As regular readers of this blog will know (if such a person exists), I am and have been a libertarian. Recently I’ve been worried about this position, but the worries are (currently) mainly theological, no philosophical.
But I won’t discuss that in this post. I just wanted to establish that I am not a socialist or leftist who thinks the more government, the better. Up until just recently, I had a bumper sticker on my car that said, “GOVERNMENT IS NOT THE ANSWER!” (To quiet any grumblings, let me just add that I took it off because it was falling off, not because I disagreed with the sentiments.)
I want to ask a question, and if anyone has an answer I’d like to hear it. Why is the political right okay with socialized (public) education, socialized police forces, socialized firefighter departments, socialized military, socialized transportation systems (including roads), etc., but are so opposed to socialized medicine?
What economic or political arguments could be given to legitimize all the former government controls, but make socialized medicine problematic?
What am I missing? It seems blatantly inconsistent to me. (More inconsistent than reading the 2nd Amendment strictly, while allowing the president war powers that can meet a strict reading of the U.S. Constitution!)
November 20, 2008 at 11:52 pm |
Hey Micah!
This obviously doesn’t get one very far,but, I’m thinking about something that might be typical of (contemporary, American) conservatism: the tendency to accept as traditional–and therefore, something that shouldn’t be lightly overturned–past innovations in interventionism, while taking the stance of caution with respect to impending potential such interventions. Even if we can conceive of reasonable arguments against a presesntly ongoing socialist project, wariness of rationalism and revolutionary change might incline a conservative to give weight to the possibility that socialist education (e.g.) emerged out of the evolution of ideas and may therefore represent some “goodness of fit” to the social environment.
Also: perhaps it could be stressed that there is a transitional gains trap in that the removal of privilege (whether the outcome of regulation or taxation or rent extraction or above-market-clearing wages) comes at substantial cost, notwithstanding the eradication of the deadweight loss that the privilege imposes on society by remaining in place.
” Compensating investors for investments whose value will tumble with deregulation is required [to make deregulation politically feasible]. To think of deregulation as entailing some sort of free lunch… is to commit the nirvana
fallacy with respect to regulation. The normative disagreements, be they legal or economic, are less important than the fact that the arguments, positively speaking, have been taken seriously, legally and economically, and hence have retarded and confined deregulation. There are important transaction costs of shifting from a regulated to a deregulated regime.” (McChesney 1999; also see Tullock 1975).
So perhaps it could be argued that, while it may have been ill considered to have socialized X Y and Z, given the status quo of socialized status, it is ill considered to desocialize.
I suppose it could also be pointed out that one could believe that X Y and Z are public goods but Q is not and so defend their position that way, but that just points to why he or she believes that, not that it is reasonable….
Blah.
How are things going, man?
-H