A Dream Deferred
(posted by Daniel Koffler)
Will Wilkinson has “a dream that President Barack Obama will decide to privatize Social Security, because it’s the sensible and moral thing to do. Democrats will be extremely confused for a couple months, but then will decide that this is in fact the greatest idea ever. Roles will reverse and Republicans will enlist the AARP and Jonathan Chait to kill it in a repeat of 2005, but their hearts aren’t in it, and they lose. Obama’s successful Jason Furman-lead transformation of the Social Security system is incredibly popular with the younger voters who put him into office and and sets him in such a strong centrist position that he completely crushes Romney in 2012.” Needless to say, this dream will become reality about the same time as my dream of inheriting a billion dollars pounds or euros† from a distant relative I never knew existed. And while Will’s dream about Obama privatizing social security is clearly tongue-in-cheek, his confidence that “it’s going to happen sooner or later” seems quite earnest. I don’t get it. Granted, the welfare state is bound to go out of business eventually — the entropy of the universe will catch up with it if nothing else does — but I can’t see any reason for thinking welfare state won’t persist, and indeed, get precipitously larger (hello, socialized medicine) for the foreseeable future.
Despite all that, Barack Obama leads John McCain among self-described libertarians 53-38. Somebody at the Economist (I’m pretty sure it’s Julian Sanchez) writes:
[T]he shift to Mr Obama among libertarians may already be a kind of “protest vote”. Among those who still favour Mr McCain in a two-person contest, there may remain a larger contingent who are nevertheless too put off by the candidate to actually punch a ballot for him. And Mr Barr’s conservative bona fides may render him more attractive to the McCain-leaning libertarian. On the other hand, libertarians who have shifted their support to Mr Obama may have done so in part because they saw no alternative.
Well, maybe. But I think some Obamatarianism is at least in part a soberer version of Wilkinson’s dream. (Mine is.) Put it this way: Suppose you’ve taken stock of the political landscape and come to the conclusion that welfare state rollback is about as far advanced as it can be for the time being, and the imposition of some form of government-mandated universal health care is inevitable. Suppose you’ve come to the further understanding that rather than support some sort of quixotic purist libertarian bid†† or simply sit out, the wisest course for libertarians is to support the viable option that is likeliest to lay the groundwork for libertarian victories beyond what’s feasible at the moment, while modulating the current welfare state and the all-but-certain addition of socialized medicine so that they infringe on liberty with as light a hand as possible.
One way to cash out those premises is by observing that on the various internal and external wars the government prosecutes, Senator Obama is far better than his GOP opponent or any minimally likely candidate from either party in the short term (Russ Feingold and Ron Paul will never be nominated folks; and they’re both far from perfect libertarians). Despite McCain and the GOP’s putative commitment to low taxes and spending, what they are in fact proposing is a massive national sub-prime mortgage that is likely to be redeemed through statist encroachments on liberty on a scale proportional to the scale of our borrowing. And with respect to the issues on which Senator McCain is better than Senator Obama, (a) he doesn’t appear to have a clue why he holds the positions he holds, and will presumably ditch them in favor of expanded statism in exchange for congressional votes for his foreign policy agenda; (b) they tend to be issues, like universal health care, on which some version of the statist position is overwhelmingly likely to carry the day eventually, and so (c) Senator Obama represents a better deal in terms of how he would socialize health care and modify existing government programs than libertarians are likely to get from any Democrat.
Point (c) is the crux. While nobody has been more disappointed with Obama’s primary-season rhetoric on domestic policy than I have been, let’s not lose sight of the fact he is guided in domestic and fiscal policy by Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee. If what we get from an Obama administration is libertarian paternalism — which actually is a likely outcome of a politically successful Obama administration — then, libertarians who believe as I do that universal health care can only be delayed and that welfare state rollback is at best a very-long term project should be open to accepting the best of an admittedly suboptimal set of choices. Moreover, an Obamafied welfare state in which the institutions of welfare are significantly streamlined and decentralized, and in which freedom of choice is greatly expanded, could be just the thing to demonstrate that government-mandated institutions are superfluous when market-based, mutualist institutions arrive at comparable or better equilibria without stepping on individual freedom. Things may not play out that way, but I can’t think of anything besides such a demonstration that could make the country congenial to far-reaching welfare state rollback.
That, indeed, is the point of liberaltarian fusionism for libertarians, at least as I understand it — i.e., the calculation that the most productive course for libertarians is to join up with liberals with whom we already agree on matters of civil and social libertarianism, and try to work to bring them closer to our views on economic matters.
†I’m assuming this wish is more likely to be fulfilled perversely, monkey paw-style, than as I envision it. E.g., what if a billion dollars becomes worthless? Better to denominate my fantasy in strong currency.
††If I’m going to support a hopeless protest candidate, he or she had better be nigh-on-perfect. Barr and Paul are fervent immigration restrictionists with (at best) some seriously malfunctioning racial sensitivity. If I were too unhappy with Obama to vote for him, there’s no way I’d support either of them. I wouldn’t vote at all.
Tags: barr, libertarian/liberal alliance, libertarianism, obama, ron paul
July 9th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
I’m with you on the inevitability of the welfare state in the near (and medium) term, but for public choice reasons. It’s simply far too lucrative (though not necessarily in simply monetary terms) to just get on board with the state than attempt to roll it back. Talk about a collective action problem.
The best one can do is attempt to smuggle in those with a libertarian-tinged altruist bent (see the talk between Wilkinson and Hanson recently if this sounds contradictory) into that arena dominated by public choice informed strategy and economic ignorance. I think ‘Libertarian Paternalism’ does this. Remember - and this is crucial for libertarians - Sunstein and Thaler have an “opt out”, er, option, for those, like many of use here, actually paying attention to the nexus between politics and their own financial/medical situations.
I don’t disown a kind of Roderick Long purism, but I’ll admit I’ve simply got a different time preference. Indeed, it isn’t clear to me that I’m more “reaistic” in any sense akin to how natural scientists are “realistic” in the realm of politics (social science). But the causal connection, for me, between ideas and reality “on the ground” is simply far too ambiguous with regard to purism for me to get a sense that much can be changed by joining the Alliance of the Libertarian Left. Also, since I believe that a too-aggressive welfare state will succumb to its own “internal contradictions” I don’t have to get too worried that the beast can only get stronger without relentless rebellion by the hardcore.
On Obama vs. Ron Paul and Barr on the racism/social issue angle, it’s more complicated that the discussion lately on AOTP would have it. Obama’s attraction of the endorsement of Farakhan is rather ghastly, and his touring with the reformed homophobe Donnie McClurkin puts him in the realm of “suspicous” from a social liberal perspective as well.
…and Paul has come out against the Death Penalty. Obama’s stance on that lately hasn’t been reassuring:
http://www.counterpunch.org/segura06272008.html
July 9th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
I don’t think there is any reason to believe that Obama is more libertarian than the average Democrat. He’s got Goolsbee as an advisor, but then he tells people he doesn’t actually accept Goolsbee’s positions (on NAFTA, for example, leaving aside whether libertarians should support it). I think Milton Friedman gave advice to Richard “We are all Keynesians now” Nixon. Since your support doesn’t make a difference anyway, I don’t know why you’d want to give any to any candidate, especially the severely compromised ones offered by the major parties.
July 9th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Sure, Obama could turn out to be a complete and utter disaster for liberty. He could also follow through on Goolsbee’s envisioned “i-pod government.” (And the relationship between them is rather different from Nixon and Friedman.) Both are viable possibilities. Those are much better pot odds than we typically get out of elections.
July 9th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
But then Goolsbee, if you believe the rumors, tells Canada no worries on NAFTA? Obama’s overheard comments on why poor rural folks don’t like trade sounds like Bryan Caplan.
Not that NAFTA is free trade, obviously, but would its abolition from this point forward by anyone other than, say, Ron Paul mean more or less trade, overall? I think the latter. You, and I, and Kevin Carson know that NAFTA isn’t really free trade, but what matters is if most people in the governing class think it is, and what they may plan for that is even worse.
Your average Democrat, at least according to Jeffrey Friedman (by way of Philip Converse), is an average American, and Americans are as casually anti-trade as most folks who are not trained economists. What Obama’s got is educated credentials, and I’ll use that as a proxy to think that he’s relatively (relative to Hillary, for sure) “conservative on economics, liberal on social issues”, as are most educated folks.
July 9th, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Dain, are you a Critical Review seminar alum too? That’s pretty much where I am on Obama and domestic policy. It shouldn’t be a great accomplishment for a prez candidate to be capable of basic economic reasoning, but there you have it. All I’d add is that Furman and especially Goolsbee — the latter of whom isn’t just an adviser, but taught Obama what he knows about economics — are the first economists since Friedman who have some really innovative ideas and are close to the levers of power. On balance, I’m very slightly sanguine about how domestic policy in an Obama administration would shape up.
July 9th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Actually no, not yet. I spoke with Jeffrey Friedman at length recently, and he’d like to conduct another Challenging Classical Liberalism seminar some time next year. I plan on going. But I’ve been reading CR for a few years now.
I’ll be at the “Homo Politicus: Irrational, Ignorant, Dogmatic?” conference on 8/31 in Boston, sponsored by the CR foundation. In fact I’m planning on doing a write-up on it, and wondering where to publish it. Maybe here?
July 9th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
[...] 9, 2008, 8:14 pm Filed under: civil liberties, libertarianism, politics, war Just as Dan Koffler tries to justify a left-libertarian vote for Obama by pointing out that socialized medicine is inescapable and the welfare state ain’t going [...]
July 10th, 2008 at 12:33 am
Dain: You seem to be implying that “more trade” is a good thing, as such. I suspect we have a lot more trade under NAFTA et al than we would have under genuine free trade. If all the costs to trade were internalized by those engaging in it, and all the artificial forms of comparative advantage (like IP) were eliminated, I’m guessing nine-tenths of the global economy would implode.
On the welfare state thing, I’d be a lot happier if Democrats could just think outside the box and promote welfare-state goals in a more market-friendly and less bureaucratic manner, as Jesse Walker once suggested. Namely, use pigovian taxation, severance fees and land value tax to fund a basic income–and then abolish the regulatory state and welfare bureaucracy, and eliminate most taxes on labor.
As a matter of principle I oppose single-payer health insurance. But given that healthcare is about as heavily state-cartelized and state-funded as Boeing and Grumman-Northrop, in practice nationalizing the industry would probably be pretty close to the moral equivalent of what Rothbard described in “Confiscation and the Homestead Principle”: one gang of thieves expropriating another, with nationalization potentially serving as the prelude to genuine privatization (i.e. mutualization). While–again–I don’t support such nationalization, it would probably be easier to get to a genuine free market healthcare system from something like the British NHS than from our present corporatist system: just devolve control to the individual facilities, make management responsible to patient/member/subscribers, and radically scale back or abolish drug patents and the licensing cartels.
Unlike the managerialists running the American corporate system, those at NHS (being built on the remains of an expropriated private system) can’t make vulgar libertarian moral appeals to the sanctity of “private property” against devolution/mutualization projects. And since it already justifies itself ideologically as the representative/servant of the public, it would be far more vulnerable to a movement to transform the ideological rhetoric into reality.
July 10th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Dain: You seem to be implying that “more trade” is a good thing, as such. I suspect we have a lot more trade under NAFTA et al than we would have under genuine free trade. If all the costs to trade were internalized by those engaging in it, and all the artificial forms of comparative advantage (like IP) were eliminated, I’m guessing nine-tenths of the global economy would implode.
Well, many people conflate “more trade” with “fewer barriers to trade”, and I guess that’s what I did. It’s possible that fewer barriers could result in less trade, true, but I don’t think it’s likely.
Your criticisms about internalization of costs and IP are well taken, but I don’t see anyone who is anti-NAFTA at the elite level of influence speaking about “real free trade” in anything like left libertarian terms. That is, the anti-NAFTA people aren’t talking about internalizing costs are they? Some are talking about the awfulness of IP, and I’m with them on that, but unfortunately protectionism seems to be coupled with that sentiment, as discussed by Edward Gresser in his book Freedom From Want, which came out just last year.
So my point wasn’t to say that NAFTA = more trade = free trade, just to say that at this point, what are those who want to overturn NAFTA at the mainstream level advocating?