I think another site would be a better idea.

(Actually, he said it would be a “better i-deer,” but being from New England, I find this endearing.)

In response to criticism from Glenn Greenwald, Dean writes (in part):

My argument is simple. This Center may be intended as a bridge or a healing gesture but it will not be perceived that way unless a dialogue with a real attempt to understand each other happens. That means the builders have to be willing to go beyond what is their right and be willing to talk about feelings whether the feelings are “justified” or not. No doubt the Republic will survive if this center is built on its current site or not. But I think this is a missed opportunity to try to have an open discussion about why this is a big deal because it is a big deal to a lot of Americans who are not just right wing politicians pushing the hate button again. I think those people need to be heard respectfully whether they are right or whether they are wrong.

What I’d like to ask Dean, proud defender of civil unions for homosexual couples, is this: couldn’t this same argument be made in favor of asking those pesky lesbians to refrain exercising their right to attend their high school prom?

I expect I’ll be writing more about Goodman’s Ideal Plan, but one thing leaped out at me straightaway as somewhat curious. Like most proponents of Medical Savings Accounts, Goodman appears to want insurance to come in the form of low-premium/high-deductible plans.

Not being utterly callous, Goodman is willing to subsidize the purchase of insurance, to some extent (although he’s willing to offer subsidies of identical amounts to rich and poor alike). In order to determine the level these subsidies should be set at, Goodman argues that we already a socially set number: it is “the amount we expect to spend (from public and private sources) on free care for that person when he or she is uninsured.” Goodman then cites Texas, which he says spends an average of about $1,000 per year per uninsured person on free care. He then notes, “Interestingly, $4,000 is a sum adequate to purchase private health insurance for a family in most Texas cities.”

Although writing in 2001, Goodman’s $4,000 Texas insurance policy must have been a high-deductible policy. According to this Health Affairs article, average job-based family coverage was $588 per month in 2001, or $7,056 per year.  Surely a $4,000 policy, in the non-group market no less, would involve a significant deductible. If so, then the following is what I find curious:

A common misconception is that health insurance reform costs money. For example, if health insurance for 40 million people costs $1,000 a person, some conclude that the government would need to spend an additional $40 billion a year to get the job done. What this conclusion overlooks is that we are already spending $40 billion or more on free care for the uninsured, and if all 40 million uninsured suddenly became insured they would – in that act – free up the $40 billion from the social safety net.

If those $4,000 policies (in 2001) were high-deductible policies, then at least some, and perhaps many, trips to the ER by those with such policies will incur expenses that would not be reimbursed by their insurance. But if so, then the $40 billion that would go toward subsidies to insure the currently uninsured would not necessarily offset the entire $40 billion in free care that we provided to them now.

I really feel scummy pointing out that this health reform proposal with which I wholly disagree is not the free lunch Goodman presents it as. Ick.

In designing my upcoming course on ethical issues in health reform, I’ve been reading a lot of health economics, despite not knowing very much at all about the subject. And not knowing much at all leaves me helpless to evaluate disputes between health economists. A rule of thumb in these cases is to find out which experts are considered level-headed and always worth listening to by most of their peers. Again, how else could I proceed.

Two such experts in health economics are Victor Fuchs and Joseph Newhouse. Fuchs is well-known in many circles for his book, Who Shall Live? Newhouse is well-known for leading the RAND Health Insurance Experiment in the 1970s-80s. This week I have been reading article from Fuchs’ book entitled “Economics, Values, and Health Care Reform,” and a recent article by Newhouse on the recent health care reform law and the residual issues we are left with. Each is worth reading, but the latter is really, really informative, especially because Newhouse both praises the law for (what I see as) its virtues and expresses deep skepticism and concern over other elements. (If you want the paper, let me know in the comments.)

Here are two quotations from the aforementioned papers that I hope to return to in the coming weeks. First, Fuchs:

There are only two ways to achieve systematic universal coverage: a broad-based general tax with implicit subsidies for the poor and the sick, or a system of mandates with explicit subsides based on income. I prefer the former because the latter are extremely expensive to administer and seriously distort incentives; they result in the near-poor facing marginal tax rates that would be regarded as confiscatory if levied on the affluent.

And here’s Newhouse:

Although necessary to achieve compliance, the subsidies will have the negative effect of increasing marginal tax rates. Consider a family of four whose income is $55,250, or 250 percent of the federal poverty level. Their current marginal tax rate is 22.65 percent plus any state or local income taxes. Assuming that, as of 2014, the family buys the most generous health insurance plan covered by the subsidy, the premium will be limited to 8.05 percent of the family’s income. This feature of the law will effectively add 8.05 percentage points to the family’s marginal tax rate, since any additional dollar of income will reduce the subsidy by eight cents. Thus, the family’s marginal tax rate will rise by roughly a third. Economic research suggests that this would be likely to reduce the labor supply of those who are not the principal income support of the household.

Being a liberal and being largely ignorant in the way of health economics, I’m often too tempted to dismiss the sorts of concerns expressed here by Newhouse. Sometimes I have good evidence for this, as when I dismiss claims that raising the minimum wage will eliminate jobs. Sometimes I have to admit that I’m just not sure what to think about claims that it would be easier to ignore.

In any case, Medicare is “headed for insolvency” because it works off a fixed budget. Well, Part A (hospital insurance) does. Parts B (reimbursing doctors), C (Medicare Advantage), and D (the drug benefit) are funded out of general revenues, so they can only go insolvent when the U.S. government goes insolvent. Medicare Part A is forced to be responsible in a way that the rest of the U.S. government is not. Why does no one ever talk about the Department of Defense being “headed for insolvency”? If Landrieu is so concerned about the public fisc, why doesn’t she push for the DoD to be funded out of a dedicated payroll tax? Then every few years, we could go through a public rending-of-garments ritual over the DoD’s impending bankruptcy. I would enjoy this very much. At least then we’d have parity: conservative Republicans shedding crocodile tears over how Medicare will have to be cut to keep it afloat, and my party doing the same for the military.

Finally, a point from Dean Baker that I’ve not seen made before:

[W]orkers, and only workers, pay Social Security tax. It is a payroll tax that is capped at just $106,000, so the chairman of Goldman Sachs pays no more in Social Security tax than a senior teacher or firefighter who may also hit the wage cap. By contrast, most of the general budget is financed through personal and corporate income taxes, which disproportionately come from higher income taxpayers. So it matters hugely that the bonds held by the trust fund are repaid from general revenue, as opposed to coming from additional Social Security taxes.

I need to think more about the full distributional implications of this point. But I think the takeaway is that while a regressive payroll tax raised general funds for years under the guise of a medicare or social security “trust fund,” the accounting vehicle of the Trust Fund ensures that the inevitable “fix” when outlays outstrip revenues will not add insult to injury by also being regressive. Instead of increasing the regressive payroll tax, the revenues used to fix program deficits are those supplied by more progressive taxation on upper income individuals and corporations.

“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.

The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”

Today Think Progress has a post documenting many occasions on which Obama himself has insisted that the American people hold him accountable. But they forgot one:

It is also worth noting that in this clip Obama praises the grassroots “agitating” that ultimately “forced elected politicians to be accountable.” This marks an interesting contrast with his Nation magazine interview with David Sirota, in which Obama

gently but dismissively labeled Wellstone as merely a “gadfly,” in a tone laced with contempt for the senator who, for instance, almost single-handedly prevented passage of the bankruptcy bill for years over the objections of both parties.

I’ll admit that I have always wondered whether Obama took the tone and stance that Sirota ascribes to him.

If anything, among the middle class there is more overuse [of medical care]…than underuse…[But for] lower-income households in America (given moderate risk levels) and for high-risk households (given moderate income), this reasonable state of affairs does not apply. Generous subsidies for better care are needed for them. Fortunately, subsidized insurance can both provide financial protection and reverse moral hazard for community benefit, stimulating the use of care that others value more than the [lower-income or high-risk] person can or does. (7; emphasis added)

Reading the entire book, one gets the impression that although Pauly has his own preferences about where reforms should go, he is only comfortable offering a health economist’s map: such a map cannot tell you where you should go, it can only tell how you should proceed given where you are and where you want to end up. For example, on p. 95 we are told that “For those for whom low income or large family size prompts a social desire for more generous subsidies, those subsidies should be offered in the form of vouchers…” (emphasis added). Here the sociological fact of a shared desire among members of the populace is identified as the basis for a recommendation of how such a society should proceed. Unfortunately, Pauly never tells us how we should proceed if there are others, as there always are, who have a “social desire” that conflicts with that of their fellow citizens.

Heavy reliance on actual preferences in the course of making policy recommendations is not surprising among health economists working withing the framework of welfare economics. For within that framework, actual preferences are king. This is one point of divergence between welfare econ and other forms of normative theory, including various forms of consequentialism, which do not necessarily identify welfare with the fulfillment of actual preference: sometimes we can be wrong about what is good for us. But welfare economics is unlike these other theories in another way. On most consequentialist views, what ultimately matters is human happiness, such as the happiness I might create if I give a homeless person a meal tonight that he would have been too poor to buy on his own. For welfare economics, however, preference satisfaction is an end in itself; we don’t go looking behind the satisfaction to see how much happiness or utility we create. How, then, do we take into account differing strengths of individuals’ preferences? The answer is that welfare econ determines the degree of benefit by looking to how much one would have been willing to give up to achieve it. This leads to the view advocated by Judge Richard Posner in his paper “Utilitarianism, Economics, and Legal Theory”: “The only kind of preference that counts…is thus one that is backed up by money” (119).

On such a view–and such a view just is a standard welfare econ view–a parent who has no money to send his child to college simply does not have a normatively relevant preference that his child go to college. Using cognate language, it might be said by welfare economists that while the rich parent values her child’s continued education, the poor parent does not.

But is that really what a welfare economist would say? It sure is. Consider again that last line I quoted from Pauly: “Fortunately, subsidized insurance can both provide financial protection and reverse moral hazard for community benefit, stimulating the use of care that others value more than the [lower-income or high-risk] person can or does.” As Steve explains, moral hazard occurs when one engages in increased costly behavior precisely because one has insurance that indemnifies one against the costs associated with that behavior. In the health care context, moral hazard occurs either when one engages in more unhealthy behavior because one knows one has access to medical care, or when one goes to the doctor more because one has insurance that will pay for it. So Pauly is saying that if others want to give low-income or high-risk folks medical care (i.e. if they have the relevant “social desire” to do so), they can support policies that will give these people the subsidies they need. But here “need” is interpreted at one remove from the common sense notion. In Pauly’s view, those who cannot afford health care need funds not only to access care. They also need the funds simply to value that care. This is why those others who support the provision of subsidies are said by Pauly to “value [that care] more than the [lower-income or high-risk] person can or does,” and it is why the care purchased with the subsidies is in the first instance interpreted as a “community benefit”–after all, it is only the community that is willing to pay what it takes to get care for the poor.

I point this out simply because we should ask ourselves whether we should give any credence at all to a normative framework that is deaf to preferences that are not backed up by money. After all, on this framework, if no better off people in society had a social desire to give poor people subsidies, there would literally be no one in society who cares that the poor lack health care–not even the sick poor themselves! I’m not saying that this is the dominant framework for policy decisions here in the U.S. But it is the framework that many elites would like to be the dominant framework, and it is a framework that evidently found its way into one of the more sensible right-of-center discussions of health care reform I have read. Then again, this is what we should expect, given that it itself is backed up by decades of dispositive economic theory, right?

It’s worth noting that the increases in the food-stamp program were designed in the stimulus bill to be phased out once food-price inflation caught up to the expanded benefits, but because inflation was lower than expected, the benefits were going to last longer than anyone originally expected. It’s hard to imagine a situation in which politicians wouldn’t view those bigger-than-expected increases as free money. And it’s a small comfort to know the pot was raided for good rather than for ill.

This got me thinking of Mollie Orshansky, the brains behind the U.S. official poverty measure. That measure took the cheapest of four “economy food plans” and multiplied it by three, since at the time, in 1963, food constituted roughly one-third of the average family budget. Longtime critics of this measure have pointed out that the cost of food has increased much more slowly than the price of nonfood staples in the average family’s budget. Since the amount allocated for nonfood items is determined by the amount “needed” for foodstuffs, the official poverty measure fails to take differential rates of price growth into account.

This historical lag in food prices doesn’t necessarily entail a similar expected lag after the passage of the stimulus bill; but it is somewhat ironic that the issue of slow food price inflation has come up again in the context of policies ostensibly designed to aid the poor and near-poor but which end up adding insult to injury. After all, perhaps one way to make amends for screwing over the poor with an inadequate measure of non-food related resource deprivation might be to allow them a bit more in the way of food-related resources.

For more on recent and salutary developments in how the U.S. measures poverty, see this Yglesias post from March.

Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French army, was accused in 1894 of selling secrets to a German military attaché. A note had been discovered indicating that someone was selling secrets to the attaché. The note was real; just about everything else that became associated with the case was not. The only actual evidence brought against Dreyfus was the claim that the handwriting on the note was his own. It was not. Dreyfus’s first trial, resulting in a conviction, was a travesty involving significant judicial misconduct, in which antisemitism played a crucial role.

And then things got really bad. As evidence identifying the real culprit started to surface and Dreyfus’s few supporters rallied against an obviously bad decision, Dreyfus’s superiors dug themselves into a deeper and deeper hole. As the 1890s wore on, the Dreyfus Affair became bewilderingly complex, with forgeries, suicides, conspiracies, missteps on the part of Dreyfus’s supporters, and stunning reversals on both sides.

The conservative, militarist, antisemitic response to the scandal was essentially to point out that for Dreyfus’s supporters to be correct, a deep rot would have to have infected the military, a pillar of French society, and parts of the political establishment. Since this was unthinkable, so too was Dreyfus’s innocence. They were wrong, of course, and it is a mistake that continues to be instructive.

Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters is a tightly written account of this affair, which so thoroughly rocked French society in the 1890s. I’ve just called the plot bewilderingly complex. Begley is to be commended for having written such a clear and engaging account of it. One highlight of the book is a brief but penetrating discussion of the Dreyfus Affair in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which should be accessible to people who haven’t slogged through it, but especially interesting for those who have.

I’m not sure Begley did as good a job explaining why the Dreyfus Affair matters. Begley finished his book just as Obama was elected. Begley, who is clearly no fan of the Bush administration, takes a few stabs at connecting the Affair to current events. The lack of due process and forms of incarceration found at Guantanamo are compared to the travesties of Dreyfus’ trial and exile on a remote island. A brief section on official reactions to whistle blowers connects a defender of Dreyfus’s to Joseph Wilson. This, I take it, constitutes the main part of Begley’s answer to the question raised by the title of his book.

This is weak stuff.* There are of course similarities between any two miscarriages of justice. But even if the similarities were more striking than they are, they wouldn’t tell us why the Dreyfus Affair matters today. You can be entirely ignorant of the Dreyfus Affair and still be offended by the scandal of Guantanamo Bay. All you need for that is a functioning conscience. If you’re not offended, you’ll hardly be convinced by a series of strained analogies with the Dreyfus Affair.

I’m not sure I’ve been able to get very deeply into the question of why any historical incident matters, but here are two fairly obvious (non-competing) answers as they bear on the Dreyfus Affair.

First, from history we (sometimes) find out why we are a certain way now. My understanding is that French society and politics is the way it is today in part because of the reverberations and aftershocks of the affair. Begley has nothing (that I can recall) to say about contemporary French politics or culture, focusing mainly on the United States. That’s fine, but I don’t believe the United States was shaped in significant ways by the Dreyfus Affair, and it’s an American audience that he seems mainly interested in addressing.

Second, studying history can broaden our sense of what’s possible. There are all kinds of contingent features of society and human nature that look fixed and permanent, and all kinds of things that seem certain at any moment that turn out to be thoroughly mistaken. I think the Dreyfus Affair matters, and not just in France, in this way. Many of those involved in persecuting Dreyfus, even after it was, or should have been, clear that he was innocent, acted in ways that were utterly irrational, stupid, and blindly defensive. It was unthinkable to many that such trusted figures of the establishment could behave this way. But it is an incontrovertible fact that they did. It was unthinkable in particular to people who thought a certain way: people with a streak of authoritarianism, who were reflexively inclined to give people in power the benefit of the doubt.

As I said above, this is instructive. It gives us a nice morality tale about the dangers of trusting officials in authority. It’s a story that ought to leave us a little more paranoid, a little less trusting of authority. But as instructive as it is in this sense, it would be a mistake to think that we can simply take the case and apply its lessons to contemporary political issues. As controversial as Guantanamo is, I don’t see how parallels between Guantanamo and some now unambiguous miscarriage of justice at the end of the 19th Century are going to be less controversial. The Dreyfus Affair, like most history, matters, but in a less direct and much more subtle way than that.

* Though Begley’s criticisms of certain French judicial procedures that worked against Dreyfus, such as an acceptance of hearsay, is certainly relevant to the issue of whether the American military tribunals contain stringent enough protections against abuse.

Via Kegri.

There were about sixty passengers on the plane. That’s sixty wins for Abdulmutallab that I personally witnessed, out of tens of thousands past, present and future. Actually, it’s sixty one, if you count the moron in front of us in line who started grumbling about “Goddamn Muslims.”

Re: Is Obama’s War in Afghanistan Just?

In support of his position on Afghanistan, Michael Walzer remarks, “I also think that most of these people [that is, Afghans] would agree (they should be asked).” I would like to second Walzer’s proposal that Afghans be asked what they think. If any organization had bothered to conduct opinion polling in Afghanistan, Walzer might have been able to discover its results with a search engine, thirty seconds of spare time, and just a smidgen of curiosity. It is a shame that Walzer was forced instead to speculate about a matter of real importance to his position.

In the lead up to Obama’s decision about what to do about Afghanistan I had drawn some faint comfort from the story that he had supposedly rejected all four of the plans presented to him, and sent his advisors back to the drawing board. I always had the impression that one of the things that made Bush such a wretched decider-in-Chief was that he tended to select only from the options presented to him by his advisors, since he lacked the imagination and the background knowledge to force them to rethink the options they presented to him.

But so much for Obama’s ability to free himself from the conventional wisdom here. His speech was such a disappointment, not just because the arguments were lousy, but because they so clearly failed to really engage the concerns of those of us who feel that an Afghanistan surge isn’t going to help (as Rashid’s post makes very clear). Really engaging the concerns of the other side is the sort of thing that Obama often does very well, so the failure to do it in this case is all the more striking. This makes me worried not just about the decision he’s making, but the process of decision-making that’s getting him there.

I’m not implacably opposed to any sort of U.S. presence in Afghanistan, so long as it’s got a clear exit date. But I don’t see any realistic prospect for success there. I don’t know what most proponents even mean when they talk about success in this context. Even when I do, I really don’t see how the benefits of hanging around (militarily) outweigh the costs, either for the U.S. or for Afghanistan.

I don’t even understand most of the time what people mean when they talk about “the Taliban.” The Taliban movement which consolidated control over a large part of Afghanistan prior to September, 2001, and which was led by Mullah Omar, no longer exists. It has not really existed for years now. Scattered remnants of the original crew remain, but not in a coherent form as a political movement. When people speak now about the Taliban it isn’t clear whether they mean to refer to this original movement, to some remnant of it, to plain old organized crime groups, to disaffected Pashtun nationalists, to disaffected Afghans of any ethnic or religious background, or to something else altogether.

I think this ambiguity is often the result of honest confusion, but it’s worth noting how very useful it is to proponents of the war. The original Taliban movement makes a rhetorically persuasive target. They gave shelter and support to people who attacked us! How could we go wrong making war against them? But when the target morphs into, say, some ill-defined and shifting group of disaffected Pashtun nationalists whose main enemy is the sharing of power with other ethnic groups in the country—well that represents a much less feasible and clearly defined target.

In any case, I think the appropriate response when someone starts talking about “the Taliban” in Afghanistan is to say “Who?“

Peter W. Galbraith, a former US Ambassador to Croatia, is Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and a principal at the Windham Resources Group, which has worked in Iraq. His new book, Unintended Consequences: How War in Iraq Strengthened America’s Enemies, has just been released. (October 2008)

Doesn’t tell you much, does it?

Anyway, this irritated me just enough that I almost wrote a post about it a while back, going so far as to actually research the issue extensively (googled for 20 seconds). But I couldn’t figure out what his consulting group did, actually, and I thought it would be irresponsible to insinuate anything on a blog as widely read and respected as Explananda. (So much for citizen journalism.)

So it was with considerable interest that I just noticed this piece in the NYT about Galbraith. The NYT seems to be following the lead here of some Norwegian journalists (so much for NYT journalism). Anyway, here’s the lede:

Peter W. Galbraith, an influential former American ambassador, is a powerful voice on Iraq who helped shape the views of policy makers like Joseph R. Biden Jr. and John Kerry. In the summer of 2005, he was also an adviser to the Kurdish regional government as Iraq wrote its Constitution — tough and sensitive talks not least because of issues like how Iraq would divide its vast oil wealth.

Now Mr. Galbraith, 58, son of the renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith, stands to earn perhaps a hundred million or more dollars as a result of his closeness to the Kurds, his relations with a Norwegian oil company and constitutional provisions he helped the Kurds extract.

In the constitutional negotiations, he helped the Kurds ram through provisions that gave their region — rather than the central Baghdad government — sole authority over many of their internal affairs, including clauses that he maintains will give the Kurds virtually complete control over all new oil finds on their territory.

Dude, that is one seriously sweet consulting gig. I was so distracted by the minor concern that Galbraith’s writing might be influenced by his consulting work for the Kurds, and was at least worth noting so that readers could make up their own minds, that I never even imagined a multi-multi-million dollar Norwegian oil angle.

Wowsers. Anyway, the article raises a whole bunch of ethical issues. I’m curious to see how the NYRB and other publications deal with this. Galbraith had an enormous financial interest in Northern Iraq as early as 2004. His readers should have been told this. The publications who published his writing should explicitly address this issue, and update their online archives to reflect those interests clearly.

UPDATE: The NYRB has this displayed prominently on their website now. Which is as it should be, I think.

“paying for someone else” is the whole concept behind insurance. the idea of insurance is that there are certain things (floods, catastrophic medical costs, car crashes) which can be so economically devastating that individuals would be ruined if they had to pay the entire thing out of their own pocket. insurance is a way of pooling risk, everyone pays in, only the unlucky ones draw out. but then everyone can feel more secure knowing they have insurance to fall back on if disaster hits.

in other words, all insurance involves you paying other people’s bills (or other people paying your bills). that’s what insurance is all about. you can call it “socialism” if you want, that’s not an argument, that’s just slapping a label on something. but if you happen to believe it’s evil to pay for other people, then cancel all your insurance policies.

While I’m certain ‘noz and I stand united on the moral imperative of health reform that gives all Americans access to high-quality affordable healthcare, I don’t think his account of the argument he targets is fair, and thus I don’t think he offers a very satisfying response to the person who endorses that argument. Here, as I understand it, is ‘noz’s line of argument:

1. Proponents of the Stupidest Argument Against Health Reform maintain that they should not be forced to pay for another’s medical care.

2. But proponents of the Stupidest Argument willingly buy various forms of insurance without complaining.

3. But buying insurance just is the paying for another’s medicare care.

4. So to be consistent, the proponents should either withdraw their objection to health care reform, or else “cancel all [their] insurance policies.”

I think we can see clearly where ‘noz’s line of argument fails by changing the story a bit:

1. Opponents of income maintenance policies maintain that they should not be forced to pay for another’s wages/income.

2. But opponents of income maintenance policies willingly buy stereos without complaining.

3. But buying stereos just is the paying for another’s wages (namely those who make stereos).

4. So to be consistent, the opponents should either withdraw their objection to income maintenance policies, or else stop buying stereos.

It seems clear that while purchasing a stereo does in fact pay another’s wages, it is false to say that paying another’s wages is the “whole concept” of purchasing a stereo. But then what distinguishes purchasing insurance from buying a stereo? Each seems to amount to the same thing: parting with a sum of money to procure a good or service which is available to one only because certain others are willing to help produce that good or provide that service only because they too get something out of the economic arrangement.

The fact seems to be that those who wish to buy stereos and those who wish to buy insurance may not really care about the economic arrangements and contracts that lie in the background of these purchases. They do not really care that buying a stereo and buying insurance involves paying an amount of money a portion of which ends up paying another’s bills. The one person wants a stereo, and parts with a certain amount of money to get it. The other wants protection from the economic risks associated with (the treatment of) ill health, and pays an insurance premium to get it. It just so happens that, in our world, the reason why these purchases are available to one at all is that other people, who play different roles in the relevant economic domain, also get something out of their involvement. So, again, what could make the purported difference between buying stereos and buying insurance?

If this analogy is as revealing as I think it is, it shows why the proponent of the Stupidest Argument may not be making the silly mistake that ‘noz ascribes to him. To extend the analogy: Assume a tax is levied on all stereo purchases in order fund income maintenance policies for the unemployed. And assume that a would-be stereo-purchaser objects to this. Then that objection cannot be met simply by pointing out that he didn’t have a problem paying another’s wage through his purchase before the tax was levied.

In the case of health insurance, what would be the analog to the stereo tax that the proponent of the Stupidest Argument objects to? Since insurance is typically paid for through premiums, the proponent will likely claim that he should not have to subsidize another’s premium. But this raises the question of whether the initial distribution of income is itself fair, as that is the distribution that determines who has what to put toward premiums. To the extent that it is unjust that some work long hours in dreary jobs for what is now a largely depreciated compensation package, that can provide a reason to ask those who are favored by the structure of the economy to give some back to subsidize the premiums of those who get the short end of the stick.

Another barrier to insurance access has to do with differentials in health status (of which “pre-existing conditions” are one kind). To use a stylized example, assume that you and I form a two-person health insurance market, and that I am fairly healthy and you have a disease that can be treated with only very expensive health interventions. In this situation, each of us is presented with the option to buy insurance. But which insurance we buy, if any, will be influenced by which insurance products are available. If the only insurance product is one that pays for the sort of interventions you need, that product will be very expensive. In that case, I may choose not to buy it, since I feel there are other things I’d rather spend that amount of money on. But that may leave you without the prospect of insurance, since the resulting premium for you will be the same price as the expensive medical care you were hoping to avoid having to pay for directly by purchasing insurance in the first place. You will face a similar problem if there are in fact several insurance products available, and if I choose one that is cheaper. For that one will be cheaper precisely because it doesn’t not cover the expensive treatment you need. So while you may be able to afford that cheaper product, it doesn’t do you much good.

These thought experiments seem to show that the proponent of the Stupidest Argument is also probably objecting to having to subsidize the insurance choices that the market makes expensive for others because they are either more risk averse than he his, or because they in fact require more expensive insurance than the proponent himself wishes to purchase with the funds he has chosen to dedicate to health risk reduction. This is in fact not an objection we should dismiss as stupid, as I think the two-person example shows.

I’m sure ‘noz and I agree that when the simple two-person example is replaced with the much more complex picture presented by the macro situation in the U.S. today–a situation in which income is not distributed fairly and where individuals’ health status is profoundly influenced by myriad social circumstances beyond their control–there is a solid argument in favor of providing all Americans with at least basic health care paid for by general, progressive taxation. But even if we are right, we cannot dismiss the objections of those who disagree with us simply by pointing out that all insurance involves using what was once one person’s money to pay for the health care of another.

The moral of the story is this: it is false to say that the “whole concept” of insurance as such is to pay for another’s care. Yes, it involves that, but the sense in which it does is just the sense in which buying stereos involves paying another’s wage. Not much of moral relevance follows. But, it is absolutely true that the whole concept of certain social insurance schemes is to spread risk and cross-subsidize care for appropriate moral reasons. But those reasons cannot themselves be teased out of the idea of insurance as such.

I don’t want to get all chin-strokey about blogs and the media and all that, so I’ll just say that one thing that (good) blogs have repeatedly reminded me is that news and commentary can be delivered with more humour and good sense than the norms of journalism and commentary typically seem to permit.

Update: See this too.

I read and enjoyed Khalidi’s The Iron Cage back in January, and so got this, Khalidi’s latest book, out of the library shortly afterwards (I’m only getting around to writing about it now). Sowing Crisis is a more sharply polemical book than The Iron Cage and I liked it a bit less, partly because I have a limited appetite for polemic and partly because Khalidi isn’t really great at it. (He’s not awful; just not great.) Nevertheless, there is a lot in this wide-ranging review of American foreign policy to learn from and by stimulated by. Khalidi’s main objective seems to be to try to get Americans to understand how non-Americans see American foreign policy. This is a worthwhile project, and Sowing Crisis is a worthwhile book.

Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance. An Inconvenient Truth helped raise consciousness about global warming. But did you notice that all of the solutions presented had to do with personal consumption—changing light bulbs, inflating tires, driving half as much—and had nothing to do with shifting power away from corporations, or stopping the growth economy that is destroying the planet? Even if every person in the United States did everything the movie suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.

Or let’s talk water. We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings. People (both human people and fish people) aren’t dying because the world is running out of water. They’re dying because the water is being stolen.

And so on with lots of illustrative examples. The author concludes with a reasonable meditation on the sorts of political changes we need to bring about.

I think this is exactly right. We’re facing enormous political problems with the environment now that require broad political solutions. Everyone in my neighbourhood can recycle and bike to work for the next ten years and all the good we’ve done can be undone in an instant by a single line in a farm bill. Environmental activism that focuses energy and effort away from that level may be well-meaning, but it can also be positively harmful. At this point we really need to think globally and act nationally.

(My own take on the subject from a few years ago is here.)