WHY I DON'T VOTE REPUBLICAN

PART TWO: THE MONEY THING

"What consequences?" the other posters ask. "Give concrete examples."

Our hapless "conservative" attempts to provide examples. If he was a smart enough "conservative" to know that this is an exercise in futility--or how to make his point so that it could not be evaded--he'd have been booted off the list long ago.

"For instance," he says. "We could provide food for all the starving millions of the world. And that would alleviate hunger. But it might also mean that those poor people have a much higher rate of population growth than they do now, meaning more and more people and less and less food to go around, so the starvation that results three generations down the line would kill more people than starvation does now and more people than it would have if we hadn't given the food."

"Aha!" the other posters say. "Conservatives want to let people starve. They like to have people starving because starving people are desperate and they'll do anything for a little food and they can be used for slave labor by global corporations."

At that point, the discussion becomes a litany of evil conservative heartlessness and shining liberal virtue, so that in the end all that's been established is that liberals are morally upright, compassionate, caring human beings and conservatives are nothing but a bunch of evil, greedy, slavemongering sons of bitches who care about nobody and nothing but themselves.

I bring up the Compassion Orgy because there's something I want to get clear here right from the beginning: I think that the original conservative/libertarian critique of liberal social and social spending policy had a lot going for it. The Law of Unintended Consequences does operate in the real world, and no matter what your intentions may have been, your programs should be judged by their results.

The old Progressive conviction that we can apply reason and principles to the world and the people in it and "solve" the problems of that world and those people is, I think, completely discredited. Human beings are not problems to be solved, not even when they insist on drinking two quarts of rotgut whiskey a day, or murdering little old ladies for the contents of their change purses, or screwing like rabbits and producing dozens of children they refuse to support.

We are all born with drives, needs and temperaments that are often not malleable even by our own wills and intentions. The idea that some grand program of social spending and character education is going to change us from the mess of contradictions we are into rational actors who eat right, get adequate exercise, and never want to spend $1599.99 for a Versace designer Pet Rock is ludicrous.

We are never going to get rid of sloth, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, anger or pride. We're never going to get rid of status hierarchies, or competition, or inequality. We're never going to get rid of hatred or violence or war. Dante knew that. So did Lao Tzu, Aristotle, and Ibn Rushd. The worst atrocities ever committed on this planet have been the result of our delusion that it is possible to change human nature, to "perfect" human beings into New Men and Women who will not behave at all like the old ones.

But admitting that human nature is fixed and not perfectable is not the same thing as saying that human beings do not respond to the incentives and disincentives in their environments, because they do. Even conservatives think they do. That's why conservatives are so enamored of the death penalty, and why Bill Bennett made enough money to blow eight million dollars on slot machines.

And it's not the same thing as saying that all human enterprises, from selling cars to training neurosurgeons, work best when carried out by market principles. Conservatives who have no trouble at all figuring out why the old welfare system generated massive amounts of fraud chirp happily about how "the market" will solve all our problems with health care funding, even in the face of a deluge of evidence that "the market" is actually making things worse.

In fact, over the last twenty years, conservatives and libertarians have descended into ideologies that are just as rigid as those of the left they sought to replace, and just as dismissive of the realities of human nature. What's more, they're willfully blind to what ought to be obvious--that it's not "government" in particular that causes the recurrent problems of human civilizations, but centralized power, and centralized power comes in many forms besides that of the Rational State.

It's certainly true that some things are not run well when they're run by bureaucracies, especially by government bureaucracies. It's just as certainly true that some things are not run well when they're run as businesses. And it's a truth known to the ages that those in power seek to increase their power in any way they can, even when seeking that increase is likely to bring them to ruin. That's how Napoleon lost at Waterloo, and venereable corporations collapse into bankruptcy every year.

My problem with the Republican Party here is twofold: one, that they refuse to accept the fact that there may be good, practical and compelling reasons for some enterprises not to operate on the market principle; and two, that they turn a blind eye to concentrations of power when those concentrations are in private, rather than public, hands.

Let me give you an example of the latter, one I find so obvious that I have a hard time believing it isn't deliberate.

Over the last few years, the U.S. Congress has been debating a new federal bankruptcy bill that would significantly change the conditions under which Americans could file for bankruptcy and the debts that would be forgiven when bankruptcy is granted.

The chief and most glaring change has to do with credit card debt. At the moment, credit card debt is considered to be "unsecured" debt. If you default on your credit cards and go into bankruptcy, the credit card company is out of luck. It's so far at the end of the list of creditors that its chances of getting back any of the money you owe is virtually nil.

This, naturally, upsets the hell out of the credit card companies, who would like for you not to have this loophole to get out of what you owe them. Under the rules of the new bankruptcy bill, the loophole would be essentially closed. Credit card debt would be on the list of those debts--until now mostly restricted to taxes, alimony and child support--that bankrupt debtors would be required to repay in most circumstances.

The Republicans who support the new bankruptcy bill do so by placing a lot of emphasis on "responsibility." People who run up debts should be required to pay them back. The courts should not be used to let profligate shopping addicts buy lots of stuff with other people's money and never have to pay for it.

The Democrats who oppose the new bankruptcy bill do so by pointing out that most people who go bankrupt do so not because they're shopping addicts but because they've had unexpected medical expenses or have been downsized or laid off in a bad economy. Besides, the new bill would make it harder for custodial parents to collect child support from noncustodial parents, therefore hurting children at the same time it helps credit card companies.

To me, both of these analyses miss the point, but the Republican analysis misses it in a way I find egregiously wrongheaded. Yes, it's certainly true that some people rack up lots of debts and use bankruptcy not to pay them off--but credit card companies routinely charge 17% to 26% annual interest on credit card debt, and justify the exorbitant rates by saying that they need to charge those rates in order to make up for the high level of default on credit cards.

If we're going to close the "loophole" that allows people to void their credit card debt when they go into bankruptcy, shouldn't we also require credit card companies to reduce their interest rates to be more in line with interest rates generally? After all, you only pay between 5% and 8% annual interest on your house mortgage. Even the IRS only charges 6%.

What this new bankruptcy bill does--what I fault the Republicans for--is to further consolidate power in the hands of the people who already have it: the credit card companies. It contributes to an increase in centralized power, even though it takes power away from government and puts it in the hands of private businesses.

But far worse than the active collaboration in the centralization of power is the tendency of the Republican Party to support the extension of market models to areas of endeavor that work very badly, or not at all, as adventures in free enterprise. Classic libertarian principle says that government has only two functions: to act as a referee between citizens in cases of force or fraud, and to carry out those functions necessary to the existence of that society that cannot be carried out in any other way.

Lately, the Republican Party seems to think that there isn't much of anything that cannot be carried out in any other way--they'd keep the military, and the police, but even the prison system is being privatized and what isn't being privatized is often--like the state public university systems--being put on a "businesslike" basis by legislators who lack the faintest clue of what the various programs they're gutting or transforming actually do.

I agree with the conservative/libertarian position that things like health care and education are not "rights," but that's not the same as saying that I think society shouldn't provide them or that I think they can be provided for in any other way. And I'm increasingly disturbed by the willingness of the Republican Party and their allies in the press to simply lie about the nature of the problems that need to be addressed and the solutions needed to address them.

This is true not only of the Big Three domestic spending issues--Social Security, public education, and health care--but of a lot of smaller ones that fly under the radar most of the time. There are good, practical reasons for wanting to make sure that everybody, without exception, has access to a decent education and adequate health care no matter what their financial circumstances.

On the education front, children can't pick their parents, and individuals are crucial to the advance of science, knowledge and civilization. The person with the brains and imagination to cure the rare form of cancer that killed my husband at 44 could just as easily be born to a crack-addicted single mother in the inner city as to an upper-management finance honcho with a stay-at-home wife in the pricey exurbs. Nor is it impossible for a school to be good if it's government-run. Some of the most famous men and women of our time were the products of the greatest public school system that has ever existed: New York City's before the end of World War II. Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Stephen Jay Gould--yes, they were an extraordinary generation, but they're illustrative of the fact that most of the significant contributions that have been made to American society have been made by men and women who attended public schools. To imagine that it won't matter if we replace universal free education with a system that requires parents to be not only knowledgeable about educational choices, but interested in them and skillful at negotiating them is nuts. No, we don't have to stick with the present system--in fact, we shouldn't--and no, there's no arguing with the fact that American public schools are seriously in need of reform in at least some areas of the country, and completely useless in others. The simple fact is that there is no alternative to universal free education that will insure that every child at least has the opportunity to get an education.

On the health care and health insurance front, the problem is far more basic--it just isn't possible for any company anywhere to make a profit by offering and delivering comprehensive health insurance coverage at affordable prices to all comers. The media is full of stories about Evil Insurance Companies denying suffering health plan members the care necessary to cure their cancers, alleviate their pain, or maintain their lives in the wake of traumatic injury, but the insurance companies aren't evil. They're just doing what they have to do to survive.

Insurance companies make a profit by taking in more in premiums than they pay out in claims. In order to "grow"--the big buzzword in business, these days--they have to maximize the amount they take in in premiums and minimize the amount they pay out in claims. In order to do that, they have to sign up lots of young and healthy people and exclude as many older and sicker people as they can--and that means finding a way to dump "unprofitable" health plan members or to limit or deny their care as much as possible if they cannot be dumped.

The very market competition the Republicans extol as the "answer" to the health insurance problem is in fact the cause of it. There's a reason why tending to the sick has always been considered an act of corporal charity and not a business opportunity. There's a reason why Medicare exists, too, and it isn't that a lot of crypto-Commies got control of the U.S. government and imposed their socialist schemes on the rest of us. Medicare exists because insurance companies were flat out refusing to insure older people. There was just too much outgo and not enough income. Let's face it. Any insurance company that truly did what we need an insurance company to do would go bankrupt in a hurry.

The commodification of everything is not good news. There's nothing wrong with making money. I'm personally in favor of it. And I certainly don't share that dripping contempt for the profit motive that seems to overtake the judgment of far too many liberals. Some things, however, are not rationally judged on whether or not they make money, nor do they increase in excellence when subjected to market forces. Art, literature, philosophy, basic scientific research, education, health care, historical scholarship--we need all these things, and more, but, at their best, none of them does much for the bottom line. If the only criterion for judging the worth of an enterprise is how much it can bring in in cash, then we as a society will have to judge as worthless some of the most important achievements of this civilization. Even the Statue of Liberty begins to look a little suspect.

Insisting that scholarship in Elizabethan Studies and museums of American colonial art, fifth grade social studies programs and mobile prenatal care clinics, medical research and long term care for the elderly infirm all "pay their way" is not hard-headed realism, common sense, or fiscal prudence. It's a prescription for disaster, and it cheapens us as a people and as a civilization.

I'm not in love with many of the spending proposals Democrats have come up with in recent years, but at least they don't assume that the efficacy of a philosophical position can be judged by the number of books it sells in Barnes and Noble.

Go on to Part 3: The Stupid Thing

Copyright © 2003 Jane Haddam. All rights reserved.

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