Living with Consequences: Principles v People

What I have never been able to understand about the reasoning of the American Republican party, is how it manages to separate principle from consequence with no apparent self-awareness whatsoever. It's tempting to label this as simple, blatant and willful hypocrisy or bad intentions, but that is too easy: we can't just dismiss a significant portion of the population as evil and leave it at that. For one thing, I personally know several Republicans who suffer this disconnect in their thinking, and I can tell you that they are not evil people. Quite the contrary: some are among the kindest people I know. Some are also quite bright, as are many Republicans (despite what left-wing talking heads would like you to believe), so we can't set their beliefs aside as the inevitable outcome of unintelligent people making policy.

So whence the disconnect? I think it stems from two things: 1) an inability to empathize with anyone outside your own sphere of direct experience and 2) an inability to connect principles on the one hand with the logical consequences of acting on those principles on the other. I won't touch that first point as I am neither psychologist nor father confessor. Lack of empathy is a personal problem people need to address through self-examination. But let's look at some examples of that second point.

1) Principle: A combination of small government/low taxes increases freedom and thus happiness. Practical consequence: poor services and infrastructure reduce the quality of life for all. This wouldn't be so bad if Republicans admitted the relationship between these two and asserted that the consequence was worth the principle. But they defiantly refuse to admit that there is a direct, indisputable link between starving a government of funds and that government being unable to provide services and infrastructure that everyone, Republicans included, takes for granted. You hear examples of this all the time, every time you hear a Republican friend complain about potholes or bad schools or poor funding for the police in one breath, while in the next breath bemoaning their high tax burden. There is no such thing as a free lunch: you either pay the price for civilization (i.e., taxes) or you live without the trappings of a civilized society, leading to generally low levels of life satisfaction. Ah, Republicans counter, but wait! It's not that we are saying that all taxes are bad, just that we could have all these nice things with current taxation if only the government didn't waste so much/wasn't so bloated. There's just one small problem with this argument: it has little basis in reality. I am not suggesting the government doesn't waste money. No government since the dawn of civilization could make such a boast. But if you actually take the time to look at the US federal budget and cut away every single thing you could conceivably consider as wasteful, then add in all the things we all want (but that some of us refuse to pay for), you come up with a total that is greater than the sum of taxation that Republicans are willing to pay. Don't take my word for it. Look at the federal budget. Cut away whatever you hate (foreign aid, assistance to the poor, whatever); leave the stuff you like (military spending, servicing the debt in order not to default, Social Security and Medicare, national parks, law enforcement, etc.) and add in what it would take to meet the needs not currently being met (the ones you complain about all the time, e.g. poor roads and bridges, unevenly and poorly funded schools, understaffed agencies that make you wait longer than you'd like, etc., etc.). I guarantee you that unless you are the most hard-core libertarian around, you still have a budget whose needs are not met by the size and revenues of our current government. Do the math. You will be amazed.

2) Principle: government debt is bad and must be stopped at all costs. Practical consequence: starving the economy, harming our creditworthiness and creating an unstable economic environment. First a major correction to the conventional wisdom that right-wing governments are more responsible with spending that left-wing governments: this simply isn't true, either here in the US or in Europe, as I showed in a 2012 post. The indisputable, easily verifiable fact is that most of the current US federal debt was run up under Republican administrations. But let's put aside blame and focus on consequences. The fact is that national debt is not (despite the folksy wisdom of some populists) anything like extravagant household credit card debt; it can be and often is an investment in growth, and, depending on interest rates and needs, can be a very smart thing to have. For example, if you have a bridge that is falling apart today and you can borrow $100,000 at 3% to fix it now versus waiting til it collapses in five years and spending $10,000,000 to rebuild it, is debt bad here? If unemployment is high now and that is draining resources from unemployment funds while also reducing the tax base, is it better to allow that to continue with no debt or invest in fixing both the drain on resources and the damaged tax base? Government debt is an investment tool. When used wisely, it is not inherently evil. Granted, we have often used it very unwisely, but for those cases, you might want to look more at Reagan in the 1980s and Bush II in the 2000s, when all we got were irresponsible,  deficit-ballooning tax cuts and huge spending programs that did nothing to boost the long-term health of the economy.

3) Principles: government shouldn't tell the private sector how much to pay workers and government aid to the poor in unsustainable. Practical consequence: a poor minimum wage that has failed to keep up with inflation means that there is ever MORE pressure for the government to help the poor. You want to reduce Medicaid and welfare and food stamps? Much of this money goes not to the so-called 'idle poor' but to the working poor, including the lower ranks of our disgracefully-paid military servicemen and -women. So you can't have your cake and eat it, too: we either have to insist on a decent minimum wage and benefits to allow the working poor to support themselves, or you have to accept higher expenditures on aid to the poor. You can't have both a low minimum wage and a self-reliant lower economic class. It simply isn't realistic. Again, no free lunch.

4) Principle: sex education is immoral and it corrupts children. Practical consequence: higher teen pregnancy rates and more abortions, two things Republicans also decry. There are few areas where disregard for the practical consequence of principles does more harm than here. The bottom line is that abstinence-only 'education' simply doesn't work. Giving children the real facts about sex, birth control and sexually transmitted diseases, is far more effective at reducing teen pregnancy, the demand for abortions and STDs. This is not an opinion: there are mountains of data to prove this. Don't believe me? Try looking at a map of the distribution of teen pregnancies and STDs and comparing them to the red state v blue state electoral map and tell me you don't see a pattern.

I could go on, but the picture is clear: Republican principles are completely divorced from their practical outcomes. But what causes this disconnect? I think part of it is the nature of what drives the Republican mentality: unquestioning conformity to principles that are often seen as either divinely mandated or as part of an obligatory legacy of the Founding Fathers. I can't understand the logic of either of these. Even if I believed in a god, it would be one who cared about the actual outcomes for its children. And as for the Founding Fathers, the one thing people forget is that their real legacy is a framework in which we are free to create (and re-create) our own country for our own times. With all due respect to them, they were creatures of their age, and I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in the 18th century. They were a wise group, but they were, by our modern standards, also pretty misogynistic and racist. I do not judge them for that: we are all products of the age in which we live; but neither do I set such people as infallible demi-gods to whose values and ideas and structures I must cling. And they never expected us to: that's why the Constitution is a living, changeable document and one subject to the tradition of juris prudence, a tradition that allows us to adapt this document to changing values and circumstances. Such malleability is key if we are to maintain our Constitution in an ever-changing world. The Fathers couldn't have foreseen ICBMs and Uzis, the end of slavery and the liberation of women and minorities.

So how do we work with people who believe that they cannot be wrong because their principles come from on high? Well.....we don't. Sorry. Not that I don't want to, not that I don't wish we could, but by definition of who they are, it simply isn't possible to treat with the more radical wing, especially the Tea Party extremists, because their mentality leads them to classify reason and compromise as treason. You can't negotiate with someone who believes he is divinely instructed to do what, and only what, he thinks is necessary, facts and the practical consequences be damned. So all we can do is build as large a coalition as possible of liberals, centrists and the ever-fewer reasonable right-wingers and try to work around, over and under this group and wait for what always happens to reactionaries: their burial by the crushing judgement of history and the unstoppable (if slow) wave of change. The worse they can do is slow us down for a while. 

Rights without Responsibilities

It seems that every day we hear more and more about ‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’ from the right wing in this country. We’re subjected to a constant litany of complaints about the supposed infringement on these precious commodities. We hear about 2^nd Amendment rights, rights to low taxes, freedom from regulation, freedom from obligations to take responsibility for…wait a moment. What were those two words? Back up. ‘Obligations’? ‘Responsibility’? These two words seem to be outside the vocabulary of these complainers. How can one go on and on about one’s patriotism and love of country and rights and freedoms without every mentioning these two words? How can you love a country to which you feel you owe absolutely nothing but from which you enjoy all the fruits of its liberties?

You can’t just chant ‘USA! USA!’ and ‘Support the troops’ in one breath, and in the next breath begrudge the funds (aka taxes) needed to actually, literally support the troops. You certainly can’t use that old chestnut ‘Freedom isn’t free’ when you want your freedom to be literally free of charge.

You can’t bemoan attempts to place sane boundaries around your 2^nd Amendment rights when that right begins to cut into the more fundamental right of six-year-old children to live, to not have their bodies riddled with bullets from high-capacity, semi-automatic assault rifles. What about your obligations to them?  

You can’t talk about ‘freedom of choice’ in the context of our healthcare system when real choice and the highest-quality care are restricted to the wealthiest people. Yes, we have the most advanced healthcare available in the world, but the vast majority of us aren’t ‘free’ to choose that level of care. If having the most advanced care available were synonymous with having the best healthcare system, then our outcomes would be higher and we wouldn’t be ranked behind most other developed countries in life expectancy. Without the obligation to extend healthcare to all Americans, having the freedom for some select people to choose the best healthcare is meaningless.

Folks on the right wing in this country claim to be the patriots, the lovers of freedoms. But if you want freedom without responsibility, you’re not a patriot. You’re a freeloading leech sucking away resources without wanting to give anything back. That’s not my definition of patriotism. 

Let's Call the Right Wing on Their Bluff

Full disclosure: I am a proud, dyed-in-the-wool, American liberal. I believe I am the keeper of my brother if he is weaker or in need. I believe healthcare is a right, not a privilege. I believe a government’s reach does not extend to a woman’s control over her own body. I believe marriage is not a special right reserved to people of a particular sexual orientation. I unapologetically believe that, to paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, taxes are the price we should happily pay as the cost of a just, safe and civil society. I believe that rights belong to people, not corporations and other abstract legal entities: such entities’ existence and behavior should be regulated at the discretion of our citizens so that the former serve the latter, not the other way around.

Now that I have established my left-wing bona fides, allow me to commit liberal heresy. We liberals should accede to the right wing’s assertion of the preeminence of states’ rights over federal policy in all but the unarguably national arenas. The view of the right wing is best summarized by Texas governor Rick Perry’s recent quote to the effect that people vote with their feet, so if policy is left to the states and their citizens don’t like it, they can move to states whose laws more closely reflect those their beliefs. I have recently been won over to this point of view for a number of reasons:

1) As Jared Diamond (the noted ornithologist-cum-anthropologist and a hero of mine) has lamented, our convergence towards an increasingly homogeneous world culture has greatly reduced the variety of ‘experiments’ we can run to find the best outcomes for society. If we in the United States strip away the centralized federal model in favor of 50 different states each conducting its own ‘experiment’ within a looser federal union, we have 50 experiments running all at once, which could lead to new models of government and political economy. This could benefit not just Americans, but the entire world.

2) The Republicans are right about one thing: devolving power to the states does indeed increase freedom in the very real sense that local populations are free to decide on the model that best suits them, instead of bowing to a national “50 percent + 1” majority.* And that leads to the final reason...

3) Americans have lost the ability to reach a true national consensus. Every decision is made by essentially cobbling together agendas that represent just under half of the people’s will, then getting just enough indecisive people in the middle to support those goals, goals that in turn enrage the 49.9% left on the other side. For example, if I get my way on healthcare**, it basically alienates the 49.9% of America that didn’t get its way. That isn’t consensus; it’s imposition.

So I propose we strip the American federal government of everything but defense, foreign affairs and trade policy, the federal courts system, constitutionally-mandated census work, interstate transportation and commerce regulation (including food and drug safety), national parks, national security (e.g. CIA), national law enforcement (e.g. FBI), and exploration (e.g. NASA). Shut down Social Security and Medicare and divvy up and distribute to the states the current assets of those programs based on each state’s prior year contributions to them. Cease all national funding of education and arts. Shut down Medicaid and all federal welfare. Shut down all programs geared towards fostering and subsidizing corporations of all sizes (e.g. Small Business Administration). Shut down Housing and Urban Development. Cease all centrally-planned agricultural policies and subsidies. Then calculate how much money would be needed to fund the few federal departments and programs we’ve left in place and then, on a pay-as-you-go basis, simply require that states turn over that money at the start of each fiscal year, basing their contributions on their share of the population according to the most recent census, since these fiercely independent poor red states certainly wouldn’t want us subsidizing them by basing it on wealth. (Also included in the money required of the states should be funds required to pay interest on the debt and enough money to pay off that debt within 20 years.) All federal tax collection at every level (personal and corporate) would cease, leaving only fee-for-service collections for programs like national parks. How the states structure their tax systems to pay their annual federal tab and their own internal expenses, is entirely up to them. Each state decides for itself how and even if it wants to fund such programs as aid to the poor, universal healthcare, pensions, etc.

There will be two overarching consequences to trying this approach. The first will be short-term. The hypocrisy of the right wing will be exposed since conservative states that pretend to hate the federal government even as they benefit from its largesse, will be forced to face the stark reality of life without net inflows of income that many of them receive. (Isn’t it ironic, by the way, that the reddest states that so despise ‘federal waste’ are most often the net recipients of government revenue, while the many blue states that are net contributors seem to mind it the least?)

The second, longer-term consequence (and benefit) is that after a generation or so, we will finally be able to settle the argument of which models offer the most benefits and lead to the maximum happiness of the citizens. As a liberal, I am convinced that after 30 years or so, states like my adopted home state of Massachusetts will have better-educated, wealthier, happier and healthier citizens living in cleaner places. I think red states like my native Tennessee will choke (quite literally) on their ‘freedom’ from such things as healthcare and environmental regulation. Conservatives will of course wager that after a generation, their models will have proven to have produced the best outcomes. Either way, the argument will slowly be won and we can return to a truly national consensus, after which point we may return to a more centralized model based on that new consensus (if the left ‘wins’) or just maintain the devolved approach (if the right ‘wins’).

The one wrinkle may be that both sides may well claim victory because they will ask different questions about their respective models’ successes. Liberals will ask who is happiest, wealthiest (pre-tax) and healthiest. Conservatives will likely ask questions like who is ‘freer’ in the sense of being less obligated to communal needs; how many corporations are headquartered in their borders (since lower corporate taxes will likely attract many companies even if their largest markets are in, and most revenue comes from, the blue states); and how much after-tax income the ‘average’ person has (even if that average masks huge disparities between the richest and poorest as their middle classes are squeezed out). If we are therefore unable to agree on ‘who wins’, there will never be a return to national consensus, in which case I would expect to see the states drift towards regional federations of like-minded states, with the overall union eventually doomed to a slow extinction through obsolescence.

The beauty of this idea lies in its simplicity: no phonebook-size laws, just a simple raft of repeals that undo all the relevant laws, with perhaps a few new laws to govern distribution of assets to the states, collection of states’ contributions to the remaining federal programs, and to replace still-needed sections of repealed laws. Since all funds for Social Security and Medicare would simply be refunded to the states, we wouldn’t even need complicated grandfather clauses to phase out those programs. Citizen pressure should suffice to ensure that the refunded money is used for similar programs at state level. (And if not, vote with your feet!) There would be high transitional unemployment as legions of federal workers are thrown out of work, but their skills would doubtless soon be required at state level and the federal government would send them on their way with one-time payouts in order to liquidate federal employee pension obligations. The relatively small remaining federal workforce would keep their benefits and be exempted from any state-level pension contribution requirements.

There is also an historical beauty to this approach in the way it would bring us full circle: The Enlightenment-inspired Jeffersonians to whom we liberals ultimately trace our roots, were the original champions of states’ right; but in the 20th century we switched places with the Republicans, having decided that our liberal goals were best pursued at the federal level. We could now reclaim the Tenth Amendment as our own.

So let us liberals call the right wing on their bluff. Let’s try it their way and see who comes out on top.***

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Footnotes:

*Whether or not this 'freedom' to behave foolishly and deprive certain people of rights and even human dignity is a good kind of freedom, is another discussion for another day.

**I didn't. No public single-payer option means this reform was far from complete.

***For the record, I know there's no way this experiment is going to happen. But as a mental exercise, it's worthwhile to consider if for no other reason than that it reveals the hypocrisy of the right wing. Their attitude and actions seem akin to those of the weakling who says "hold me back or I'll kill 'em"....knowing full well that he is being securely 'held back'.