A Fictionalized Dialogue about the Future, c. 1985

After reading Josh Barro's interesting piece about the execrable Cliven Bundy, my mind drifted off to the past. The year is 1985. Two people sit in a bar: Randy and Devon. They chat about politics. (I offer no endorsement of either one of our barflies; both people in the conversation annoy me a bit, when I read it over.) Let's listen in.

Randy: Life is great! Ronald Reagan just smoked your guy. Everyone knows that big government liberalism doesn't work; all we have to do is bring out the spectre of Carter, and everything is great for us. Conservatism has won!

Devon: Oh, please. Reagan's just running up the deficit and stimulating economic growth. He's being a Keynesian, except he's just wasting money on charades like Star Wars. And it's all on the backs of the poor.

Randy: You're just ticked off because America has once and for all rejected the European path. We're self-reliant, independent, patriotic! Thank God for Margaret Thatcher. Otherwise, Europe would be a total sinkhole.

Devon: Your man is an idiot. Did you see him trying to steal "Born in the USA" for his campaign? That's a negative song about America and the treatment of veterans, not a jingoistic anthem!

Randy: Come on, now. Springsteen's politics may be liberal, but he understands us, you know?

Devon: Us?

Randy: You know, real Americans!

Devon: No, I don't.

Randy: You'll never get it.

Devon: I must say that I'm pretty optimistic, though. Let me tell you about the future.

Randy: Go ahead. It's morning in America!

Devon: Roughly 14 percent of the electorate this time around wasn't white. Eighty-five percent of those non-white voters voted for Mondale! And Mondale was a disaster of a candidate.

Randy: Yeah, so?

Devon: Well, what if the non-white share of the electorate increases? And I hear your boy Reagan is going to support an amnesty bill that gives three million illegal immigrants citizenship. Most of them aren't white.

Randy: Don't be a racist. Republicans can win non-white voters, too. They just need to see that our policies are best for everyone.

Devon: Oh sure, maybe they'll say that when times are good. But what about when things get rough again? You know they will someday. Capitalism eats its own.

Randy: Marxist.

Devon: I'm being serious! Capitalism, for all of its perks, has booms and busts. Someday we'll have another bust.

Randy: I don't know, maybe.

Devon: I expect quite a bit of immigration over the next couple of decades. Some of them will become like you, certainly: wealthy, uncaring, and boorish.

Randy: Thank you! I'm not really wealthy, though. I'm middle class.

Devon: Sure. But a lot of others are going to be struggling, and they're going to want a helping hand. Do you think Republicans are going to provide it? Your party is already incredibly white. And people get afraid of difference in bad times.

Randy: America is all about individual achievement and entrepreneurship. Anyone who comes here gets that.

Devon: Not really. They're coming here to make a better life for their families, but most aren't particularly ideological. If anything they'll be coming from countries that don't have the American cultural tradition of limited government. So certain conservative ideas might be a little... foreign, for them?

Randy: Say whatever you want to say to make yourself feel better. Limited government has won here, and that's a fact.

Devon: This is the truth: in 28 years, you're going to nominate a handsome, religious, brilliant man for the presidency. He's going to focus a big portion of his campaign on private entrepreneurship and individualism. He's going to argue about how the incumbent is fundamentally hostile to those things because of his intense promotion of the role of the federal government in virtually all spheres of economic activity. He'll mostly be right about that argument. And your guy is going to get destroyed.

Randy: Come on!

Devon: I swear to you, that is the future. I won't agree with your guy, but his critique of the incumbent will be part of an honest argument that he will lose, quite badly, on Election Day.

Randy: You're serious?

Devon: Completely.

Randy: Let's say I accept your prophesizing here. What percentage of the electorate is going to be non-white in 2012?

Devon: 28 percent.

Randy: What percentage of those will the incumbent win?

Devon: 76 percent.

Randy: Wow.

Devon: Yep.

A long pause follows.

Randy: How do Republicans stop this?

Devon: I'm not going to tell you that! The future is bright.

Randy: I guess the first thing we have to do is stop immigration, or at least slow it down! Can't let people change what makes America great.

Devon: What are you implying?

Randy: I really don't mind immigration. But they have to assimilate to our way of life! We shouldn't just let anyone in here. We should protect our borders from this sort of fundamental change in our country!

Devon: A lot of immigrants are in dire poverty and horrible conditions. We can make their lives immeasurably better just by letting them into the country!

Randy: I see your point. Our country is magnanimous and generous, after all. But I'm really worried about your story now! What would you do if you were a Republican strategist?

Devon: Screw that, I want this outcome.

Randy: Come on! Just for shits and giggles, what would you do?

Devon: OK, fine. Your party needs to make a concerted outreach to those voters now. Broaden your message. Denounce racism wherever you see it. Stop being so aggressively white all the time, and really reach out to minority communities to show that you care. Don't lecture them; listen to them. You have a guy, Jack Kemp, who focuses on the inner-cities sometimes. Listen to what he has to say about that. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is a Democrat, but a lot of what he says is useful to you, too. It wasn't that long ago that Republicans were winning a sizable chunk of black voters. Jackie Robinson was a Republican. You can get back to that, at least a little, but you have to make an effort!

A long pause follows.

Randy: Nah, I don't think so. And you're full of shit about all of this. But we should really oppose immigration, just in case.

Devon: Sigh. I guess that's a perfectly rational response to this future. But I assure you, it won't work. We will be relentlessly demonizing you as heartless for wanting to restrict immigration and break up immigrant families, and we're at least a little bit right about that.

Randy: Whatever. What really matters is that Reagan's in charge now, and the Soviets are running scared.

Devon: Get used to the Cold War; the Soviet Union isn't going away anytime soon.

Randy: You're probably right.

Silence. Another long pause.

Randy: Hey, do you watch Cheers?

On that Men's Rights Reddit Survey

When I was in 7th grade, my English class had an assignment: look into our ancestry and try to find an instance, in our lives or family history, where our families were oppressed or disadvantaged because of stereotypes, race, or ethnicity. The assignment explicitly excluded Italian stereotype discussions because the teacher did not want to deal with half a class worth of discussions of mafia stereotypes, which was certainly defensible in Central Jersey.

I vaguely remember doing something on Danish people, as my mom's side of the family is part Danish. I don't recall what the nature of the grievance was, but I do recall that my great-grandfather from Denmark had dealt with some issues. In fact, I do not remember very much about the assignment or my project, other than that I loathed the assignment.

Fast forward a decade or so and I was in graduate school for history. Much of the discussions hinged on a series of issues or prisms of analysis regarding dynamics of power in empire and colonialism, and, usually, how they related to race, class, and gender. Arnold Kling would describe these discussions as fastened tightly to the oppressor/oppressed axis of the "three axes" of politics.*** Kling identifies two other potential axes: one, he dubs the freedom/coercion axis, and associates it with political libertarians. The third, he dubs the civilization/barbarism axis, and associates it with political conservatives.

This focus on the oppressed appeared in almost every book I read, every article I read, and every discussion: Discussions invariably moved to Gramsci, or Marx, or Foucault, or at the very least, garden variety blanket condemnations for Western colonialism and activity.

Of course, those condemnations are probably appropriate, considering the horrifying conduct of Europeans in the nineteenth century, and Americans into the twentieth. Indeed, we still see the aftereffects of those decisions everyday. My contention, though, is after four decades of relentless research, pedagogy, and argumentation, the oppressor/oppressed axis has essentially come to dominate intellectual discourse. The "freedom/coercion" axis is essentially a fringe world in academia, sometimes pursued by leading lights like Milton Friedman, but usually left to contrarians. The "civilization/barbarism" axis is systematically delegitimized in most polite, intellectual conversation; even highly-credentialed, intelligent professors like Harvey Mansfield are shunned by much of the academic establishment. This is unfortunate, and I think its absence shines through our entire academic and educational culture. With this in mind, that odd assignment in my 7th grade English class makes perfect sense: it was just another way to explore the oppressor/oppressed axis. I really don't believe that people think that they are using the axis; I just think that the oppressor/oppressed means of analysis has crowded out all other forms, so that one doesn't even see that there are alternatives.

Which brings me to an interesting survey performed recently about the Men's Rights Community on Reddit.com. Fully 90 percent of the users of the Men’s Rights subreddits were 20 years of age or younger. Now, young people may well be overrepresented on Reddit as a proportion of the population, but still, only about one-third of Redditers overall were younger than 25 as of 2012.

Let's accept that the data here is of questionable value, and certainly can't be given the sheen of validated social science. But there is something here: overwhelmingly, the participants in Reddit's community for Men's Rights are very young, aggrieved men. Why? My working hypothesis right now is that these young men have spent their entire lives in the educational establishment; few have any real world experience beyond school. And schools focus relentlessly on grievance, via this universal application of the oppressor/oppressed axis.

Educators, textbooks, etc. mean to instill young people with a notion about privilege, the idea that people have unequal advantages that they often cannot see from their own perspective. In theory, at least, educating people about privilege is a way to make them see their own advantages, and then work to keep the needs of those without privilege in mind as they go through their lives.

But not everyone likes the idea of thinking of themselves as privileged. And a certain subset of men look around themselves and can't see their privilege at all; all they see is boys doing worse in school, boys getting punished for misbehavior more regularly, and boys being relentlessly hounded about how they are the perpetrators of sexual assault. In my judgment, theirs is a distorted view of reality. But it persists.

So those men or boys look to the world around them. They see the discourse of "rights" and "privilege" and "oppression," and they then see themselves on the disadvantaged side of those relationships. Some gravitate to these online communities, where they make common cause with people who have reached the same conclusions about the world around them.

As people get further away from school and gain world real experience, they are probably more apt to see other ways of looking at the world, and then gravitate away from the simplistic, distorted "men's rights" frame. But young men are (apparently) vulnerable to this way of thinking.

The men's rights movement is a textbook example of the misapplication of the oppressor/oppressed axis. But its young practitioners probably don't have any better tools. They see themselves as disadvantaged by the system, and the only language they have available to explain that is the language of oppression. I see it as a classic example of the old aphorism: when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The oppressor/oppressed axis is the hammer. The unfortunate state of these young men is the nail. We need to do better by these students.

This is an area where an infusion of the civilized/barbarism axis would be a better corrective. A narrow view of the axis would view it as suggesting that certain people (us!) are civilized and that others (them!) are not. But that would be an incomplete interpretation. Certain conduct is better described as civilized than certain people. The language of shared obligation essentially falls into the realm of the civilized/barbarism axis, because the construction is, on some level, "The civilized do this thing," or "The civilized have this responsibility."

Even if we don't use those terms, the subtext is about fulfilling one's duty, and how failing to fulfill one's duty is a shortcoming. Instead of a relentless focus on oppression, an added focus on social obligation, community, and responsibility would give young people a different prism for viewing the world around them. Instead of dividing the world with a line, separating the oppressed and the oppressors, we could explore the idea of what we owe one another as people in general.

Discussions of the disadvantaged should start with the notion that we owe the disadvantaged our assistance because it is the right and decent thing to do in a "civilized society," rather than starting from the point that the disadvantaged are disadvantaged because of the oppression of a dominant group. This may not be as intellectually satisfying, but it is more likely to gain adherents than to foster resentment and backlash.

Bottom line: we spend so much time on the issue of oppression that we see it as the sine qua non of scholarly thought and analysis. Other potential axes, or prisms for evaluation, are discarded. And we see that intellectual poverty in things like the men's rights movement.

*** Kling wrote an excellent essay on his Three Axes Model for the Kindle. I recommend it heartily.

Summarizing the Best Arguments Against PPACA

You could argue that the past week has been somewhat discouraging for opponents of PPACA. The president has mocked opponents of the law for going through "stages of grief." Vox.com recently published a piece critical of opponents of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (hereafter PPACA), saying that they were afflicted with Obamacare Derangement Syndrome. None of the events, though, have weakened the core reasons for opposing PPACA. Instead of doing a point-by-point rebuttal of Ezra Klein's argument, I thought it might be more useful to put together a foundational list of "good reasons to oppose PPACA."

We'll start, though, with the opposite: what are good reasons to support PPACA?

1. A belief that health insurance is a moral imperative.
2. Faith in the ability of a non-single payer centralized program to control costs.
3. A desire to protect President Obama and the remainder of his agenda from a crushing defeat and embarrassment.

Most support for PPACA comes straight from point 1: that health insurance is a moral imperative. My contention would be that if you believe in point 1, there are many better solutions to the problem of the uninsured than PPACA. But that's a separate argument. Why oppose PPACA at all?

There has been so much sound, fury, and writing about PPACA over the last few years that it is often hard to keep track of all of the arguments. Some of the arguments against PPACA were not particularly persuasive, but others really were, and may have gotten lost in the heat. That is my starting point for writing here: there are lots of good reasons to oppose PPACA vociferously, and it would be nice to have those available in one place. So here are eight reasons:

1. The centralized, top-down nature of PPACA will squelch disruptive innovation.
2. The pre-PPACA environment was incredibly flawed. PPACA exacerbates those flaws.
3. The law has created some undeserving winners.
4. The law has created some undeserving losers.
5. The employment effects on both the demand side and the supply side are troubling.
6. The story of the law's passage does not reflect well on the law itself.
7. The Obama administration has shown utter disdain for the rule of law in implementing this legislation.
8. Even the "conservative" ideas in PPACA--like its use of High Deductible Health Plans (HDHPs)--are distorted and perverse.

What follows are a bunch of links from the last half decade of debate and argumentation, and lots of blockquoting. I intend to return to this post somewhat regularly.

1. The centralized, top-down nature of PPACA will squelch disruptive innovation.

I have read hundreds of articles on health care policy, health insurance, and PPACA over the last half decade. Of all of those, French writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry wrote the most compelling critique of PPACA and the progressive approach to government and reform more generally. Gobry proposes an interesting thought experiment, imagining if the Internet had emerged as those "in the know" in the early 1990s had expected: as some sort of "connected/interactive TV device." His thought experiment went on:

What would be the state of internet innovation under such a global network? It’s very easy to see that it would be much lower. Because the network would be controlled by gatekeepers, it would be much harder to start things. It would be a walled garden. 

Is this something you agree with? That if the “internet” had been a walled garden there would have been much less innovation on it? 

There would be no Google (the thing would have its own search interface). There would probably be no Amazon (instead the Barnes & Noble of the world would have their own storefronts to which they would dedicate almost no resources and would suck). There certainly would be no Wikipedia, or Twitter, or Business Insider. There would be services! People could certainly “communicate” and “shop” but with nowhere near the kind of efficiency and ease of use and innovation that we have today.

The internet has emerged as a wonderful source of value for humanity because of the very decentralized way in which it emerged. He continues:

Now, imagine, still, that we’re in 2013 in this walled garden internet alternate universe. Everyone’s on the network and it “works” well enough. Now imagine that someone writes that the global network is actually horrendous and that we would have so much more innovation if there were no gatekeepers. That person would be universally seen as crazy. First of all, they would say, why are you saying that we need a global network, since we already have one? Second of all, they would say, why are you saying there’s no innovation, since there is already plenty? I mean, we can shop and communicate and leave each other messages. 

If you described the internet as it exists on this universe to someone from that parallel universe, they would never believe you. Imagine describing Twitter to such a person. Imagine saying, well, we should have an open internet because then people could communicate in 140-character bursts. Or Wikipedia. An open internet is a good idea because people could work on a collaborative encyclopedia that anyone could edit. Yeah, like that’ll work! Oh, and the most profitable thing on the internet would be “search” and the search company would be so profitable that it would come out with self-driving cars. People would think you were just a complete lunatic.

I find this to be an incredibly powerful thought experiment, because it is one way to visualize the difference between the seen and the unseen. Gobry proposes that there is a similar world available to us in health care and health care delivery, discussing the "hints" of such a system--like "health care advocates" and dramatic cost reductions in heart surgery in India. Gobry's suggestions here are all about disruptive innovation, but it is near-impossible to get disruptive innovation in a centralized system where the stakeholders are all heavily vested in the status quo. Disruptive innovation is what could lead to new life-saving medical procedures. It's what could increase the available supply of medical practitioners. It's what could slash the costs of expensive tests and treatments. We can't do those things from the top down; they just don't happen, because the stakeholders are too powerful, and innovation is too hard to control and direct. PPACA essentially makes that future less likely. And those of us who are complaining about it in twenty years while we suffer through long waits, rationing, and astronomical prices will probably be described as "complete lunatics." It's disheartening, but that's the future.

2. The pre-PPACA environment was incredibly flawed. PPACA exacerbates those flaws.

One of the reasons that I thought that Mitt Romney would never win the Republican nomination back in 2011 was because of the obvious Romneycare/PPACA link. PPACA was a major potential source of votes for Republicans, if the right messenger could hit the right message. (I expected Tim Pawlenty to emerge as the guy. Oops.) But Ramesh Ponnuru and Yuval Levin of National Review crafted a compelling message for Romney that really hits at the core issue of PPACA: it entrenches the bad parts of the previous status quo. As a state governor, Romney could not sweep away the pathological problems of the American system of health insurance; considering the flaws of the system, Romneycare was a valiant attempt to solve the problem of the uninsured. But the federal government must address those flaws in any solution, not further entrench them. An example: a man named John was in a precarious situation; he was hanging off of a cliff. If he were alone, his best solution would be to jump to a landing nearby to save himself from a much worse fall. But if his friend Lauren were standing at the top of the cliff, Lauren shouldn't help John jump to the landing; Lauren should help pull John up! That is, in short, what the Romneycare/PPACA message should have been.

Unsurprisingly, the milquetoast Romney campaign never went there. But this critique of PPACA from Ponnuru and Levin is spot on:

The perversity of Obamacare is that instead of addressing the ways in which federal policies make an efficient and competitive health-care system impossible, it doubles down on those policies and adds a highly convoluted system of further public subsidies and oppressive rules on top of them. In short, Obamacare takes a bad health-care system and makes it much worse, in ways that are likely to exacerbate the grave problems with American health-care financing and to be very difficult to reverse once fully implemented. 

Thus Obamacare takes a Medicare system that stifles innovation and prevents competition, and maintains its irrational structure while subjecting it to a rationing board that will undermine access and quality. ... Obamacare vastly expands Medicaid without reforming its structure — intensifying the incentive for overspending and drawing more middle-class Americans into a segregated, subpar health system. ... Obamacare adds to the economic distortions created by today’s system by leaving the tax treatment almost entirely unchanged but placing a new entitlement program alongside it and subjecting both to an additional onerous layer of regulations. ...

Obamacare, in other words, takes each of the three parts of our deeply troubled health-care-financing system and makes every one of them worse, by making them less market-oriented, less efficient, and less innovative. 

Any conservative who doesn't acknowledge that American health care had serious problems prior to the passage of PPACA is a disappointment. (John Hudak notes that this might be because Republicans' "key voters" tend to already have health insurance. There may be some truth to this.) But PPACA didn't really address the central problems of American health insurance. In many cases, it exacerbates them.

3. The law has created some undeserving winners.

Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner is the blogosphere's foremost expert on crony capitalism and handouts to big business. A century ago, Carney would have been a plains Democrat and probably a supporter of William Jennings Bryan. But that is no longer the Democratic Party. Carney has been all over the crony capitalist, corporatist overtones of the law:

Yes, they opposed provisions regarding Medical Loss Ratios (basically capping the legally allowable profit and overhead that health insurers can make), but the heart of the bill – an individual mandate paired with rules requiring insurers to accept all comers and controlling the pricing tiers they have – was a package the insurers proposed even before Obama was sworn in. 

Throw in the subsidies for insurers and the laws requiring employers to cover employees, and you’ve got a bill full of insurer-friendly provisions. It’s noteworthy that on the ObamaCare case before the Supreme Court, the top health insurance lobby is not arguing to overturn the law, but is simply arguing that if the court kills the individual mandate, it must also kill the must-issue and “community rating” regulations. 

And just as a reminder, the biggest single-industry lobby in the country, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, supported the bill and dedicated millions of dollars to supporting Democratic incumbents who might face electoral trouble for their “Aye” votes. 

The other biggest health-sector lobbies – the American Medical Association and the American Hospital Association – also supported the bill.

Carney also identified some of the direct benefits to pharmaceutical companies from some e-mails that were released back in 2012:

Obamacare emails made public last week show that Obama is skilled at publicly pretending to fight a supposed bad guy -- the drug lobby, in this case -- while ensuring neither side actually gets hurt, both sides get paid, and everyone can be chums afterward. 

Throughout his campaign and while pushing his health care law, Obama regularly spoke as if he were sticking it to the drug industry. But these were phantom punches. Sometimes, the emails show, the drug lobbyists didn't even blink an eye. 

[snip] 

Over the following weeks, the emails show, drug lobbyists, White House officials and aides to Sen. Max Baucus hammered out a deal that formed the backbone of Obamacare. 

The final bill would subsidize prescription drugs, force states to include drug coverage in Medicaid, and expand private insurance coverage of drugs. Also, the White House pledged to oppose policies that Obama had promised on the campaign trail: allowing reimportation of prescription drugs and empowering Medicare to negotiate for lower prices on the drugs Medicare is paying for. In return, drug companies would offer a discount to some senior citizens, and would spend millions of dollars on ads supporting the bill and the lawmakers who backed it. 

But after the deal was complete, in late July, Obama publicly delivered a play-fight piledriver to the drug lobby. "I understand that some will try to delay action until the special interests can kill it," Obama said in the Rose Garden on July 21. The president warned that his opponents "would maintain a system that works for the insurance and the drug companies, while becoming increasingly unaffordable for families and for businesses." 

After that speech, Republican Pfizer lobbyist Anthony Principi, a former Bush Cabinet member, wrote in annoyance to PhRMA lobbyists and other top drug lobbyists. "We're trying to kill it?" he asked sarcastically. "I guess we didn't give enough in contributions and media ads supporting hcr [health care reform]. Perhaps no amount would suffice." (The pharmaceutical industry gave $1.2 million to Obama in the 2008 election, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the most it had ever given to a candidate, and more than triple its contribution to John McCain.) 

Hall wrote back: "Billy [Tauzin, president of PhRMA] and I were at the WH today. We raised this issue with Jim Messina." Messina was deputy chief of staff and one of the drug industry's main points of contact. "Jim said that he went into the Oval [Office] and talked to the President." Messina reportedly asked Obama, "Why was this in the sppech?" [sic.] Hall writes that "Obama said, 'I was wondering the same.' Attributed to young speechwriter."

The law was a complete giveaway to entrenched interests. The Obama Administration called them stakeholders.

4. The law has created some undeserving losers.

One of my favorite PPACA-related anecdotes pertained to NPR's talented health care correspondent, Julie Rovner. Anyone who listens to NPR regularly (as I do) knows that Rovner is sharp on health care: she reports well and adds clarity to often-complicated situations. But even Rovner was swept up in the fervor of the heady days of 2012. Jonah Goldberg has the story:

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. "Obamacare"), NPR's "Talk of the Nation" held a seminar of sorts at the Aspen Institute's legendarily pretentious Ideas Festival. Someone in the audience asked NPR health policy correspondent Julie Rovner this question: "Today's decision is a positive decision for the estimated 50 million uninsured Americans. Who are the losers today?" 

Rovner seemed to struggle to find losers. She came up with insurance companies that want the so-called individual mandate — now a punitive tax according to the Supreme Court — to be much more punitive. After thinking through her answer, she later added that another group of losers might be the citizens of states whose governors opt to not participate in the law's expansion of Medicaid.

Rovner is a public policy reporter, and most public policy decisions have to do with identifying winners and losers. Good public policy minimizes the pain that losers feel so that they are less likely to object to new policies vociferously. But in her enthusiasm for the law, Rovner could not see past the surface of this legislation: there are many losers hidden just underneath the shiny exterior. Jay Cost of The Weekly Standard has been beating this drum the most vociferously.

Losers in the schema include people whose new insurance is more expensive or otherwise less satisfactory because of the new regulations, seniors whose Medicare Advantage program will be peeled back (or whose local hospital stops taking them because of cuts to Part A), businesses who cannot afford the mandates, people who lose their employer insurance as a consequence of the new business mandates, young and health people who [sic], and others. Importantly, the administration's delays speak to the potential coalition of the losers, as almost all of them have been designed to keep these groups from realizing the harm they are due to suffer before the 2014 midterm election.

I suspect Cost would have added "young and healthy people who would prefer not to pay for comprehensive health insurance" if he were to edit it. (Per reason 1, I would also add the millions of Americans who will suffer in a future of less innovation.)

The people who are losers in this schema have long been protected by both sides in an unwritten political agreement, which vouches that the only people the government "takes" from are those with plenty to spare. The rule was: you do not redistribute money and security away from the middle class to accomplish some policy objective. The Democrats broke this rule, largely out of cowardice. They wanted to hide the trust [sic] costs of the legislation. Rather than put together a straightforward tax that hit everybody equally (like the Social Security tax), they created a convoluted system to fund the program, such that people whose premiums have gone up are paying an implicit tax, one that happens not to be collected by the government.

I heartily agree with this. The law's losers have been hidden for political reasons.

5. The employment effects on both the demand side and the supply side are troubling.

In general, I am skeptical of most economic study estimates, particular from government studies; there are too many variables, too many ways to massage the data, and too many assumptions to make to model anything confidently. But I think that theory and logic are useful in conjunction with data, and based on that, the broad outlines of the policy lead to two problematic effects on employment:

- Demand side: By increasing the cost of hiring and maintaining workers, employers will hire some number fewer workers.

- Supply side: Approximately two million workers will drop out of the workforce because they no longer need to work to get health insurance or security.

Conservatives believe that work is useful for social cohesion, harmony, and individual thriving, and that dispensing with work, even if we can "afford it," is socially dangerous. But PPACA challenges "work" from both blades of the supply/demand scissors.

Casey Mulligan has done some excellent writing on the problems of the demand side, noting that the act was chock full of "taxes on employers" and "implicit taxes on employees," which together "amount to a five or six percentage point addition to the average marginal tax rate on labor income."

On the supply side, Ross Douthat wrote persuasively for several days on the problems of the labor impact of PPACA. In one post, he wrote:

... there also lots of people who emphatically do not benefit from being given an incentive to either detach from the workforce or (if they’re already unemployed or underemployed) remain detached rather than taking a lower-paying job. And given the current economic landscape, especially — in which persistently high unemployment coexists with a growing population of workers too discouraged to even look for work — the size and scope of a work-discouraging effect matters a great deal: The bigger the effect, the more likely that the people dropping out aren’t just, say, parents cutting hours to spend more time at home while the other spouse works full time, but people we should want to be attached to the workforce [emphasis added], for their own long-term good and the good of the economy as well.

His Sunday column is also worth quoting:

... in the Obamacare debate and elsewhere, it’s not always clear whether this larger welfare state is supposed to promote a link between work, security and mobility, or to substitute for work’s gradual decline. On the left, there’s a growing tendency toward both pessimism and utopianism — with doubts about the compatibility of capitalism and democracy, and skepticism about the possibility for true equality of opportunity, feeding a renewed interest in 1970s-era ideas like a universal basic income. 

On the conservative side, things are somewhat clearer. There are libertarians who like the basic income idea, but only as a substitute for the existing welfare state, not as a new expansion. Both “rugged individualist” right-wingers and more communitarian conservatives tend to see work as essential to dignity, mobility and social equality, and see its decline as something to be fiercely resisted.

Douthat has been the most consistently interesting critic of PPACA, and he absolutely nailed the supply side employment effects.

6. The story of the law's passage does not reflect well on the law itself.

It may be hard to remember, but PPACA was passed using a variation on the "ping-pong" method of passing laws. The How a Bill Becomes a Law process almost invariably requires a "conference committee." The conference committee takes people from both the House and the Senate, who hammer out differences in the specific legislation and correct drafting errors and inconsistencies. Under normal circumstances, a version of a bill must pass both the House and the Senate, and then must pass again after conference. But in the case of PPACA, there was a problem: a special election in Massachusetts replaced Ted Kennedy with Scott Brown, who vigorously campaigned as the "41st vote" against PPACA. So the House and Senate has passed versions of the bill, but Brown's election ensured that no conference bill would ever get through the Senate.

The Democrats had two options:

- Scale back their ambitions and look for something that moderate-leaning Republicans, like Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Scott Brown, could support.
- Pass the Senate bill without any changes.

Crying, "Damn the torpedoes," the Democrats opted for the latter. The issues in the Senate bill are myriad and are the types of things that should have been cleared up in conference. One is the apparent drafting error that technically prevents purchasers of insurance on the federal exchange from receiving subsidies. Regardless of intent, the plain language of the statute dictates that a court must strike down those subsidies. Judges may disagree with my interpretation. But a major piece of the law is dependent on judges cutting careless drafters some slack. This is not how you pass wise public policy, and it is the type of error that would invariably be corrected in a good conference committee. Massive reform laws should not be plagued with obvious drafting errors. The conference never happened.

7. The Obama administration has shown utter disdain for the rule of law in implementing this legislation.

As bad as the process was in passing the law, the Obama administration's relentless array of waivers, extensions, and outright changes to the law as it exists are downright terrifying if you have . The precedents that Obama has set in terms of selective enforcement are incredibly dangerous. Worse, I expect a Republican president to take a similar tack when one is next in office. This is a terrible norm to set.

The rule of law is one of those elements of the constitution (small-c) that helps ensure a functional political and legal culture. There is a longstanding norm in American governance for sticking to the rule of law, which protects Americans from arbitrary executive action and from unequal treatment by the government. (Let's accept that many non-whites in American history have not always benefited from a fair implementation of the rule of law. This is not a reason to dispense with the concept.) From the perspective of "rule of law," PPACA has been farcical. The Galen Institute identifies 22 separate unilateral executive modifications to the law. These range from a delay of the employer mandate to an expansion of a provision of the law that allowed for "grandfathering" of older plans to an exemption to unions from required reinsurance fees. The logic appears to be "if it is convenient, change the bill." Even outlets friendlier to the president's agenda, like Politico and the New York Times, have seized on the "modifications" story.

At the same time, however, Obama has made it clear that he would veto legislation from the Congress that accomplished the exact same objectives. He has not had to because Harry Reid has prevented all of the House's "fixes" from ever seeing the light of a floor vote in the Senate. But he is essentially flouting standard process and taking an incredibly broad view of his administration's rights to implement legislation as he sees fit. Essentially, Obama has acted as a one-man conference committee.

Perhaps the most galling change, though, was the perfectly-timed Census change of its formula for computing the number of uninsured. Megan McArdle nailed this on Friday:

For several months now, whenever the topic of enrollment in the Affordable Care Act came up, I’ve been saying that it was too soon to tell its ultimate effects. We don’t know how many people have paid for their new insurance policies, or how many of those who bought policies were previously uninsured. For that, I said, we will have to wait for Census Bureau data, which offer the best assessment of the insurance status of the whole population. Other surveys are available, but the samples are smaller, so they’re not as good; the census is the gold standard. Unfortunately, as I invariably noted, these data won’t be available until 2015. 

I stand corrected: These data won’t be available at all. Ever. 

No, I’m not kidding. I wish I was. The New York Times reports that the Barack Obama administration has changed the survey so that we cannot directly compare the numbers on the uninsured over time. 

[snip] 

Sarah Kliff of Vox says we shouldn’t freak out, because these are the numbers that the census collects for 2013, so the change is actually giving us a good baseline. But I’m afraid I’m not so sanguine. As Aaron Carroll says: “It’s actually helpful to have a trend to measure, not a pre-post 2013/2014. This still sucks.”

Of course the formula change will result in a smaller number of uninsured than in the formula's older iteration (which was the source of the numbers that were "shoved down our throats" in the passage of PPACA in the first place). The Obama Administration will disavow any connection to this change, but considering the history of near-total rejection of the rule of law when it is convenient, I just don't believe them.

Ramesh Ponnuru notes that the rule of law "tends not to have a built-in constituency for it" and believes that a "healthy political culture" would take the rule of law more seriously. Indeed. Like many elements of political and social culture, the rule of law will only be missed when it is largely gone. The PPACA implementation has certainly pushed us more in that direction.

8. Even the "conservative" ideas in PPACA--like its use of High Deductible Health Plans (HDHPs)--are distorted and perverse.

I said I'd rather not engage with Ezra Klein's Vox.com piece on Obamacare Derangement Syndrome, but I can't help myself on one point: Klein writes, "High-deductible health plans are a longtime conservative solution for health costs — and Obamacare is spreading them far and wide."

It is true that PPACA has resulted in something like HDHPs gaining some traction on the exchanges (in the form of the lower-tiered "bronze" plans.) But in reality, PPACA has dramatically increased the number of things that an HDHP is required to cover (defeating the purpose). In conservative circles, HDHPs are good in conjuction with robust, tax-exempt Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). These HSAs would offer people money to shop, and would serve to create something closer to a thriving market for health care services, with the advantage of price discovery as the major benefit to everyone else. But if anything, PPACA weakens HSAs by limiting the amount of non-prescription drugs that people can buy with them. It certainly has no place for a growing HSA market.

True conservative health care reform with HDHPs would actually resemble insurance, or protection from unexpected, catastrophic expenses, rather than prepayment for expected expenses. Seeing the appearance of something resembling HDHPs in PPACA and saying that it's a conservative success is like calling my beloved blueberry Eggo Waffles a fruit dish.

You can argue that my eight reasons are not enough to override the moral imperative for health care. But I am convinced that a better law that solved most of the problem that PPACA attempts to solve would have had far less downside. Instead, we got the disaster that is PPACA. I expect stories of the winners to dominate a fair bit of the mainstream narrative, and certainly the Obama campaign narrative. But these drawbacks remain and are important, and we should have had better policy in the end.

Making it Harder to Hire

I've made no secret of my distaste for the current administration. I have many reasons for this, ranging from the president's incredible, relentless use of strawmen to his insistence on making everything political to his Machiavellian approach to pushing the health care bill to that deeply frustrating style of rhetoric where he is always the synthesis to a traditional thesis-antithesis argument.

These are mere pet peeves. More broadly, I find the president's faith in the efficacy and wisdom of top down, government solutions to be misplaced, and I think that this core misjudgment colors much of his policy agenda.

But in terms of policy, if I had to point to one particular issue that irritates me most, my largest qualm with the current administration would be its consistent focus on policies that actually serve to make it more difficult (or less desirable) for private businesses to hire people.

For the most part, I buy into Tyler Cowen's arguments about how structural problems are the main source of our continued unemployment woes. But the president's policies and policy preferences have consistently made the issue worse. You can argue that some of these laws were genuinely good ideas in isolation. Indeed, some may have made perfect sense in a time of economic strength. But that is not where we stood in 2009, and it's not really where we stand in 2014. Here's my list of things that serve to cool the climate for hiring and employment expansion. These are just off the top of my head; we could add to this list going forward. (Note: I will not be engaging with the wisdom of the policy other than its potential employment effects.)

- Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act: This law essentially increased the statute of limitations on pay discrimination suits from 180 days from the "discriminatory decision" to 180 days from any paycheck associated with the discrimination. Businesses may decide that they would rather not hire additional employees if they may becomes sources of litigation, and this law made litigation immensely easier.

- Paycheck Fairness Act: This is essentially the next step after the Lilly Ledbetter law, and takes that logic much, much further, dramatically increasing the difficulty for companies in pay inequity lawsuits. With the risks of wage discrimination suits increasing (higher thresholds mean more likelihood of success for prospective plaintiffs, who will file more suits), it may make more sense simply to avoid expansion and hiring entirely.

- Push for a minimum wage hike: This one is straightforward, in that it directly increases the cost of hiring a new worker and the costs of employing people at the minimum wage at all. Employers can easily respond by making one-time capital investments to automate their processes or simply by hiring fewer workers.

- Appliance efficiency standards: I use this one as representative of most of Obama's minor environmental regulations, but they add up. These efficiency standards cut into company margins because companies are forced to spend more on development, which cut into potential hiring or expansion. (They also may drive up prices, but that is a different issue.)

- Keystone XL Pipeline: The Keystone XL Pipeline has become symbolically important and remains so for many on the environmental Left. Its approval would create 20,000 jobs. It remains in legal limbo.

And, of course, the big kahuna:

- Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA): The employer mandate dramatically drives up the cost of hiring new workers. The "full time hours requirement" incentivizes employers to reduce employee hours and avoid bringing on new full-time workers. The increased mandatory benefits--like birth control--drive up the price of insurance, which further increases the cost of employment.

I love the metaphor of regulations as "pebbles in a stream", in that no one regulation is going to negatively affect a business, but a whole slew of them serves to depress economic activity. I don't think the Obama Administration sees it this way; I think they see their regulations as smoothing out the rough edges of capitalism and making it work better. The regulations, on their own, might be a good idea. Indeed, I make no argument (here) about the relative overall merits of any of these policies; all policy decisions are tradeoffs between multiple priorities. But in a time of great pressure on the job market, they do not make sense if our goal is to keep people working and prevent the suffering that is long-term unemployment and the tragedy that is human capital depletion. And I remain unconvinced that President Obama, for all of his rhetoric about getting people back to work, really gets that.

Too Many Words on the "How I Met Your Mother" Finale

I'm a latecomer to How I Met Your Mother. As a contrarian/troll, I rejected the show at first because it was popular, and then because the premise of the show--stories about how different couples met--struck me as silly. (It was after watching an episode that I realized that there was only one couple whose story was central. I found it much more interesting then. Yes, I was very wrong.)

So I eventually caught up, and I watched almost the entirety of Season 9 as it happened. And I have to say that I largely disagree with the fan consensus that the finale was a letdown. At least three fans of the show whose opinions I respect came down very opposed to the finale, so I've thought about this quite a bit. I still think I disagree.

Spoilers of epic proportion follow.

One approach to the finale would be to spend the entire hour dealing with the reception. Ted and the Mother (Tracy) could meet early on in the episode; they could hit it off in a way similar to Season 1's Victoria meeting, which would have been somewhat symmetrical. The tone of the episode would be joyful and light. They could then rapid-fire show their relationship, and end with Ted and Tracy at the altar saying "I do." They could then end back with the kids saying something like, "That story was boring," mocking Ted, having the parents share a laugh and a kiss (with the kids off-screen), and fading to black. (Certainly, the showrunners should have shot multiple iterations of the final scene with those kids seven years ago to keep their options open. I have no idea if they did.)

But I think How I Met Your Mother was after bigger game.

We could describe Ted and Robin as "on again/off again," but they're really not. They date for about a year once and then separate when it appears that their life goals are intractably different. Ted and Robin's mutual affection is certainly on-again/off-again, but the two date once and then go elsewhere. The emergence of Barney as a competitor for Robin's affections restricts the potential for the two main characters to reunite.

Ted's affections for Robin never fully disappear throughout the nine years of the show. Why? Well, largely because no one Ted dates even approach Robin in terms of her appeal: she is very attractive, smart, and passionate about life, all of which appeal to Ted.

By Season 9 (which takes place across only 3 days), Ted has gone on a wild goose chase to recover a locket of sentimental value for Robin. The effort to which he goes demonstrates his affection. Clearly, Ted has not given up all feelings for Robin, no matter what he says. (Note that Ted is not a reliable narrator in the story. His actions speak louder than words.)

Thus, for what was ostensibly a romantic comedy show, the worldview of How I Met Your Mother is incredibly bleak. Robin is always Ted's "first choice," and his character is borderline pathetic by the middle of Season 9 after years of pining for Robin and failing to fill that void with other women. Barney won Robin; Ted won nothing except a new job in Chicago and a reboot of his life. And no matter how amazing Tracy was, the bleakness cannot be ignored; a "happy ending" for Ted would paper over the underlying mood of the show: the unfulfilled longing, the disappointment, and the regret. Sure, the "reception" ending would be happy, and showing the two happily married in 2030 would be nice in some ways. But the darkness would remain hidden underneath the surface, or neglected entirely. It just doesn't square with the show as we watched it.

So, instead of opting for a "happy ending" with a bleak subtext, the two opted for something more appropriate for the show: a bleaker finale with a happy denouement. The showrunners chose to spend five minutes at Barney and Robin's wedding, and proceeded to carry our heroes into their melancholy futures.

- Marshall gets stuck back in a corporate law job for a few years that he loathes.

- Robin and Barney divorce after three (seemingly) unhappy years of marriage, with the two never able to reconcile Robin's work travel demands. (Which, oddly enough is similar to why Ted and Robin didn't marry. Are Carter Bays and Craig Thomas making a comment there?)

- Lily becomes incredibly demoralized by losing Robin as a friend. (All we see of Lily after the wedding is disappointment.)

- The "gang," such as it exists, grows apart in many ways. We see them get old and move into their "adulthoods." It is mostly depressing.

Meanwhile, Ted and Tracy are very happy together... for a few years. Within a decade of meeting, Tracy has died of some long-term illness. We see Ted comforting her. On my count, Tracy died in 2024. Their two kids are pre-teens.

This is a better, more realistic trajectory of life than the one suggested by the "happier" episode. The "happier" episode would have allowed us to leave the future to our imaginations, but Carter and Bays can't allow that, because it wouldn't carry their message forward; the bleakness would be too hidden.

The challenge is what Carter and Bays have hinted at for years: the gang was outgrowing MacLaren's and looking at different futures: whether it's Robin taking a job in Tokyo, or Marshall and Lily moving out to the suburbs, these characters all try to go the future, but always got pulled back. But after Barney and Robin marry, the future can't be avoided anymore, and it happens, in all of its pain, change, and sadness.

The "story" that Ted tells his children is somewhat cathartic for him, presumably. He's an older, sad man who has been alone for six years after tragically losing his wife. (Again, this is all incredibly sad.) In retelling the long story, Ted has presumably been overcome with emotion and the realization that--whether he denied it to himself or not--it was always Robin at the center of his journey. Victoria nails it when she confronts Ted over this in Season 8: Robin is what prevents Ted from a successful long-term relationship.

So Ted has a revelation, and his kids sanction it: reality has done what it does--destroy. But Ted can salvage what remains: he can reunite with Robin. He steals the blue French horn from the pilot, holds it up outside her window. The story ends with Robin and Ted--older, wiser, sadder--smiling at each other.

This is a joyful ending to a bleak story, and one that is far more consonant with the story itself: sad adults are able to recapture some of their youth, with the wisdom of experience to bolster their chances. (Isn't this the entire theme of Ted's long-running story?) But this is a much better joyful ending to a bleak story, because it doesn't give us the misplaced hope that life will be perfect once Ted and Tracy and Barney and Robin tie the respective knots. Life is not perfect. People divorce or die young, and How I Met Your Mother's bleak undercurrent needed this coda for the story to remain true to itself.

Lastly, let's be clear: I don't see this as a traditional "happy ending" of any sort. Ted wasn't "waiting" for Robin. Life unfolds in ways that we can't expect. Tracy and Ted were perfect for each other, but she died, because bad things sometimes happen. But the way that the show engaged with its "bad things" was incredibly mature, and its story ends in such a perfect way.