A Free Market Agenda for Healthcare Reform
Saturday, August 2nd, 2008As a general rule for liberal-libertarian cooperation, I’ve proposed “first do no harm.” That means, specifically, first eliminating existing forms of government intervention that are contributing to a problem before considering new forms of intervention to correct the harm. Otherwise, we end up with a sort of Rube Goldberg device, in which new layers of government intervention are added to mitigate problems created by government intervention in the first place.
Under the terms of the coalition, liberals should agree to move the elimination of existing harmful intervention to the top of their agenda, and then assess the remaining need for new intervention, before proposing new intervention. Libertarians, in turn, should agree to focus on first eliminating forms of government intervention that benefit the wealthy and big business at the expense of ordinary working people, consumers, tenants, etc., before turning their attention to state functions that protect the latter. That is, they should focus primary attention on the structural forms of intervention that support state capitalism, rather than on the secondary or ameliorative forms of intervention that make state capitalism bearable for most of us.
