We passed a notable milestone the other day.
As of Friday, it has been 100 days since the GOP promised it would have an alternative health care proposal available, and thus far nothing has been presented. My attempts at centrism are an entirely uphill battle when there are no plans to be weighed; how can one pit government-run reform against market-based controls if there's no reform in the latter? The one thing that the White House and Democrats have unequivocally won is the battle of convincing Americans that the status quo isn't working.
This leads me to ask: What do you want us to do? If you say you want reform as well, explain to me how one might go about reining in costs and securing coverage without tampering with the almighty market. Kevin Drum notes the similarities between the health care battle and the fight over cap-and-trade; in both cases, the status quo is a relatively unregulated market. There are modest consumer protections in place on insurance companies, and there are emissions standards for industry. However, people still lose their coverage when they get sick, get denied insurance for pre-existing conditions, and the world is on its way to becoming a soggy piece of charcoal in a few centuries (hopefully, none of these points are too contentious).
The invisible hand of the market is what we have right now. Where's the reform going to come from if there's no money in it? If you're dealing with increasing the standard of living, then mechanized manufacturing and streamlined production are excellent. For issues like ensuring health care for our citizens or abating climate change, there's far less financial motivation. We're faced with momentous issues that require a scale of thought and action that I honestly don't think our founders planned to deal with. Living in a smaller community, you might be inclined to help out your neighbors, pursuing your business interests but also reaching out in charity. Instead, Conservatism has protected the right to pursuit of happiness above all else in these debates, leaving little non-governmental recourse for the problems of the day.
Libertarian Matt Welch, for instance, tears into Paul Krugman's recent column that makes similar connections between the health care and climate change debates. Yet again, though, what's missing from his argument is the elephant in the room. Welch is unconvinced by the effectiveness of cap-and-trade (despite evidence to the contrary) yet he does nothing to propose an alternative. The concepts of the public option in health care and cap-and-trade for climate change are, to me, the ultimate hybrids of government action and the harnessing of market forces. Want to make money on insurance? Well, fine, but you'd better be able to do it at least as well as the folks running the DMV and the Post Office. Shouldn't be too hard, should it? And how about continuing our survival on a fragile planet? Buying and selling the right to pollute gives direct financial incentive to clean up your act (no pun intended) as quickly as possible.
If these both are considered acts of government-overreach, I again challenge you folks to come up with an alternative. These are not single-payer systems or mandated emissions caps we're talking about here; they give you a chance to step up and make financial gains WHILE fixing the problems that face us. Sounds like a good deal to me.
Prove all of us crazy socialists wrong, yeah?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I've only taken one economics class, but a lot of what I hear is from people who seem to have taken the same class, and then stopped showing up after about week 6.
ReplyDeleteThis was high school econ, and the class started out with something called a Perfectly Competitive Market. It was an *idealization* much like the perfectly frictionless surface or infinitely strong wire used in physics classes: Non-existant in practice but useful for explanatory purposes. In this system, supply and demand automatically conspire to produce the perfect price for all goods.
This is simple enough, but then we learned about all the reasons why real markets are *not* perfectly competitive and why some things just work better if you make them public, and why some things work better if you tax them. This wasn't like "Ridiculous economic theories 101" it was just basic, normal economics. The Newton's Laws of the econ world (yeah I'm a physics major, don't judge me).
Anyway, sometimes all this "let the market decide" talk just makes me think that people took the same class I did, but only up to the first few weeks.