’s probably not true, as Matt Yglesias explains: “At first blush it seems logical that the government could perhaps respond by simply choosing which bills to pay and which not to pay, but there’s no legal authority to do this either, and Treasury’s computers aren’t set up to do it.”  Instead, Treasury would probably simply pay every bill in the order it received them, which would almost certainly lead to a default.  There is no guarantee that on any given day the amount of revenue received would be enough to pay that day’s debt costs.  Some Republicans, like Senator Pat Toomey and the editors of National Review magazine, wanted to give the administration the very legal authority Yglesias mentions – i.e. the authority to pick and choose which bills to pay – as long as it always paid for the debt first and thereby avoided default.  But if Treasury could jump through hoops and prioritize debt payments – either on Congress’ authority or its own – it would still fail to pay a large proportion of the bills it is legally obligated to pay, i.e. the spending authorized by Congress.  This would, says Eric Posner, “also create a crisis – most people and institutions won’t want to do business with the government, or work for it, because they won’t trust it to do what it promises. This is a mess and a bad way to run a country.”  Would America be less of a deadbeat if we paid our debt bills but failed to pay defense contractors, government employees or Medicare providers?

And if maintaining the current debt ceiling would fail to cause a debt default then it loses much of its force as a bargaining chip; it becomes, in effect, merely a government shutdown.  (I say “merely”, because, per Krugman, even though a shutdown would mean big trouble, its destructiveness would pale in compared to a default.)  Some conservatives protest that not raising the debt ceiling focuses the national attention on the debt, even if there is no danger of a default.  But does anyone believe the nation would fail to notice a government shutdown?  Why then would Republicans resist a debt ceiling raise and not just bargain hard during normal budget negotiations?  Both require Republican acquiescence.  There is a difference and it’s a revealing difference: failure to raise the debt ceiling forces the president to unilaterally choose which spending to cut.  This is the key irresponsibility.  Failure to raise the debt ceiling would hand legislative budgetary responsibility from the legislative to the executive branch.  The Constitution envisions members of Congress haggling back and forth until they agree to specific spending; it does not imagine Congress handing a block grant to the President and saying, “Spend as you please.”  But the party of smaller government is also the party of older, white people, that is, people who really like receiving Social Security checks and having Medicare pay for their medical care.  Republicans do want to cut spending – and in the abstract so do their constituencies – but they don’t want the blame for what will certainly be terribly unpopular cuts.  And this is the deeper problem: their constituency is just as irresponsible as they are.  During the fiscal cliff negotiations last December, Republicans demanded that Obama propose deep spending cuts but they refused to specify what those cuts should be!  They’re just not willing to take responsibility for their policies, but they are willing to wiggle through a loophole in the Constitutional separation of powers – that’s what they’ve made of the debt ceiling – to avoid that responsibility.

There are even some conservatives who would actually welcome a default, who would refuse to raise the debt ceiling even though they concede such a refusal would cause a default, because the final result would be to shrink government.  As reported by Rachel Bade, “The fallout from a debt ceiling breach is the lesser of two evils, they say – the greater threat being Obama’s proposal to increase the debt ceiling without corresponding cuts and reforms.”  And as Megan McCardle put it during the debt ceiling crisis of 2011, “there is a sizeable faction on the right, and worse, in the GOP caucus, that is willing to default rather than make any deal at all.”  At least these people don’t offer up lame alibis about the debt ceiling not forcing a default.  At least they have the courage of their insanity.  As Ed Kilgore put it in 2011:

the debt limit issue has been elevated among conservative activists to the level of religious frenzy and absolutism. . .
Indeed lurking just beneath the surface of much of the conservative hard line on the debt limit is an ironclad conviction that all sorts of economic havoc, including a much deeper recession, might be preferable to the continuation of twentieth-century “welfare state” policies.

The debt monster and its foul progenitor, the American government, have so unhinged them that actually believe that anything – even economic Armageddon! – is justified to stop it.  They want to destroy America in order to save it.  The ones who want Obama to avoid a default by picking and choosing what to cut are merely evading their responsibility as legislators.  But the ones who want to actually force a default are evading their responsibility as Americans.

But it does appear that cooler heads have prevailed, though there are still holdouts.  It took the entire Washington Republican establishment plus leaders of the business community to convince enough congressional Republicans to abandon the threat of economic annihilation.  But through most of the summer of 2011 and for most of this last January the party, including its leaders and its supporters in the commentariat, vehemently presented the foolish and nonsensical arguments analyzed above.  Any party that can make such arguments and seriously consider such actions is a party which is not capable of properly running the government of the United States. We must hope the American people don’t return them to power before they have mended their ways.  But are they capable of mending their ways any time soon?  Republicans call themselves the party of family values, of traditional morality, but their actions in this matter have been empty of the self-reflection and accountability that are essential to genuine morality.  They crusade righteously onward, so convinced of their own moral purity that they feel justified in any action.  Here we see the most galling aspect of this whole embarrassing episode, and the most discouraging: They have no shame.

But Republicans have one more opportunity to act like grownups.  In order to prevent conservative purists from pulling the debt ceiling trigger, Republican leaders promised to present a budget that balances within ten years.  That would indeed be a responsible proposal (assuming one shared their inflated fear of the debt).  But, alas, it won’t happen, and that’s because it can’t happen, the math just won’t allow it.  As Jonathan Chait so well explains, if you won’t raise taxes and you won’t cut defense and you are politically incapable of cutting Social Security and Medicare you’d have to cut programs for the poor – Medicaid, food stamps, etc. – by something like 90%, which even Republicans would probably shrink from doing.  The last time Republicans presented a putatively balanced budget, Paul Ryan’s budget from 2012, they had to fudge the numbers to make it balance and even then it didn’t actually balance until 2040.  It’s quite likely that this new budget will contain at least as much sleight-of-hand.  Maybe it’s not entirely fair to judge a budget we haven’t seen yet, but (as Chait explains) it strains credulity to imagine they can honestly make something happen by 2023 that they couldn’t make happen by 2040.  Republicans are stuck between the rock of structural irresponsibility and the hard place of mathematical reality.  Even if they could overcome the allure of cynicism, demagoguery, pandering, moralism, paranoia and irresponsibility and made a good faith effort to honestly balance the budget they would still be stopped by the inexorability of simple arithmetic.  Conservative fiscal goals are simply incompatible with American political reality.  And it is conservative failure to honestly address that simple fact that is the real failure of responsibility.