A (Very) Short History of Abortion in the United States

In light of the expected overturning of Roe v Wade, I wanted to look at the not-so-long history of abortion as a political issue in the United States today.

First, let's burst a bubble.

The Founding Fathers whom conservatives idolize so much did not outlaw abortion.

What many people might find surprising about that statement is the underlying fact that abortion even existed in the 1700s. So let's take a quick detour. Not only were abortions performed in Colonial times; we have evidence of artificially-induced abortions going back thousands of years in civilizations all over the world, using a variety of methods, from surgical to herbal. And I emphasize 'artificially-induced' because as any ob/gyn can tell you, Nature herself performs far more abortions than humans do themselves: 30-40% of all pregnancies are terminated by the human body itself in spontaneous abortion or miscarriage.

Now back to those old White guys in powdered wigs...

Before a shift in doctrine beginning in the 19th century, and accelerating in the 20th, the mainstream Protestant belief in force at the time our country was founded was that life didn’t begin until “quickening,” at a minimum 15 weeks, often about 20. Until then, abortions were allowed, and it was definitely not considered “murder.” It was procedure, albeit admittedly a risky one, given the poor hygiene and medical practices of the day. So if you pictured our Founding Fathers solemnly devoting themselves to a policy of respecting the sanctity of unborn life, think again. Their belief, shared by the Catholic Church (on which more below), was that a fetus had no soul until it quickened roughly halfway through the pregnancy.

Only much later did conservative American politicians realize that abortion was an opportunity to create a divide among people and to control women, their two favorite pastimes in my experience. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church held substantially the same belief as Protestants. Abortion was a non-issue all the way up until 1869, when Pius IX did a 180 and turned the supposedly eternal and consistent Church into enemies of something they’d previously had no problem with whatsoever. Prior to that, the doctrine was in lockstep with Protestant belief, albeit with a different lexicon: in the language of the Vatican, life began upon “ensoulment,” which corresponds to that same notion of “quickening” Protestants had always embraced, i.e. around 15-20 weeks into the pregnancy. So where do Christians in America stand today? Now, of course, it is a very political issue, and if you observe the actual numbers, it is one rife with hypocrisy. It works like this: If you’re a Christian woman (or, say, a Republican Christian politician with a pregnant mistress) and you need access to a safe abortion, you get it. Indeed, 70% of all abortions are performed on women who identify as Christians, and 23% of those are evangelicals. That means that every year, there are approximately 100,000 evangelicals terminating their pregnancies, and about another 340,000 non-evangelical Christian women terminating theirs. But if you’re a Christian and someone else needs an abortion, that is apparently very wrong and that person is going to hell, and they must be prevented from accessing safe abortion care. This has serious consequences for women's health. Completely putting aside considerations of risks tied to such issues as giving birth too young or while suffering certain medical conditions, childbirth is at the best of times a risky thing, resulting in the death of the mother 14 times more often than a safe, legal abortion performed by a doctor does.

The point of this essay is not to change anyone’s mind about abortion. I am not up to that task.

But regardless of your feelings about the issue, let’s all deal in verifiable facts.

Being “pro-life” isn’t about your Bible and it’s not about your religion’s long-standing beliefs about abortion or the nature of life's beginning, because the Bible never even mentions this medical procedure, and your religion had no problem with it until a relatively short time ago, going back less than 8% of its history. Abortion is now solely about politics, and it’s about controlling women in service to a very specific political agenda in that sphere. Religion is simply a convenient excuse, as it so often is when evil people need to justify evil actions that deprive others of their fundamental rights and human dignity.

The SCOTUS Ruling on Gay Marriage

I have three issues with conservative Christians' reactions to the Supreme Court’s decision about gay marriage (and, in case anybody missed it, about the overall question of the citizenship rights of gays, marriage aside): one to do with civil rights and democracy, one to do with the (mis)understanding of the role of the SCOTUS, one to do with the Bible’s view on homosexuality.

1) Civil Rights & Democracy. Conservative Christians are making the argument that in red states, huge majorities are against gay marriage, so the SCOTUS decision is a subversion of democracy, effectively disenfranchising millions who have voted in referenda over the years to prohibit gay marriage. On many other subjects, I might agree that the overruling by nine people of the votes of millions of people would be an outrage. (Right, Mr. Scalia?) But this issue is about civil rights, and you cannot morally submit basic civil rights to a vote. In the late 18th century, slavery was still permitted even in northern states (except, bless their liberal hearts, Vermont), so if you had conducted a national referendum on slavery, I have little doubt slavery would have come out the winner. Would that have made slavery morally right and provided it legitimacy? If you had held a referendum on women's rights (particularly the right to vote) in, say, 1850, I guarantee you the all-male electorate would have soundly rejected the notion. Would that result have morally justified oppressing women? If, in 1930s Germany, you had submitted to referendum the question of Jewish rights, what do you think the outcome would have been? Would that outcome have justified the Holocaust, simply because a majority deemed it acceptable to strip a minority of its rights? (Heavens, I am only two paragraphs in and I’ve already fulfilled Godwin’s Law!) The majority simply does not have the moral right to take away basic freedoms from the minority. Ever. And by the way, that concept was best spelled out by Founding Father James Madison, most notably in the Federalist Papers, those documents most venerated among conservatives. And yet this key concept is downplayed by conservatives to the point that even the venerable Heritage Foundation doesn’t mention it in their introduction to the Papers.

2) Role of the Supreme Court. I have heard many a conservative Christian say since the ruling, that SCOTUS either doesn’t have the right to decide such matters, or shouldn’t be so ‘activist’ when considering such issues. To the first point, I would refer you to the paragraph above: we need a body that fights the tyranny of the masses. But my feelings on morality aside, I would point out what is obvious to anyone who knows even a little about the Supreme Court: that since 1803, the Supreme Court has indeed been recognized as the final arbiter in judicial review, so they absolutely do have the right to rule here. And to the second point, notice that, pretty much without exception, conservatives always endorse legal decisions that reinforce their prejudices and don’t mind if these clearly smack of judicial activism, while they reserve that term for any decision with which they do not agree. And since we are talking about legal history, let me insert here that the vilest thing I have heard yet is a comparison of this ruling to Dred Scott, the infamous 1857 SCOTUS ruling that codified the idea that African Americans were not even to be considered as citizens worthy of rights. That ruling stripped a whole people of their rights, while the ruling in favor of gay marriage did the exact opposite, insisting that we recognize our LGBT brothers and sisters as citizens who absolutely deserve equal rights and the privileges afforded to other Americans.

3) Biblical perspective. Of course, more than anything, conservative Christians insist that no matter what earthly institutions may say, the Bible commands us to condemn homosexuals and, by extension, their right to marry. I am the wrong person to challenge on this: I was a devout Christian the first couple of decades of my life, and, more relevantly, (unlike, I would say, 99% of Christians), I have actually read the Bible, cover to cover. Twice. So grab your wet-suit and let's deep-dive this from a Biblical perspective. (Note in advance that I am not even going to go into the quite demonstrably false statement that Biblical marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman. Why bother when a meme sums it up so well?)

Many people opposed to homosexuality (and who thus feel entitled to condemn gay folks) cite various passages from the Bible. The most obvious is Leviticus 20:13: "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them." The problem with this verse is not actually the verse itself - it's pretty clear in its proscription. The issue is that if you rely on the Old Testament for your morality, there are many things that many a Christian does that are equally prohibited, e.g. eating shellfish, getting divorced, committing adultery, laboring on the Sabbath, and so on. So why this selectivity? If you can be murdered for being gay, you are equally liable to have those same stones kill you for working on the Sabbath, for doing something as mundane as picking up sticks on that day. (No, seriously, it actually cites that as an example in the book of Numbers. Look it up.)

Ah, says the clever Christian, but Jesus came along and replaced the Law and washed away all previous sins with his forgiveness, but then he reinstated the prohibition against homosexuality in the New Testament itself by mentioning it several times there! Ha! Gotcha! Well.....except no. Let's break it down. First of all, even post-Jesus you are still bound by Old Testament law (including fun stuff like selling your daughter to her rapist for 50 shekels and going to hell if you suffer an accident or disease that damages your 'manhood'....seriously, have you READ this book?!). See Matthew 5:17-18, the words of Jesus himself: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished." [Emphasis mine.] So here we see Jesus saying that all that old-school stuff stays in effect. Now you're in a pickle here, Christian literalists. If Jesus didn't come to replace the old Laws, you're in trouble, and for one obscure sin or another, you deserve to be stoned to death (or worse: see above about selling your daughters, dads).

But  let's go deeper, since Christians might say I have misinterpreted Jesus's words in Matthew (though these words seem very straightforward to me). Let's say the old Laws are therefore gone. But gays are still condemned by verses from the New Testament, right? Not so fast. That I know of, there are three verses about homosexual activity in the New Testament, and the very first thing to notice is that none represents Jesus's personal stance or his own words. (He mentions homosexuality exactly zero times.)  So let's look at those three verses.

All three (in 1^st Corinthians, 1^st Timothy, and Romans) had better be disregarded by Christians for their own sakes! Read 1^st Corinthians chapter 6 (and stop being a cafeteria Christian for once and read the WHOLE CHAPTER!): homosexuality is simply one among many equally condemned sins. That's right, 1^st Corinthians makes no distinction between a gay person's 'sin' and, say, an adulterer's sin, or that of an idolater or a thief or a drunkard or slanderer or swindler. So if you use 1^st Corinthians to condemn gays as sub-human abominations before the Lord, my Christian friend, you better watch yourself. That piece of candy you stole in second grade; that time you got drunk back in....well, yesterday; that time you cheated on a test or lied about an enemy: according to the Bible, all are regarded by God as equally reprehensible. So stop looking at that sty in your gay neighbor's eye and see to the plank in your own (to paraphrase Matthew 7:5).   

(Interesting side note here: the part of chapter 6 that mentions homosexuality has an overall context of prohibiting lawsuits among Christians. So that divorced, Christian, litigation-specializing lawyer who cheated on his ex-wife is WAY WORSE than the gay man or woman he condemns, in terms of sheer volume of sin committed. Still more fascinating is that the second half of that chapter has to do with sexual immorality, but it fails to mention homosexuality by name or inference at all, though to be fair, it doesn’t mention, say, adultery by name, either, and we can safely assume that would be condemned. The point is that nowhere in the Bible is homosexuality called out as being any worse than other sins like adultery.)

First Timothy chapter 1 and Romans chapter 1 are no different than Corinthians above: homosexuality is simply listed as an equal among those other sins that our Christian brothers and sisters commit all the time (but which for some reason they see as less evil, which I am sure is not at all self-serving). But lest one think I am skimming over this because these verses weaken my point, here are the verses in question: 

1^st Timothy: “We know that the law is good if one uses it properly. We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me.” (The ‘me’ here is Paul; oddly, for a book called Timothy, the writer is not Timothy, but Paul; Timothy is the recipient.) 

Romans chapter 1: Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.”


[Here is where the lazy Christian stops reading, since his or her own prejudice has been sufficiently reinforced. Alas, there is more.]

“Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.” [Emphasis mine.]

Bottom line: if gays deserve to be cheated of their civil rights, or even killed, because their ‘sin’ is mentioned in the Bible, then almost every Christian alive deserves the same fate based on sins they have all committed, sins that nowhere in the Bible are called out as being any worse or better than homosexuality

One last point in order to address the obvious, last-ditch attempt conservative Christians can make in rebuttal here. They claim that the difference between gays v. gossips, slanderers, thieves, the greedy, the lustful, divorcees, adulterers, et al, is these latter do not live their lives in constant, unrepentant opposition to God, that they at some point stop committing their sins. Someone who commits adultery, for example, may do it only once and then plead for God's forgiveness and be absolved, while the gay person 'chooses' to spend his or her life in constant rebellion. I shouldn't need to point out the obvious flaws here, but for the sake of thoroughness, I will. There are two problems: 

1) People in this latter group in fact rarely seem to stop living in defiance of 'God's will'. How many gossipers do you know who stop gossiping? Ask Newt Gingrinch's ex-wives how contrite he was when he cheated on them and divorced them. Ask Donald Trump how many times he has been married and divorced. (Christians conveniently forget that only a spouses's 'immorality' excuses divorce, per Jesus himself.) Ask the Christian investment banker if he ever stopped being greedy from the day he finished his MBA to the day he lay on his deathbed. Know a lot of people who stop lusting until age begins to rob them of it, quite against their will? Of course, there are outliers, but the bottom line is that a group of LGBT-haters screaming 'God hates fags' is full of people in a constant state of sin and quite unrepentant. Which brings us to the second point. 

2) Gays are the only people conservative Christians are constantly trying to punish through legislation and institutionalized prejudice. Do we have laws against adultery? Not anymore. Greed? Please. It's the foundation of our economy. Lust? People try to limit it, but with limited success (and one suspects they like it that way). (Besides, without lust, we'd lose 80% of the internet.) Gossiping? How much do you figure TMZ alone makes every year, and how many people view it? Thievery? We choose to impose real penalties on only a subset of thieves. If you steal a car, you can go to jail for years. But steal from millions of homeowners and your company - not even you personally - pays a fine and you move on. No, alone among all these 'sinners' are gays, because what conservative Christians can't allow themselves to admit is that most of them just can't relate to that 'sin' the way they so easily do to lust, greed, gossiping, adultery, etc. In short, they find it 'icky' and then build up their case from there. But you being grossed out by something doesn't give you the right to persecute those who do it. People's basic human rights cannot be stripped away because their behavior simply doesn't appeal to you.

So from a civil rights, legal, and Biblical point of view, conservative Christians simply do not have a leg to stand on here. They may on a visceral level disagree with everything I have written here; but on a factual level, they can provide no meaningful rebuttal.

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. 

The Capitalist Case for Government

Libertarians are an interesting lot. They espouse the idea that almost any government is bad government, that the role of the state should be limited to national defense and a select few other tasks. To the extent they are talking about civil liberties, I tend to agree with them: I see no reason for any Leviathan to tell me whom to marry, what drugs I am permitted to ingest, what I can or can’t say, what a woman chooses to do with her body, etc.

But when it comes to what the government should do, what role it should play in the economy and infrastructure, I become confused. As you delve deeper into libertarian beliefs (and on this subject they are joined by right-wing Republican beliefs), you soon learn that they are rooted in a deep faith in capitalism and the wisdom of the markets, in the benevolent guidance of the ‘invisible hand’. But the idea that the state has no role to play in the economy is in fact quite anti-capitalist because it ignores a fundamental underpinning of capitalism, something so basic that it is really part of the definition of capitalism: comparative advantage.

The concept of comparative advantage was first described by the father of economics himself, Adam Smith. I’ll let Mr. Smith sum it up in his own words: "If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry, employed in a way in which we have some advantage." Of course, it doesn’t have to be a foreign country: it can be any entity that has an advantage over you in how efficiently or cheaply it produces a good or service. This isn’t just a principle or an abstract idea: it’s a mathematically provable fact. If you take two goods (or services) and I produce one well and you produce another well, protectionism or any other means of excluding you from production or market participation makes no sense as we are both materially better off if we trade. In fact, it goes even further: even if I am better at both of these things than you are, we are still both materially better off if I perform the task where my skill most exceeds yours and you perform the other.

So what does all this have to do with why libertarians, and right-wing Republicans who claim to be capitalists, shouldn’t object to the many things modern governments do? It’s because with quite a lot of the tasks required to survive and thrive in modern life, governments enjoy a distinct comparative advantage over individuals and even corporations and other organizations. Let’s take safety inspections as an example. A strict libertarian says that safety of the food supply should be left to producers, because it is in their best interest not to poison their customers, who, if so poisoned, would punish them by not buying their products.* A single, centralized governmental food safety organization enjoys a distinct comparative advantage over private industry here, and certainly over individuals. The collective cost of all Americans being responsible for their own food safety testing is ridiculously higher than what a single agency would cost to perform this task for us all. Even when compared to industry doing the testing (assuming we were foolish enough to trust them to do so), government still enjoys the cost advantage through economies of scale and centralization that help avoid redundant costs and resources. So why not be good capitalists and pay them to do it through our taxes?

The same principle applies to a vast array of goods and services. Health insurance is another, much as American Republicans and libertarians deny it. The verifiable fact is that programs like Medicare and Medicaid have far less costly overhead and operating expenses than do private insurance companies, who must pay for things like marketing and who of course must make a profit. At the other end of the spectrum is something like manufacturing, a task government is quite ill-suited to perform because, due to elasticity of demand, competition is key to (and effective at) driving efficiency and innovation, and a government take-over of such a task would by definition eliminate such competition. And therein lies one of the keys to deciding what government should and shouldn’t do: price elasticity of demand. That’s just a fancy way of saying that people will demand something like healthcare service at roughly the same level regardless of price (so it is quite inelastic). You don’t say, ‘no thanks, I’ll just leave that arm broken or let that cancer grow because the price is too high’ the way you would decide to walk or take the bus if car prices went up too much. That’s why it does make sense for healthcare insurance to be a government task while car manufacturing is best left to the private sector: prices for cars are quite elastic since people have many options, thus ensuring that there will be fierce competition among makers to innovate and keep costs low through efficiency as otherwise they lose business either to competitors or to alternative means of transportation. The list of examples could go on and on: roads, emergency services, schools on the one side; manufactured goods and value-added professional services on the other side.

So if our libertarian and conservative friends want to be good little capitalists, let them prove their understanding of capitalism by applying a reasoned, rational test - versus an emotional, irrational and ideological one - when deciding what the government should and shouldn't do. If government enjoys a comparative advantage, and especially if the good or service in question suffers from highly inelastic demand, then let them do it and pay them a fair price (through reasonable taxation) to do so; else, leave it to the private sector.

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*Let’s put aside for the moment the absurdity of allowing people to die in order to allow the market to adjust itself. Let’s also put aside the fact that poisoning with chemicals and impurities can take years if not decades, thus leaving companies with a profit motive to continue poisoning in the short to medium term with no fear of retribution from the marketplace during the lifetime of current management.

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. 

Why You Shouldn't Resent the Unemployed, Unemployable...or Even the Just Plain Lazy

I have never been on welfare. I have been fortunate to benefit from a great education, hard work and some plain ol' dumb luck. But I don't resent those who are on welfare. Indeed, one reason I find it so difficult to relate to the radical right wing in this country, is their whiny temper tantrums about the poor. They seem to believe these people are lazy and want to live in unemployment and poverty, that they prefer to live off the largesse of the public purse.

Let's put aside the fact that the 'largesse' of the public purse is hardly enough to afford the luxurious lifestyles Republicans want us to believe the poor lead. The myth of the Welfare Queen is exactly that: a myth. Let's also put aside the fact that an exceedingly small number of Americans spend very long periods on welfare. For most, welfare is exactly what it's intended to be: a short-term safety net to prevent people from starving or becoming homeless due to unemployment or family situations that preclude employment. A relatively very small number of people are on it for decades.

But these few people just make Republicans seethe with anger. And this rage makes people perceive that the costs for programs helping the poor (both here and abroad through foreign aid) are huge when in fact they are not. When pollsters ask people how much of our budget goes to helping the less fortunate, the figures they state are staggeringly wrong. For example, most Americans believe that more than 5% of our budget goes to foreign aid, when in fact it is less than 1%.

Let's also put aside my rather subjective take that this resentment and this anger are childish and selfish. It reminds me of the 5-year-old who throws a tantrum because his friend is using his toy, even when it's a toy he didn't care about and hadn't been using for ages. When conservatives get so worked up about welfare, I half expect to see them throwing themselves on the ground, kicking and screaming, shouting 'MINE, MINE, MINE!'

So putting all these issues aside, why should Republicans, Teabaggers and others NOT resent the poor and unemployed? One simple reason: we'd all be screwed without them. Let me say that again: without the poor, unemployed, and yes, even the lazy, this and every other capitalist country on the face of Earth would be quite royally and completely screwed. Why? Because having a certain portion of the population idle (by choice or otherwise) is like a safety valve through which the built-up steam of excessive demand for goods, services and labor can be vented. In the absence of this safety valve, you get runaway inflation and economic collapse. If there were a job for every person in this country and everyone who could work, did work, inflation would spiral out of control, primarily for two reasons: 1) Labor costs would soar. It's simple supply and demand: if everyone is working, there are far fewer applicants for new jobs and employers must thus pay a premium to entice people to change jobs. This has a snowball effect and soon wage inflation is out of control. This might sound good if you are a wage-earner, but it isn't because of reason number two. 2) When there are too many dollars chasing too few goods, prices skyrocket. With all those added wage-earners and all that added wage inflation, there would be too much money flooding the system in relation to how quickly that system could meet demand. Next thing you know, inflation hits double, then even triple digits.

So the next time you see one of those obnoxious bumper stickers that say, 'Work harder: Millions of people on Welfare are counting on you', tell the driver that he should be sending thank-you notes to those people for keeping his whole economic system and way of life feasible.

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'.