A while back I talked about the health care and health insurance market and how it is the result of tremendous government regulation. There are portions that involve competition, but they are limited by a variety of matters, including large distortions from licensing, regulation, tax exclusions, and government provided health care. The matters are so complicated, it is hard to get a handle on it. The transfers and redistributions are significant and hard to follow. But it is worthwhile just attempting to describe some basic aspects of this sector. One take on what is happening is the following story. It is my…
Risk, Not Redistribution, Motivates America’s New Socialists
A recent survey reports 37 percent of Americans over the age of 18 “prefer socialism to capitalism.” After Bernie Sanders near-run candidacy last year, that cannot be much of a surprise. Still, the U.S. historically has stood out among Western nations due to its lack of a sizeable socialist movement. So what’s changed?
The Special-Interest State: Onward and Upward
My buddy Steve Teles—in my estimation, one of the country’s most creative thinkers—just sent me his latest on “The Scourge of Upward Redistribution.” Here’s the lead paragraph: America today faces two great challenges. First, the explosion in inequality threatens the public's belief in the justice of our economic system. Second, the slowdown in the formation of new businesses, a key metric of economic dynamism, endangers economic growth and employment. The solutions to these problems are usually in tension with one another — greater inequality is often the price of economic growth — and our politics has been divided according to this tension, with one side playing…
Federalism, Yet Again: Views From the Citadel
Last Fall, the excellent Jim Fleming (Boston University Law School) organized a fun conference on “America’s Political Dysfunction: Constitutional Connections, Causes, and Cures.”
Part of the conference was a panel inviting Sotirios A. Barber (Notre Dame) and yours truly to critique each other’s books on federalism—respectively, The Fallacies of States’ Rights (Harvard UP, 2013) and The Upside-Down Constitution (Harvard UP, 2012). Both of us took the assignment quite seriously.
Let’s just say there’s not a lot of common ground; it’s a rather pointed exchange. To my mind, though, the colloquy illustrates the high utility (as well as the entertainment value) of the bilateral critique format, which I think Jim Fleming invented. Kudos.
What struck me on flipping through the essays for purposes of this post is just how much of a game changer the ACA has been, or become.
The Politics of Dependency
In response to: The Great Society, a Half-Century On
William Voegeli’s Liberty Forum essay reminds us of the absurdity of so much American political discourse of the past 60 years. The call for greater state-mandated redistribution and entitlements in order to “oppose the drift into the homogenized society” and “fight spiritual unemployment,” to combat “loneliness and boredom” and “build a richer life of mind and spirit” sounds comical, even pathetic after decades in which those policies created atomized societies, emptied out inner cities, and fueled violence, poverty, and despair. The solution to all of those problems, manifestly caused by the very entitlement programs of the Great Society, was, of…
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With the 50th anniversary of President Johnson’s “Great Society” speech fast approaching, we are seeing a flood of historical remembrance and analysis, and there will be more in the weeks and months ahead. The television historians and talking heads will be swooning over how much was accomplished by an 89th Congress that was, in the…
The 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” speech offers us an opportunity to reflect not just on the speech itself but also on the half century of consequences that have followed in the wake of the grand project it announced. As William Voegeli notes in his Liberty Forum essay, he commencement address Johnson delivered to the…
Why Clinton’s Redistribution was Worse than Obama’s
Redistribution that is not actually felt by the losers at the time of its enactment is one of the most insidious features of the political order. Such legislation gives the illusion of a free lunch and disarms potential opponents who fail to recognize the costs that are coming. At least taxing Peter to pay Paul causes Paul immediate harm and prompts others to fear they may someday take Paul’s place. In contrast, silent redistributive legislation and regulation wreak havoc on democracy by undermining deliberation.
In this respect Bill Clinton was a much more dangerous politician than Barack Obama. To be sure, the current President never acknowledged that redistribution was one of the main purposes of Obamacare. Nor was he forthright about the policy’s redistributive effects. Misleading prospective losers, he promised, “If you like your plan, you can keep it.” But Obamacare’s costs have become clear relatively quickly, and the President’s party will pay a political price for them. Furthermore, Obamacare institutes new taxes to pay for some of its costs, even if these taxes were not transparent increases in the IRS tax rate schedules.
By contrast, one of Bill Clinton’s biggest redistributive scheme was almost completely hidden from the public eye.
Oxfam’s Flimflam
A report of the British charity Oxfam recently drew attention to the fact that Britain’s five richest families had more assets than the lowest 20 per cent of the population put together. It called upon the government to consider instituting a wealth tax to reduce the gap, by how much it did not say. Would the poorest fifth be much the better off, or at least happier, if 20, say, or 50, rather than five families now had more wealth than they?
Growing the Pie in India
“Redistribution, as distinct from growth, cannot be the answer to removing poverty. In countries such as India, China, and Brazil, the large numbers of poor mean that redistribution will do little and that, too, will not be sustainable. … The pie has to grow; growth is a necessity.” So Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya begin their analysis on ‘Why Growth Matters’ and the lessons India and other developing countries can learn from Indian successes, failures, and missed opportunities for economic growth. Drawing on their previous scholarship defending the economic liberalization in India through the 1991 reforms, the authors delve into the…
Silent Cal’s 6 Simple Rules for a Confused President Obama
Coolidge's Inaugural Address, March 24,1925In his new book, Why Coolidge Matters: Leadership Lessons from America’s Most Underrated President, Charles C. Johnson claims that ‘Silent Cal’ wasn’t so much silent as he was silenced. But today, thirty years since Tom Silver’s underrated book about America’s underrated thirtieth president, Coolidge and the Historians, that is changing. In addition to Johnson’s book, we also have Amity Shlaes’s new biography, Coolidge, a prequel of sorts to her bestseller, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. Undoubtedly, there is growing interest in Coolidge that, although somewhat delayed, is especially timely for the present. Here are six lessons for President Obama from the not-so-silent Cal Coolidge.
Social Justice Theory: A Solution in Search of a Problem
In response to: What is Social Justice?
Lamartine in front of the Town Hall of Paris rejects the red flag on 25 February 1848.What is social justice? Sam Gregg’s essay answers this question by reviewing the origins and evolution of the concept. I find little to quibble with in Sam’s remarks and I am certainly in no position to make them a fortiori. My contribution will therefore be to offer an explanation for why social justice theory is both misguided and dangerous. It is misguided because it regards observed inequality as prima facie evidence of injustice because of insufficient understanding of how a free market economy actually works. It is dangerous because social justice advocates therefore attempt to solve a moral problem that doesn’t…
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Samuel Gregg’s essay, “What is Social Justice?” is an important reminder that many different moral traditions – including the Catholic natural law tradition – may lay claim to the vocabulary of “social justice” and to an associated notion of the “common good.” As articulated by Gregg, this natural law tradition can employ the language of…
