"Liberalism is a lifelong disease which will devastate your ability to think clearly about the government."
The title of this post is the last line of Justin Doran’s Monday column in the Daily Illini.
Well, golly! Where do I begin?
I will attempt quite wholeheartedly not to use information I know about Justin that I’ve gathered casually in conversation or on his bookshelf, but let’s be clear about one thing: Justin is a die-hard Obama fan. And good for him! Obama would make an excellent president. But if one thing is true about Obama, it is certainly his belief in the power of government to a) change (itself) b) change (the lives of others for the better).
But the substance of the article is, it seems to me, that (in particular young) liberals are like well meaning mentally handicapped children, lumbering around weighed down by lofty ideals about the common good and big government, unable to actually change anything for the better. They crawl to College Democrats meetings, suckle on the pacifier of pacifism, and daydream themselves to sleep wearing Save Darfur pajamas.
He paints a tantalizing picture, no doubt. But while all the active mega-conservatives and vaguely-libertarians on campus bake cookie for Alan Keyes, raffle off semi-automatic weapons and make a mockery of tolerance, democrats at least throw in a little social justice with their dishonorable political campaigning.
Justin says liberalism promotes a “parasitic reliance” on the government. I don’t think that’s true. Certainly some policies breed parasitic reliance, but liberalism breeds a demand for accountability in the government to do what is RIGHT with the money it collects whether or not it agrees on the whole with the tax rates, or tax policy.
Fiscal libertarians would have you believe that we can help the neediest in this country by leaving worse enough alone. They believe that rich people will set up private charities! That somehow, if we get rid of government, all that money we don’t pay in taxes we will put directly in the pockets of the homeless. And this is in the BEST case for libertarianism. In the average case, the financially fittest survive.
Though Justin portrays a vague truth that big government liberals are shamelessly idealistic and possibly naive, I think the same is true of minarchist libertarians. A belief in the altruism of the individual while promoting selfishness in policy? That seems a little far fetched.
Comment by Anonymous on 10 September 2007 at 11:08 am:
This article is really, really bad. It is quite revealing that no single liberal is actually quoted anywhere in the article.
If Mr. Doran had bothered to read any liberal political theory, it is hard to see how he could write the article he did.
Let’s take one example: John Rawls. Does John Rawls support welfare-state capitalism that creates a dependent underclass? Or does he support a matrix of political/social/economic institutions that protect individual autonomy and their ability to pursue and revise their own conceptions of the Good? Does Mr. Doran think there is a difference here; does he know the difference?
What “liberal” has “throw money at it” as the entirety of their solution to education? And government run or directed healthcare is the standard in the industrialized world, a standard that outperforms our private system on almost every measure.
The first step to saying something interesting is not to strawman your opponent. This article is not a serious attempt to engage with liberalism.
Comment by Lally on 10 September 2007 at 12:19 pm:
It seems that the comment above came from someone I know. I don’t think Justin is trying to engage with Rawlsian liberalism though,I think he is trying to engage with “mild socialism in young Democrats.”
If he was engaging with Liberalism, that would be strange, since Justin is himself a libertarian liberal from what I understand. Perhaps more like Nozick than Rawls.
Comment by tet on 10 September 2007 at 12:42 pm:
I think that the original article is wry enough to make me smile. However, it suffers from the reader (by and large) not being able to understand what the point is that he’s trying to make in it.
All the cleverness in the world is no substitute for clarity of meaning.
Anon, as far as government run healthcare being the primary standard in the industrialized world, I do want to point you to the recent articles on the continuing deterioration of the Canadian and British health care systems. (Including the one I mentioned a couple days ago with the Brits considering curtailing treatment for folks who do not live a healthy lifestyle in the hopes of saving money.) France still seems to be doing all right, although the rich have a tendency to use health-tourism to get their specialist needs taken care of.
Mitt’s got the right idea on that one, actually.–If we give tax credit for all medical bills and medical insurance payments, it does two things–it keeps money out of the hands of the government at the same time that it enables the middle class to receive decent treatment without going bankrupt. Much more efficient than having the tax money for health care go through three or four agencies before it’s returned to the user.
Lally, rich people do give money to charities. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with additional money added by Warren Buffet is required to give away no less than a billion and a half dollars each year. I expect as the assets of the richest citizens begin growing rapidly that this kind of philanthropy will only increase.
Tom
Comment by JM Doran on 10 September 2007 at 12:47 pm:
Yeah, for instance, I actually agree with Universal state-sponsored health care.
Also, I’m definitely referring to liberalism in the vernacular sense, not the formal sense. I was accused from multiple sources on my previous columns of being too academic, and I decided to use this more accessible moniker to refer to what I actually mean as weak economic socialism.
Comment by Anonymous on 10 September 2007 at 2:05 pm:
Tom, we have had this discussion. Canada has superior health outcomes for 60-70 percent of what we spend. Britain pays around or less than 50 percent of what we spend (depending on the stats you use) yet have at least or equivalent or slightly superior health outcomes.
Tax credit schemes will not deal with the problem of those without insurance since the poor do not pay much in taxes anyway. And if you want to just give them money to buy insurance and then force insurance companies to accept them…well then you are pretty close to “socialized” medicine.
JM, I still don’t know who you are arguing against. John Q. Liberal on the street? Do you have any survey data? How about quotations from mainstream Democratic politicians? Anything? Any evidence that what you describe obtains in the real world? We liberals have a hard enough time without having to defend against phantom charges that we turn people into slavering automatons.
Besides, I don’t know what “weak economic socialism” means. That the poor shouldn’t starve? That the government should account for market failures and negative externalities through regulation? That peoples’ life chances shouldn’t be squashed because they happen to be born into gross poverty?
Maybe this might help me out. What, Justin, do you see as the big difference between “liberalism” in the social democratic sense and your own left-libertarianism? Is it a philosophical difference? Are there going to be policy differences?
Oh, and I meant to include my name last time.
–Patrick
Comment by tet on 10 September 2007 at 2:18 pm:
Patrick, define superior. Giving people who live the way the government wants “a cut in line instead of an eighteen month wait”, perhaps?
Utter, complete propaganda.
In American, the rich can afford health care and the poor are already covered by one or more entitlement programs. The middle-class are the ones that are really getting screwed. Having the payees completely reimbursed by the government up to their tax liability *has* to be more efficient than having the government run it simply because fewer people are in the line, each demanding their percentage.
As far as the insurance companies go, they need to be held liable for measurable damage. If they refuse to carry a person at any price whatsoever and that person dies or becomes more ill because of this, they certainly should pay the damages. The government has no business protecting those companies (or any others) from measurable damage that they do.
Tom
Comment by Jim on 10 September 2007 at 4:11 pm:
Patrick, please clarify “superior health outcomes”
Why do middle-upper class Canadians head south to America to attend to their medical needs instead of staying in Canada?
Answer: America has “superior health outcomes?” No waiting lists + amazing doctors and equipment, arguably the best.
“superior health outcomes” can mean so many things.
Comment by JM Doran on 10 September 2007 at 5:28 pm:
Let’s splice out the meaning:
weak – theoretically weak. Not based on consistent ideology or philosophy. Usually emotional, rarely defensible.
economic – only with regards to fiscal policy.
socialism – not liberalism at all really, just pure socialism, id est American Marxism.
I am trying to capture what I perceive to be the intellectually unsophisticated left, which makes up many young Democrats on campus. Those who have not had their viewpoints challenged in any meaningful way, and have not been required to ask themselves where the government should and should not be.
It’s not a straw man if I’m not outlining a position for my opposition to hold. I am commenting on (what I believe to be) the effects pervasive reliance on government will have if left unconsidered. I am not commenting on the official stance of any liberal political theorist, or liberal partisan elite.
Simply: I am warning individuals to carefully consider what it means for something to be the responsibility of the government. This is a question much less asked in the Democratic sphere than in traditional conservative (classical liberal) spheres.
Example: The last time I heard a Democrat talk about reducing the scope of government power was in the primary debates where all of the “viable” candidates brandished it on the question of gay marriage. Of course they did this not because they actually appreciate state’s rights, but because they’re cowards (or pragmatists, which is synonymous in politics).
Comment by Anonymous on 10 September 2007 at 10:56 pm:
Superior health outcomes can mean a bunch of different statistics from life expectancy to the “years of life lost” to the various ways the WHO analyses to OECD data sets.
But don’t take my word for it, take a lot at this:
http://www.openmedicine.ca/article/view/8/1
Above is a review of the recent health studies that compared the US and Canada. It shows that Canada performs, overall, slightly but non trivially better than the American system (with the US doing better in some cases mostly for the rich and Canada doing clearly better on other things).
The funny thing is that we spend twice as much as Canadians do. Twice as much money for slightly worse care.
As for Canadian medical migration, provide evidence please. As for waiting times, this article indicates that they are a big problem in the USA:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-wait25jul25,0,1330225.story?coll=la-home-center
But hey, why let the facts get in the way of a good story?
As for you Justin,
It is the very definition of a strawman to attack the weakest form of a position when you don’t demonstrate anyone actually believes it. Waving your hands and saying, “Well, gosh, I really feel like people believe this” is not evidence that people hold the position. You have DEFINED what you are attacking as inconsistent, emotional, and generally indefensible, but you never went through the trouble of showing that anyone, from the most sophisticated political theorist to the drunken frat guy at a party ACTUALLY believes what you are arguing against.
“The last time I heard a Democrat talk about reducing the scope of government power was in the primary debates where all of the “viable” candidates brandished it on the question of gay marriage.”
Sigh, can you really mean this? Democratic Senator Joe Biden has presented a bill, with many sponsors, to pare back the unchecked executive powers embodied in the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It was a Democratic Congress lead by Feingold that pulled back the excesses of the PATRIOT Act. It is Democrats who fight for the right of women, not the government, to choose when they reproduce. It is Democrats who led the fight against the domestic wire-tapping program. These are all examples where the Democrats argued for a restricting and checking of government power, and I just named them off the top of my head.
You might argue that Democratic support of these issues might not always have been as full-throated or effective as one would like, and you’d be correct.
The broader point is that the conservatives on the right have meet the current regime’s abuses of powers with, as a rule, thunderous silence. President Bush has claimed extraordinary powers to use military tribunals, hold Americans in custody indefinitely without trial, and eavesdrop without warrant on American citizens.
And what have those “small government” conservatives done? Nothing. Less than nothing…they have ENABLED this behavior.
-Patrick