(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
I like analogies, and I think Jonathon Chait has a good one, in NYMag:
… The Obamacare wars pit two opposing camps who not only have different ideas about the role of government, but different kinds of ideas about the role of government.
One of my longstanding fixations, going back almost a decade now, is that we make a mistake when we think of liberalism and conservative as symmetric ways of thinking. On economic policy, at least, they are asymmetric. Liberals believe in activist government entirely as a means to various ends. Pollution controls are useful only insofar as they result in cleaner air; national health insurance is valuable only to the extent that it helps people obtain medical care. More spending and more regulation are not ends in and of themselves. Conservatives, on the other hand, believe in small government not only for practical reasons — this program will cost too much or fail to work — but for philosophical reasons as well…
The different ways of conceptualizing the debate over government spills over into every other way in which the parties operate. Democrats are more favorable toward moderation and political compromise; Republicans toward ideological purity and principle. It’s not coincidental that Republicans have instigated more high-stakes partisan escalation in Congress.
The asymmetry has also colored our understanding of issues like Obamacare. I like analogies, so let me try a different one. Suppose a new barbecue restaurant opens up in town. Is it any good? On the one hand, you have traditional food critics. Imagine that you also have an equal-size group of meat-is-murder activists evaluating it. And whether or not you share their views on the ethics of meat, which you’re entitled to do, it stands apart from the question of whether people who do eat meat will like it. The traditional food critics may or may not like the place. They will tell you if the chicken is too dry. If the owner bungles the paperwork and can’t serve any food on opening night, they will probably be caustic. On the other hand, they’ll also tell you if it’s good.
The meat-is-murder activists, on the other hand, will predictably rip it to shreds. And, since the potential customer base for the restaurant does not include committed vegetarians, they will emphasize other reasons to shun the new animal death factory. The food is awful and overpriced. If the opening is delayed, maybe it will never open at all! Oh, it’s open now? The owner is probably cooking the books!…
…[A]t its root the idea of Obamacare’s collapse was tinged heavily all along with right-wing wish fulfillment. It’s not the case that the flaws were all imagined, and some aspects of the law will struggle badly. But the basic enterprise is workable. I used to go on Twitter and ask conservatives to lay out what the criteria for Obamacare working as intended would look like. I never got a satisfactory response. You don’t take your barbecue reviews from people who think meat is murder.
***********
Apart from trying to figure out how our fellow citizens’ minds work — insofar as the words ‘mind’ and ‘work’ apply — what’s on the agenda for the evening?
some guy
Abbas government begins paperwork for entry into UN organizations. Becoming a member of the International Criminal Court comes next. Finally, economic sanctions against the apartheid regime should follow, along with active prosecution of Israeli war criminals.
some guy
http://www.imemc.org/article/67434
ranchandsyrup
CBS is reporting the shooter at Fort Hood is Ivan Lopez — a name that is ripe for anti-russian and mexican speculation.
Also sez it was due to a dispute between soldiers. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fort-hood-on-lockdown-as-active-shooter-reported/
Wag
Nice analogy No wonder I feel about the GOP the same way I feel about The Smiths.
Marc
@Wag: I was just thinking DougJ would have a field day with a Chait post themed around “meat is murder.” Ah well–what might have been.
Betty Cracker
Watching baseball. Rays are behind, damn it.
bemused
Great Toles cartoon.
The Pale Scot
Ok, are ya’ll ready for Chasidishe Gigolos
Do You Have to be Jewish?
RobertDSC-Power Mac G5 Dual
Perfect.
the Conster
As long as I live, I will never understand how otherwise seemingly sane people have come to the place where providing affordable health care for their fellow citizens – with private insurance – is an ideological hill to die on.
Citizen_X
Nice post, Anne, but it’s spelled O-R-T-H-O-G-O-N-A-L.
shelly
You forget. 50% of it is denying Obama any accomplishments at all.
Litlebritdiftrnt
Okay I know that this is bragging on one of my boys but this is impressive. Greatest sniper shot in history, shoots a suicide bomber from over half a mile, detonates the vest and kills his 5 co-conspirators.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/01/the-greatest-sniper-shot-in-history-six-taliban-killed-with-one-bullet.html
When you think about it, it is economizing at its best, 6 terrorists killed with one bullet.
Mike in NC
@the Conster:
Most of the over 65 crowd falls into this category: IGMFY. Geriatric nihilists and malcontents who dream of going back to the 1950s that never actually existed. I deal with them each and every day.
MomSense
The Republicans in the Congress and the leaders of the party are doing their masters’ bidding. They are beholden to the gazillionaires and corporations who pay them. The stuff they say about the ACA is just spin. They are political mercenaries. Except for a very few true believers, this is not about ideology or their preferred roles for government. It’s just corruption.
Mnemosyne
@ranchandsyrup:
Wild guess — “some sort of soldier dispute” will turn out to be domestic violence, with the guy either killing or trying to kill his ex-wife/ex-girlfriend and/or her new boyfriend. Move along, nothing to see here.
Roger Moore
@shelly:
Considering how vigorously they fought HCR when HRC was championing it 20 years ago, and how hard they fought against Medicare 50 years ago, I don’t think so. They don’t like anything that helps out the little guy.
Baud
@the Conster:
True. The hill to die on would be the public option.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
Given the end of DADT, it could as easily be killing his former boyfriend and his new boyfriend.
Frankensteinbeck
@Roger Moore:
They only fought those 50% as hard. There really is an asshole ‘we hate helping people’ contingent, but it’s mixed in with a huge racist contingent who have noticed that liberals – IE, anyone who wants to help others – support equal rights. It’s become a big, mixed stew of hate, with themes like ‘welfare queens’ and ‘voter fraud’, and it’s absolutely no coincidence that the whole thing went completely batshit ballistic when a black man was elected president.
Chris
I’m not sure I agree with this. Many of them do seem to believe in “small government” as a means to an ends – namely, destroying the government’s capacity to enforce laws on the rich and protect the public from their depredations. Or their capacity to protect black people, immigrants, etc from white power assholes. Or their capacity to protect voters from crooks in local and state governments enacting suppression efforts. Etc.
Yes, there are conservatives out there who believe in small government on purely philosophical grounds, but I don’t think they’d have gotten very far without all the money and votes of these other people for whom it’s a means to an ends.
And, indeed, when we’re talking about parts of the federal government that don’t threaten the rich and the white power structure and actually tend to reinforce them – like the security state or military-industrial complex – all of a sudden, they couldn’t care less about “small government.”
jl
My agenda for the evening suddenly became “venting about the link in this BJ post”
Near the end we read ‘ But the basic enterprise is workable. ‘
No, the basic enterprise is the bare minimum necessary for a functioning health insurance market to exist over the long run.
(Edit: changed ‘bear’ to ‘bare’, to avoid confusion with Cole’s neck bears)
All the economic theory and evidence that says that unregulated insurance market with the characteristics of health insurance will tear themselves apart over time, in pretty much the way the U.S. health care market has.
Indirect evidence is that, of the over 25 high and middle income countries who have better population health outcomes of the U.S., not one has anything like the unregulated free market paradise advocated by the GOP. Not one single one. Maybe that is because every single one of those countries is running a cruel unsustainable con on their population, or because their citizens are putting up with a cruel national health system death machine because of the totalitarian tyranny of social democracy. But, then there is a good chance that neither of those alternatives is the case.
The two countries that have the nearest to a free market system are the Netherlands and Switzerland, and their, contrary to BS propaganda put out by the reactionaries, have much stricter regulation, and much more mandated public and non-profit involvement than the ACA.
Economic bloggers like Krugman, Dan Baker,Uwe Reinhardt and others have explained the basics umpteen times.
I sometimes express my exasperation with some of the wrong headedness of Obama’s economics by saying he is the best moderate Republican president since Eisenhower, or calling him Dwight D. Obama. But if the weak tea of the ACA is the best this country can do without devolving into civil war and revolt and mass citizen freak out, then that is a sad commentary on the state of this country. But if this is the best we can do, for once, in terms of economic policy, I am glad the country had a Dwight D. Obama to help it out.
If we can get this kerfluffle over with, maybe Obama can get his head straight on macro and start talking up some proposals that will help the ‘lesser people’, and eke out a Dem Senate. So that his last two years in office will not be a living hell.
MikeJ
@Betty Cracker: My team did some stuff yesterday.
McJulie
@the Conster: Conservative evangelicals have decided that gay rights is the hill they wanna die on, so there’s a lot of that going around on the right.
McJulie
@the Conster: Conservative evangelicals have decided that gay rights is the hill they wanna die on, so there’s a lot of that going around on the right.
The Other Chuck
Spelling nazi here, but it is in the title: It’s spelled orthogonal
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
True, but that would still keep it firmly in the realm of domestic violence.
Belafon
@Chris: One of Chait’s analogies from a couple of years ago was this: If God came down and (after proving he was real) told everyone that all you had to do to eliminate poverty was cut the tax rate to 3% and eliminate all welfare programs, the left would go “OK” and implement them. If God told everyone that to eliminate poverty the tax rate needed to be set at 99% and a central government program would distribute benefits to people, the right would fight against it.
Those weren’t Chait’s exact words, but you get the idea.
the Conster
@Baud:
I think that’s what they think they’re doing though. How hard really would it have been for our FAIL media to explain that all the law does is to force millions of (mostly healthy) new customers into the arms of the hated insurance companies, but with a quid pro quo: it’s going to force them to insure those sick people driven into their arms, which makes sense. The fact that this law became some kind of totem – like how and where and when you say OBAMACARE – like a tribal signifier – is what I will never understand. The policy principle is not only not communist, it’s not even socialist. It’s exactly what Dick Cheney did with Halliburton and the military.
Hal
I mentioned in another thread about going back and forth on Facebook about the hobby lobby case with a friend of a friend, and the one constant argument that this person kept making is the argument I keep seeing everywhere; why should a corporation be forced to pay for someone’s birth control?
I made the point multiple times that HL is not being forced to pay for bc. Insurance companies must offer plans that include contraception as preventative care, therefor there is no co-pay. Nothing is free. Employees contribute their time, labor and a portion of their earnings and receive health benefits in return.
Why is that so hard to understand? This person simply kept going back to “religious freedom” no matter what I said. I made the point that hobby lobby is an it, that the owners and the company are not one and the same, therefor the owners don’t have a right to deny certain coverage based on their religious preferences.
I gave up. At the end, I guess I’m arguing with the same people who did not seem to understand Phil Robertson’s rights were not violated by A&E. This country sometimes. Yeesh.
Woodrowfan
one of the righties I know thinks property rights are the single most important, and that means very, very little taxation. He really does think his right to every last penny in his paycheck outweighs another man’s right not to die from lack of medical care.
raven
@Hal: “going back and forth on Facebook about the hobby lobby case with a friend of a friend”
that, my friend, is a stone loser.
kindness
So what Chait was saying in the above is Republicans-are-murderers.
I’m cool with that assessment.
Baud
@Woodrowfan:
I really do think my right to every last penny in his paycheck outweighs Bush’s right to start a war of choice. Life’s tough all over.
Woodrowfan
@Hal: did you remind them that medical insurance was part of their pay? It’s no different that an employer telling an employee that they can’t buy birth control with the money they earned working.
Baud
@the Conster:
Seems like you do understand.
Hal
@raven: Someone on the internet was wrong! Yeah, I know, but sometimes obvious attempts to spread misinformation bug the hell out of me.
raven
@Hal: I just had to stop arguing with friends of friends. I unfriend anyone, family or old friends, that starts that shit but getting into it with people I don’t know is really a waste of time.
JPL
@raven: My ex was drafted when he worked for a computer company. He was stationed at Ft. Hood running their equipment, rather than going to VietNam. Instead of the barracks, he chose a tent and lived in the fields and I still married him. He’s now up in Cole country with 100 acres.
jl
@the Conster:
” It’s exactly what Dick Cheney did with Halliburton and the military. ”
I do have some faith that that under the ACA, the health insurance companies will provide more than malfeasance and fraud.
El Cid
Conservatives don’t believe in ‘small government’.
They want government which helps you schmucks small.
They want government which protects and enriches them & smashes their enemies huge.
raven
@JPL: Ha, I guess since I was in a Signal unit there were computers somewhere nearby but they damn sure didn’t let my raggedy ass near them!
Ian
@McJulie:
Wait, are they not dying on the lightbulb hill anymore?
raven
Cassidy
If you’re gonna be in the Boston area or live there, here is some info for a couple of benefit concerts for Lt. Ed Walsh and Firefighter Mike Kennedy. They’re being performed by the Street Dogs, the punk band Mike Mcolgan formed a few years ago. He was the original singer of the Dropkick Murphy’s and left the band after their first album to become a Boston Firefighter.
Chris
@Hal:
The modern version of these segregationists who, in the sixties, were arguing that all right, maybe GOVERNMENT laws against black people were bad, but private institutions like restaurants, hotels, bars etc totally had the RIGHT to keep black people out.
? Martin
@raven: We could threaten to boycott Mississippi over this, but I’m not sure how.
the Conster
@jl:
Remember all the fraud from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act? Yeah, me neither. The military/Halliburton – insurance company/ACA government/private enterprise policies are equivalent, but the beneficiaries of the ACA are our family, friends and neighbors instead of Cheney cronies who profit off of lies, torture, shitty food and electrocuted soldiers. but BENGHAZI
Baud
@? Martin:
Sounds like Mississippi is boycotting itself.
PhoenixRising
I’m not sure how to increase my boycott of MS.
Shame really, as my kid wants badly to design a 3 week tour of the battles of the Civil War/CRM as her culminating project for 8th grade US history. I’ve lived in Nashville but never been south of there except in Florida. Sounds interesting: we visit the sites of LA and TX battles in 1860s, then 1960s, emphasizing where Grandma went (have I mentioned that my mom got on the bus?) in 1961-62.
But I’m not sure how we do that if we can’t buy dinner or a hotel room in MS.
PhoenixRising
Oh, and in other news, my new Obamacare oncologist who gets NCI and NIH funding to study the particular cancer I have (didn’t take my individual policy until Jan 1) wants to put me in his research group.
That’s not great news, if it’s too oblique for those who don’t [yet] HAVE an oncologist.
Belafon
@Hal: I had a twitter argument yesterday (yeah, twitter). One of the things I kept saying was that the company wasn’t paying for them. Health care is something we earn, just like the rest of our salary. In fact, we take a pay cut in order to get company health care. The reason we do this is because being in a group lowers rates by spreading risk.
The ultimate point is that we earned the health care. The company isn’t giving it to us.
Omnes Omnibus
@Litlebritdiftrnt: “One of your boys?” Aren’t you ex-Navy?
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: The
shootersolder is British, isn’t that enough?Edit: shooter sounded too much like another crazy shooter.
Omnes Omnibus
@Hal: Some people view any kind of compensation for employees beyond mere subsistence wages as a gift from a benevolent employer. These people, therefore, see any attempt by the government to change this as an intolerable intrusion into the rights of the employer.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: Not if you understand inter-service rivalries.
hells littlest angel
In a nutshell: conservatives are ideologues.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: Benevolent employer? That sounds like an interesting concept.
These days, I thought they were on the endangered species list.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: I don’t subscribe to the view. I merely point out that it exists.
SFAW
@Chris:
In the sixties? Hell, Rand Paul tries to push that today.
With any luck, the dead muskrat on top of his head will get resurrected, climb down, and strangle him.
SFAW
And the restaurant-complainers thing? I thought they’d complain because a barbecue place didn’t serve tire rims and anthrax. More in keeping with their level of (in)sanity.
SFAW
@Belafon:
Maybe things have changed since I was an employee, but I was under the impression that, in most companies, the employer subsidizes some percentage of the actual insurance cost. (Although that percentage was steadily dropping.) Maybe my former employer was just more enlightened than most.
WaterGirl
@SFAW: Yeah, but health insurance is part of the “benefits package”. They just end up paying you less in wages or salary.
Omnes Omnibus
@SFAW: The company does pay. The fact that it is paying doesn’t mean it is giving. Insurance is compensation. Can your employer tell you that you can’t spend the dollars you earned while working on whores and booze, right? Why can they dictate how you spend your healthcare related compensation?
SFAW
@Omnes Omnibus:
I think the problem was/is the use of the word “giving”? It can be interpreted a number of ways: donating vs. providing for some small amount of $$ vs. making available for less than you might pay on the “open market” vs. I-don’t-know-what
Not yet, for most of them. When plutocracy is finally completed, all bets are off – employees will be property.
You probably think I’m being melodramatic regarding that.
ETA: And, I seem to recall, back in the before-time, some companies were experimenting with “you’re not allowed to smoke at home because lung disease will affect your job performance.” Not sure if stuff like that ever went anywhere.
Chris
@SFAW:
Ah, hell. There was probably a time when I’d have said it was melodramatic to say Republicans would strike down provisions of the Voting Rights Act, reinstate poll tax measures, openly legalize bribery under the guise of “free speech…” At this point, the House could introduce a bill to repeal the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments and I don’t think even that would surprise me.
JoyfulA
@Hal: Read the Rolling Stone article that says Hobby Lobby’s retirement plan contains plenty of manufacturers of birth control: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/hobby-lobby-retirement-plan-invested-emergency-contraception-and-abortion-drug-makers
SFAW
@Chris:
Yeah. About the only thing(s) that the Rethugs et al. could do that would amaze me would be: repealing the 2nd Amendment, showing TRUE compassion towards the poors, browns, etc., and stopping their treasonous/seditious ways.
Wait … what’s that outside my window? Why, it looks like an alate Sus scrofa domesticus !
No, never mind, I was seeing things.
SFAW
@Chris:
You’re also reminding me of James Spader’s speech in Boston Legal.
Bugboy
One thing that drives me up a wall is things like the so-called “Welfare Queen”; that a single case of fraud can be conflated into the Standard Operating Procedure of any government program you might oppose. It’s either willful ignorance or delusional thinking, but it cannot be reasoned with.
J R in WV
No point in even talking around crazy people, you just over-stimulate them, then bad stuff happens.
Fort Hood in West Texas seems to be the latest example. Bound to be some crazy in that sad story.
slag
I’m not convinced that we don’t have philosophical underpinnings to our approach to government. Personally, I’m a big believer in equal rights and general democratic principles regardless of income, race, or gender. And if people can’t get healthcare in the private market, I’m not just going to chalk it up to “thems the breaks, kid”, even if the private market were more efficient (which I–possibly conveniently–don’t believe it to be).
I fundamentally believe that the government has a responsibility to be of the people, by the people, and for the people. Even if those people aren’t Mitt Rmoney. That’s a deeply held principle that I believe many of us share. And many of us casually collect lots of data to support that principle. I know I do.
So, I guess this is just a long way of saying…Not buying it.