The basic idea is that Obama and his team prefer policies of incremental change based on subtle interventions rather than grand strokes of policy. The authors conclude that
Obama has set out to synthesize the New Democratic faith in the utility of markets with the Old Democratic emphasis on reducing inequality. In Obama's state, government never supplants the market or stifles its inner workings--the old forms of statism that didn't wash economically, and certainly not politically. But government does aggressively prod markets--by planting incentives, by stirring new competition--to achieve the results he prefers. With health care, for instance, he would make it easier for employees to tote their insurance from job to job, eliminating the disincentive for insurers to invest in preventive care. Or take his bank plan, which helps banks dispose of their toxic assets, reducing uncertainty and making the banks more attractive to private investors--a far less drastic step than nationalization. Rather than force markets to conform to his wishes, he shapes their calculus so they conclude (on their own) that their interests coincide with his wishes.
The authors correctly trace this way of thinking back to the Carter presidency and the ideas of Charles Schultze. I think the roots of the situation go back a little deeper, though. The mainstream Democratic Party really hit a wall in the aftermath of the sixties. It came apart because of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement and the splits these events introduced into its coalition. In the aftermath of the Nixon/Watergate debacle, there was a missed opportunity to put things back together. Since then, it has been all downhill.
What we have to ask ourselves as people of the left, people who want to see real structural change in the way America works, is whether there is a real progressive program, and beyond that whether there is a progressive constituency. OK, there ought certainly to be one given the serious problems that exist in this society. But if you think about it there isn’t much there, or at least not much that percolates to the mainstream.
There are a lot of reasons for this, reasons that are pretty complex to be sure, but, in all honesty, recognition of this situation has to be the point of departure for progressives. There is a massive disconnection between the real situation of the country and the majority of its citizens and the political and media elite, really of both parties, but my own concern and preoccupation is with the Democrats or actually the progressive or left Democrats.
So in this context, one wonders exactly what this wonky ideology has to do with political and social reality. I hate to get down on Obama and his team. They are certainly better than the right-wing alternatives. But you have got to wonder whether people are going to take to the barricades over the portability of health insurance or presumptive 401-K participation. Not that these are not laudable or harmless initiatives, but are these the lessons we have learned from the past three decades of American history?
The question here, and the real objection to this kind of back-door social engineering is who is going to drive it, what class or interest carries this agenda? If we are honest, there is no significant social group behind it beyond a segment of the political and academic elite.
After seven pages of beating about the bush, the New Republic authors finally reach a sense of uneasiness with the program.
The health care plan suffers from a similar Rube Goldberg quality. For example, the "public option" sounds like an elegant way to improve quality by promoting competition. If only it were so simple. The problem is that private insurers have every opportunity to game the system: By skimming off the youngest, healthiest patients and leaving the rest for the government to cover, they drive down their own costs and make the public option look outrageously expensive by comparison. To prevent this, the government would have to restrict the way private insurers woo patients--something that's not impossible, but definitely tricky, given the variety of subtle techniques for screening out the sick. At a certain point, it seems far less complicated to just expand Medicare to everyone. The irony here is hard to miss: In order to keep its hands mostly off the free market, the Obama administration sometimes has to hatch schemes so convoluted they'd make an ambitious social planner blush.
Which raises a final objection: What's so great about private insurers or the people who currently run our banks? We are, after all, talking about a banking industry that tred a global financial meltdown and which, according to the IMF, may be sitting on trillions in losses to show for it. We're talking about a private health insurance industry that leaves almost one-sixth of the U.S. population without coverage and is a major reason we pay more for health care on average than any other country and get only mediocre results in return.
Bingo! It took these guys a long time to figure this out, although in the last paragraph they successfully pull all their punches and then some. But heh, here’s why this stuff is some much baloney. It is a rehash of the old complaint about the Fabians. It is, at bottom, change that nobody wants.
That’s the first objection. The second is perhaps even more cogent. These schemes are by and large dependent on congressional action. To the extent that they affect significant sectors of the economy, like banks and insurance companies, for example, the sectors affected have a disproportionate power to mitigate or resist reform, whatever subtlety or intellectual trickery is involved. They know what is really in their interests and they have an army of lawyers and lobbyists to figure it out and communicate it to our representatives. Most of Congress is there in some measure due to their contributions. So when things get serious, they have the consolation of pretty much owning most of the media and most of Congress.
Now Obama is uniquely suited to the role of tribune of the people, but until he gets a stomach for it, we are unlikely to see much of real significance happen.
No comments:
Post a Comment