Almost Everyone is a Progressive Now

Unholy Trade-Offs

An insightful piece from Patterico, explaining why conservatives and classical liberals end up being cheer-leaders for "progressive" (i.e. statist) solutions to social issues.

How does the Leviathan of the federal government grow in size and power every year? One reason is that, when government “solutions” are offered to a problem, it apparently becomes impossible for most people (including conservatives) even to imagine addressing the problem in a different way.

Take health care for poor people. We used to have a well-developed system of charity care, premised on the principle that doctors were expected to do a certain amount of work without compensation, simply because it was needed and the patient could not afford it. LBJ came along with Medicaid and largely destroyed this centuries-long tradition.

Now, it is taken for granted, even by “conservatives,” that if we were to restrict or eliminate Medicaid, we would not be advocating a market solution (i.e. a better, more efficient, higher quality solution) to the problem of health care for the poor. No, we would simply be against health care for the poor. Period.


Again: even “conservatives” can no longer imagine the market handling these issues. Take John Kasich, who advanced this very notion in 2013:

In 2013, Kasich lectured a state legislature on God’s interest in his Medicaid expansion. “I…happen to know that you’re a person of faith. Now when you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not gonna ask you much about what you did about keeping government small, but he’s going to ask you what you did for the poor.”

You see? Already, Kasich can’t imagine health care for the poor unless the federal government handles it. If you are against Medicaid expansion, you are against poor people. And you probably going to hell.
Your choice is Medicaid expansion or eternal hellfire, you guys. Which is it gonna be?

Et tu, Bill Kristol? The answer is, sadly, yes. Kristol’s 2017 Project assures us that we can’t simply do away with ObamaCare without some kind of comprehensive and apparently centrally (meaning federally) designed alternative:

While most Americans would personally like to see Obamacare repealed, they are not likely to yank newly obtained insurance away from millions of their fellow citizens. It is therefore crucial for conservatives to advance a winning alternative that alleviates this concern and leads to Obamacare’s ultimate defeat.

There are three reasons why advancing an alternative is so important: (1) politically, one cannot expect to beat something with nothing; (2) policy-wise, our health-care system already needed to be fixed pre-Obamacare, because the federal government had already broken it; and (3) if Obamacare continues to unravel but conservatives offer no viable alternative, liberals will seize the opening to push for the government monopoly over American medicine (“single payer”) they have always desired.

What is Kristol & Co.’s “winning alternative”? Get government out of the way and allow the market to address the problem? No, stupid, of course that’s not the “winning alternative.” The winning alternative is to agree with progressives to place the responsibility for delivering health care squarely in the hands of the federal government, which will issue “refundable tax credits” to allow people to pay the inflated prices for health insurance — inflated, of course, because of government intervention to begin with.

So, just like education, government intervention (through subsidies and other controls) causes the price of an important good or service to skyrocket, and the solution — even for self-labeled “conservatives”! — is still more government intervention and subsidies.

And the Leviathan marches on.

I read a quote this morning from Thomas Sowell that I can tell is going to stick with me the rest of my life.

Once, after giving a talk, I was confronted by a lady in the audience who asked what some people regard as the ultimate question:

“What is YOUR solution?”

“There are no solutions,” I said. “There are only trade-offs.”

There are no solutions. Only trade-offs. It is a simple insight, yes — but a brilliant one, because it is so often forgotten.

We assume that, because the market does not provide a good or service perfectly, that the government can impose a “solution.” We assume, in other words, that the government “solution” will be better than the market solution — usually without even stopping to consider the question at all — simply based on the fact that the market’s provision of the good and service is imperfect. (Often, the reason that it is imperfect is because of government intervention.)

But all we are doing by getting government involved is substituting one set of trade-offs for another. But the trade-offs commanded by the central planners are not trade-offs chosen by the people affected by those commands. And decisions made by those who are not affected by the decisions are notoriously less reliable than decisions made by those with a stake in the outcome.

There are no solutions, you guys. Only trade-offs. And the trade-offs of the marketplace are almost always going to be better than those provided by central planners.

The inability of conservatives to see these simple truths consistently are [sic] why progressivism has won.

When a people have no trust in an all-wise, all-governing divine providential God, they don't thereby cease to trust in a god.  They create their own uber-governing, divine providence, using the only possible substitute for the Living God--the administrative, all-controlling state.