One of my CNN iReporter collegues, Cliff Olney sent me an email with the article below titled Will conservatism bankrupt America. He sent it just in time to start coverage on my Coffee Party Radio Show Politics Done Right.
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Will conservatism bankrupt America?
Tuesday, Jun 12, 2012 12:51 PM CDT
The right’s privatizing alternative to the welfare state will leave us broke
A “Kinsley Gaffe,” named after the journalist Michael Kinsley, occurs when a politician accidentally blurts out what he really believes. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney recently committed a classic Kinsley gaffe when he criticized President Obama: “He wants another stimulus, he wants to hire more government workers. He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”
Romney blurted out the unstated premise of America’s anti-government conservatism: Many tasks of government could be performed more cheaply and efficiently by private firms competing in competitive markets.
In some cases that might be true; it is not clear that we need anything like our old-fashioned federal postal service in the age of email and FedEx. For the most part, however, American government at all levels provides two kinds of goods — public goods, which are essential to the private sector but would never be provided efficiently if at all by the private sector, and merit goods, defined as goods that the private sector does produce, but in inadequate quantities or at unaffordable prices, in the judgment of the sovereign people, acting through their elected representatives.
Public goods include military defense, police and emergency services, and essential infrastructure services like streets, water and electricity, and basic R&D. Merit goods are far more controversial than public goods, Romney’s claim that we have too many police officers notwithstanding. Merit goods are goods that our society decides each of its members should have access to as a matter of citizenship, not private personal income or wealth.
The major merit goods that Americans have decided their government should provide are income maintenance, healthcare, education and housing (others include access to cheap credit by small businesses and family farms). These merit goods can be provided either directly by government or indirectly, by means of government subsidies to the private sector, including tax credits, vouchers and subsidized loans. They constitute the universal, middle-class American welfare state, as distinct from means-tested “poor relief.”
At the purely public end of the spectrum are merit goods that are directly provided by government agencies, like public K-12 schools and public colleges and public clinics. In the middle of the spectrum are transfer payments, like income or unemployment insurance, which are collected and distributed by the government but spent mostly on private goods and services. At the other end of the spectrum are specific merit goods like private higher education, housing and most healthcare. Here private purchases of particular kinds of goods are subsidized by the government through subsidized lending (student loans and home loans), tax credits (the tax break for employer-provided health insurance, the home mortgage interest deduction) or vouchers (food stamps for the means-tested poor).
With this in mind, we can understand why the conservative economic agenda is likely to bankrupt America.
Apart from lunatic-fringe libertarians, nobody on the American right proposes to privatize the military or police and fire departments, and conservatives have not had much to say about deregulating electricity and water utilities since that experiment ended badly with Enron.
Nor do conservative politicians, in practice, propose to revive the era of Ebenezer Scrooge and convert what Americans consider to be merit goods like education, health and housing back into private luxuries. Instead, they tend to argue that all merit goods — including K-12 and Social Security — should be provided by government-subsidized, for-profit corporations. (In theory nonprofit charities could also provide these merit goods, but the right has lost interest in “faith-based” alternatives in recent years, perhaps because there are no guaranteed profits to be made.)
The mainstream conservative argument for privatizing the provision of all merit goods is not moral, but practical. The right claims that merit goods like education, health and housing can be provided more affordably if private providers, motivated by profit, are forced to compete for the patronage of citizens provided by the government with vouchers, in the form of tax credits.
This isn’t wholly wrong. In industries in which there are competitive markets with many producers, subsidizing the private purchase of goods classified as merit goods can increase access to them without affecting prices. Food stamps are one example. In-home services for the elderly, which can be supplied by individuals or small companies in competitive local labor markets, are another. That is why traditional “big government” countries like Sweden and France provide vouchers for in-home private elder-care services, of a kind that my former colleague Lauren Damme and I proposed recently in Democracy Journal, suggesting that Americans consider.
But vouchers can’t work to drive down prices in merit-goods industries with inherent tendencies toward monopoly or oligopoly — whether the monopoly or oligopoly is a result of geography (hospitals, housing), increasing returns to scale (mutual funds in which more investors make possible lower fees or “loads”), or zero-sum prestige (reputable colleges and universities command more prestige than diploma mills). Unlike firms in a competitive market, monopolies and oligopolies are “price-makers” rather than “price-takers.” They can gouge consumers without fear that competitors will undersell them. And antitrust actions to break up monopolistic firms would merely impair efficiency without creating lasting competitive markets.
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