Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.

A fairly absurd argument that Dems’ health care reform bill will increase liberty from William Galston:

So when the Tea Partiers complain that a government health insurance mandate invades their liberty, they reveal a defective understanding of the logic of liberty in a modern society. Individuals who choose to go without health insurance could try to resolve the contradiction by signing a document foreswearing all reliance on health care they didn’t pay for themselves. But, because our medical norms don’t permit us to leave injured accident victims at the side of the road, such a document couldn’t be enforced. To be a citizen of the United States today is to live in a community where individual health care choices can have social consequences, a fact to which government can legitimately respond.

The obvious fallacy in this argument is that choosing not to insure against health care costs is not an announcement one will refuse to pay them when they are incurred, particularly in extremis. Rather than smiting such spurious strawmen, Galston might explain how a policy of throwing people in jail for not buying health insurance can be called consonant with maximizing liberty outside of an Orwell novel.

And such a policy is counterproductive anyway. Stephen Spruiell cites a Democrat who makes an relevant analogy to WalMart:

In most goods and services there are very few active consumers. What happens is, everybody selling a good is affected by Wal-Mart. You benefit from that wherever you are. So many of those who oppose consumer-driven health care use the perfect as the enemy of the good. You’re not going to shop for health care if you’re hit by a bus. That’s not the point. The point is you’re served in a health-care system that’s been tightened up, both from a cost and quality point of view, by the fact that some consumers, for many procedures, are shopping around, and not just on price.

The inefficient government is already paying for half or more of health care by some estimates, and insurance companies granted near-monopolies by state law cover all but a few percent of the rest. That’s not a recipe for driving efficiency, and the smaller we make the already-tiny fraction of people who are still incentivized to shop around for health care the worse off we’re all going to be in the end.  The bill under consideration would make it zero.

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Sometimes as a Christian I’m embarassed by the likes of Pat Robertson, but then I remember things could be a lot worse.

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Yesterday, Carly Fiorina released a bizzare web video attacking Tom Campbell’s record on fiscal issues and depicting him as a demonic sheep. Since the video was released, Chuck DeVore has also come out against demonic sheep, but in a very different way.

First, a bit of background for those who haven’t been following the race. Fiorina, Campbell, and DeVore are the major candidates for the Republican nomination for the 2010 California Senate race against Barbara Boxer (who is currently underwater in her approval rating, and is thus seen as vulnerable despite California’s strong Democratic leanings). Fiorina is the former CEO of HP and was a campaign advisor for McCain in 2008. DeVore is the ranking Republican in California’s state assembly committee on revenue and taxation and a former VP of Research for a midsize aerospace company. Campbell is a former Congressman and the current Dean of UC Berkeley’s business school. Fiorina has next to no political record prior to this campaign; DeVore is a conservative of the Tom McClintock mold, focused primarily on cutting spending and taxes; and Tom Campbell is a soft libertarian: very conservative on spending, a bit squishy on taxes and gun control, pro-choice, and very pro-gay-rights.

Until a couple weeks ago, Fiorina and DeVore were the only major candidates. Fiorina has been running as a  moderate, and started out with a considerable lead in the polls, with a very high percentage of undecided voters. DeVore’s been steadily catching up on her. Fiorina’s tenure as CEO of HP was something of a train wreck, which gives her high name recognition but not in a way that translates into high support, while few people who aren’t politics junkies have heard of DeVore. Tom Campbell was initially running for Governor, but Meg Whitman seems to be running away with that race, and Campbell switched to the Senate race. Both polls taken since Campbell switched races show him well in the lead, picking up about half of DeVore’s support and a big chunk of the undecided vote.

And so Fiorina decides to come out swinging against the new frontrunner. From a strategic perspective, I don’t see what this ad does for her. First, its writing and production values are ridiculous, which makes Fiorina look profoundly unserious as a candidate — Jim Geraghty speculates that the absurdity is intentially to get the ad attention, but that strikes me as counterproductive. In addition to the effect of beclowning Fiorina, the absurdity of the ad distracts from the content (everybody remembers the demon sheep, but we have to strain to remember exactly what the line of attack on Campbell was), and the viral nature of the ad means it’ll be seen mostly by people who follow politics closely and who are the most likely people to know enough background (or have the interest to look it up) to see how badly out of context the ad’s attacks are:

• Campbell has a ten-year voting record in the House, in which he was a solid conservative on spending issues.
• The 2005 California Budget was Plan C — a package designed to keep the state limping along as best they could after Campbell’s proposals to fix the underlying problems with the budget were rejected by both the state legislature and the state’s voters.
• Campbell has supported temporary tax increases as part of a compromise to get permenant spending caps — as far as I know, he has never supported a permanent tax increase. It’s not a tradeoff I agree with (since temporary tax increases have a way of sticking around and permanent spending caps have a way of evaporating), but it’s defensible from the standpoint of a fiscal conservative who believes that unconstrained spending is the core problem.

The ad also leaves Fiorina without a niche in the race. Before Campbell joined the Senate race, Fiorina was the moderate and DeVore the conservative. The Demon Sheep video hits Campbell from the right, thus abdicating the moderate niche to him. Meanwhile, DeVore still has a firm handle on the conservative niche, and comes off looking like a mature adult next to Fiorina’s silly antics. At this point, I rather suspect the race is going to turn out to be between Campbell and DeVore with Fiorina rapidly fading into irrelevance.

Personally, I’d be quite happy with that outcome. I’m a fan of both Campbell and DeVore, and I’m leaning towards voting for Campbell. I’m probably a bit closer to DeVore on the issues I care about the most, but endorsing Campbell’s libertarian views on social issues (especially his support for gay marriage) would be a very healthy step that I’d like to see the California Republican Party take.

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Mark Steyn sizes up Barack Obama:

In the last 60 years, the size of America’s state and local workforce has increased five times faster than the general population. But the president says it’s still not enough: We have to incentivize even further the diversion of our human capital into the government machine. Like most lifelong politicians, Barack Obama has never created, manufactured, or marketed any product other than himself. So quite reasonably he sees government dependency as the natural order of things. And in his college-loan plan he’s explicitly telling you: If you start a business, invent something, provide a service, you’re a schmuck and a loser. In the America he’s building, you’ll be working 24/7 till you drop dead to fund an ever-swollen bureaucracy that takes six weeks off a year and retires at 53 on a pension you could never dream of. Obama’s proposals are bold only insofar as few men would offer such a transparent guarantee of disaster: It’s the audacity of hopelessness.

Why does our President often seem to reason like an antagonist straight out of Atlas Shrugged? Maybe it has something to do with the fact his advisers have less private sector experience than any President… well, ever, apparently. The chart only goes back to Teddy Roosevelt, but given that the growth in government is fairly recent  I think we can safely assume past Presidents and their staff had some familiarity with not living off the taxpayer (Honest Abe famously did some honest work as a railsplitter and Jefferson was a farmer; the American Brahmin class itself is a recent result of the state’s increasingly voracious appetite for taxpayer dollars). And Obama’s staff have a lot less than any other President: the next least appears to have three times as many staffers with exposure to the private sector.

Maybe that explains why the Obama coterie also engages in the kind of fantasy bookkeeping that would get you thrown out of any boardroom in America (and probably in jail as well):

Only a fifth of respondents believed that Obama cut taxes for 95% of Americans, and even Democrats couldn’t believe the “two million jobs saved or created” fantasy

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