Category Archives: Articles

When Centralized Institutions Fail, Is Anarchy an Answer?

July 16, 2012 – 12:42 pm


Last week I raised the topic of institutional failure: Why is institutional trust and trustworthiness failing more-or-less across the board? Corporations, political parties, the various layers and branches of government, churches, academia, the banking system, the media — none provides a solid base to stand on while we reform the others.

Two leaps. Then I made a leap you might not agree with: Even though each institution has its own failure story, I decided to look for some common cause, which I called a UFT (Unified Fuck-up Theory). I chose a tongue-in-cheek label because I realize I’m getting uncomfortably close to conspiracy-theory territory. (In Valis, Philip Dick wrote, “It certainly constitutes bad news if the people who agree with you are buggier than batshit.”) But the alternative is big-coincidence territory, and I’m not comfortable there either.

I followed that leap with another, which I’ve since come to call the Agatha Christie Hypothesis: If the clues don’t add up, it means that the culprit never made it onto your suspect list. So the common cause is likely to be something we instinctively don’t question.

Chris Hayes went down that path in Twilight of the Elites and pointed his finger at meritocracy. The certainly satisfies the ACH: Literally nobody had been saying “Our problem is that talented, hard-working people get ahead.”

As I laid out in more detail last week, Hayes argues that meritocracy justifies a level of inequality that has created a new ruling class, i.e., the elite have enough power to game the system that there is no longer anything like the level playing field meritocratic theory assumes. As a result, our institutions are run by an entrenched, hyper-competitive, self-serving elite that feels entitled to whatever it can grab. We have re-created the noblesse without the oblige.

In The Leaderless Revolution, former British diplomat Carne Ross adds another unexpected culprit to the suspect list: representative democracy.

Sheep and Shepherds. The basic idea of representative democracy is that a world of sheep and shepherds is fine, as long as sheep get to elect their shepherds. Presumably, the sheep will choose good shepherds, who will stay good because the sheep could replace them.

Ross criticizes this model from both sides: First, the options offered to the people are too limited and too easily manipulated by those with money and power. My favorite expression of this situation comes from the Cake song “Comfort Eagle”

Some people drink Pepsi, some people drink Coke.
The wacky morning DJ says democracy’s a joke. 

More prosaically, Benjamin Barber wrote:

We are seduced into thinking that the right to choose from a menu is the essence of liberty, [but] the powerful are those who set the agenda, not those who choose from the alternatives it offers.

In November, for example, the American people will elect either Romney or Obama. How many important issues does that choice take off the table?

Second, the job of “good shepherd” is impossible in such a complex, diverse, inter-connected world. Even with the best intentions, no one can “represent” a nation like the United States or the United Kingdom. The very attempt (as Ross knows from personal experience) leads you to adopt grossly oversimplified worldviews that create more problems than they solve.

Representing the UK at the UN. The stories from Ross’ diplomatic career are worthwhile whether you end up agreeing with his conclusions or not.

The British Foreign Office is an elite Chris Hayes would recognize. A hyper-competitive process selects Ross and a few others out of thousands of applicants.

We were a chosen elite, given to expect that in due course we would become ambassadors and undersecretaries, the most senior exponents of our country’s wishes. I was elated to join this exclusive club and happy to undergo the many compromises membership in this group entailed.

Then the recruits are indoctrinated into the groupthink of the Foreign Office, which affirms the diplomats’ superiority: Only they know the classified information. Only they have unfettered access to the real experts — each other.

Eventually, Ross becomes head of the Middle East section of the British mission to the UN, where he and his American allies design and maintain the trade sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — sanctions that were not only based on false assumptions about Iraq’s WMDs, but whose burden fell mainly on the Iraqi poor. Ross now accepts demographers’ calculations that the sanctions caused an “excess mortality rate” of half a million Iraqi children.

In other words, half a million children died. Though Saddam Hussein doubtless had a hand too, I cannot avoid my own responsibility. This was my work; this was what I did.

In what way, Ross now wonders, did he “represent” the people of the United Kingdom? Given the information and responsibility he had, how many of Ross’ sheep would have let hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children die in exchange for a small theoretical increase in their own safety? Might they instead have shown some compassion and courage? And if ordinary citizens of both countries had met in the same room, might they have come up with completely different options?

Rather than a series of gates through which information and power flow, representative democracy has become a series of walls: The people are cut off from their diplomats, and the diplomats in turn are cut off from the foreign peoples their actions affect.

Similar stories could be told in every country, about every aspect of government policy.

Renouncing the pact. So Ross is attacking government from a different side than conservative libertarians do. Libertarian rhetoric focuses on the tyranny of governments interfering with sovereign individuals, and minimizes any collective or social responsibility. “Society” is just a myth that justifies the few ruling the many.

Ross is saying almost the exact opposite: Not only do we have collective responsibilities to do things like take care of the planet, help each other, establish justice, and live together in peace, but those responsibilities are too important to hand off to leaders. He wants us to renounce what he calls “the pact”:

We vote, they act; we get on with our lives, they protect. … For most of us, politics is a spectator sport.

He cites the 2008 Obama campaign. Obama called for and got unprecedented participation from individual citizens. But

The political end of his campaign was not change itself, but for him to be elected to deliver change — a subtle but crucial distinction, and the disjunction at the heart of representative democracy.

Grey anarchy. Ross uses the word anarchy in a positive sense, but he means something subtle by it. Usually we talk about anarchy in a black-or-white way. We have a government or we don’t; anarchy is achieved by overthrowing government and not replacing it.

Ross’ anarchy has more grey in it. Government isn’t evil, just hopelessly inadequate. We need to figure out how to work around government — rather than through it — in order to fulfill our social responsibilities.

If government cannot provide for the stability, safety and just arbitration of our common affairs, who can? The answer is both radical and discomforting. For there is only one alternative if government cannot successfully provide: We must do so ourselves. Self-organized government is one term; another, rather more loaded term, is anarchism.

His model is more the everybody-pitch-in model of Wikipedia than the every-man-for-himself model of conservative libertarianism. Rather than electing the next savior, activists should focus on creating new arenas of interaction and trust where creative self-organization becomes possible.

The goal is to make the leaders become the followers: Rather than change society through politics, directly create social change that the politicians will have to react to.

Methods, not programs. Predictably, Ross’ prescriptions are on the vague side, and are more about methods than programs. (If he said, “Pass my program” he’d be back in the representative democracy model, offering himself as a leader.) He ends with nine principles for action, but unfortunately they take more space to unpack than I have. So I’ll have to do my own summary.

The ideal anarchic action, from Ross’ point of view, is something that will start a wave: It tackles the problem in some small but direct way, other people will see it, and they will be inspired to imitate. It is nonviolent and builds new trustworthy relationships. It will achieve something even if it doesn’t totally catch on. It focuses on those who are suffering most, and asks what they want rather than imposing a solution on them.

Gandhi’s salt march, Rosa Parks not giving up her seat — these are both cited as good examples.

Or maybe we could look at Ross’ current project, which he describes in this interview on the Colbert Report: He’s working an Occupy Wall Street bank.

By weeklysift | Also posted in The Sifted Bookshelf | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

What Shaving Taught Me About Capitalism

July 16, 2012 – 10:20 am

A couple months ago, I ran into an article on TechDirt that linked to another guy’s post on his personal blog, both making the same ridiculous point: Shaving technology hasn’t really improved since World War II.

Anybody who watches sports in real time (when you can’t fast-forward through the commercials) knows this is crazy. For decades, shaving has had a “revolution” every two or three years: disposables, cartridges, comfort strips, double-blade, triple-blade, and now even 5-blade cartridges. Each revolution makes shaving a little more expensive, but it achieves the perfect comfort and safety that the previous revolution fell short of.

Or so the ads say.

But these guys on the internet were saying that all the revolutions were just marketing nonsense, and that I (and just about every other male on the planet) had been taken in by it. Shaving itself hadn’t gotten any safer, easier, or more comfortable since the last few bugs were worked out of the double-edged safety razor, a technology that is more than a century old.

All these “improvements”, they claimed, had only two purposes:

  • to create a patentable technology that would protect the manufacturer from generic competition for another 20 years or so.
  • to provide a marketing gimmick that would make men fork over big bucks for a product no better than one they could buy cheaply.

That couldn’t be right. Could it?

Reclaiming the way of my ancestors. It’s actually not that simple to find out. My local supermarkets and drug stores sell double-edged blades if you look hard enough for them — they get one hook in the whole shaving aisle — but the razors they fit into are nowhere. No worries, though, that’s what the internet is for: I got a perfectly functional razor (in the old butterfly style my Dad used) for about $20. That lone hook in my supermarket carries 5-blade packs for $2. Above it, rows of 8-packs of Gillette Fusion cartridges go for $32.

Do the math: 40 cents apiece vs. $4 apiece. Even for somebody like me (who goes bearded in the cold half of the year) that could add up.

But what about the experience and the quality of shave? You have to hold the handle at a slightly different angle (because the double-edged blades sit perpendicular to the handle rather than being angled like the cartridges), and that takes a day or two to get used to. After that, in my opinion, the “improved” 21st-century razor is no better and might even be worse.

Connoisseur shaving. Once you start browsing through shaving web sites, you quickly discover the other side of the market: straight-razor shaving, like the old-fashioned barbers did before King Gillette (his real name, apparently) invented his double-edged blades. (BTW, it turns out this great American entrepreneur was a utopian Socialist.)

Today, straight-razor shaving is a way for a man to establish his connoisseur identity, and it carries a comparable price tag. A high-class straight razor can set you back hundreds. Then you need a leather strop, and the perfect brush and bowl to mix your special shaving soap, and on and on.

Upper-crust malls have a chain of shops called The Art of Shaving, many of which include a barber chair where a straight-razor professional can demonstrate proper technique.

Does it make a difference? I got the cheap cousin of the classic straight razor — a $19 arm-and-handle that holds half of a double-edged blade. Straight-razor shaving turns out to be like driving a manual transmission or baking a cake from scratch. It takes some learning, there’s a certain satisfaction to mastering it, and even if you never do it again, you’ll have a deeper appreciation of what’s really going on when you shave.

Here’s the deeper appreciation I got: All blade shaving comes down to covering your face with something slick, and then dragging something sharp across it. You can improve by making the slick stuff slicker or the sharp thing sharper, but pretty soon you’ve gone as far as you can go. Beyond that, it’s all marketing.

Profit margins. So let’s review. Shaving has basically been a solved problem for at least half a century. By the 1970s the patents on those solutions had expired, and nothing of importance has been invented since. In a sensible world, all men would know this and the factories would focus on delivering cheap high-quality double-edged razor blades.

That didn’t happen because it wouldn’t have made anybody rich. Since a standardized, patent-expired product like the double-edged razor can be made cheaply by anybody, the profit margin is too small to buy Super Bowl ads or pay stupendous CEO salaries.

So instead, the market has gone two ways. The mass market has kept research labs busy churning out phony “improvements” that generate market-protecting patents and give advertisers something to work with. And vast amounts of money have been spent persuading men (successfully!) that there’s something new worth paying up for and something primitive about the double-edged safety razor.

For men who have caught on to that game, a connoisseur market sells expensive shaving paraphernalia to bolster an overclass identity. So whether you’re a mass-market Gillette-Fusion-type guy or a connoisseur wielding a buffalo-horn-handle Damascus-steel-blade straight razor, you support a market with high profit margins.

Computers, razors, and public schools. This isn’t a personal-care blog, so I didn’t tell you any of that because I think you care about shaving. Instead, I believe there’s a lesson here about capitalism and politics.

Whenever we have a public discussion about the virtues of the free market, we always end up talking about computers. Computers keep getting better and lighter and faster and cheaper because that’s what the market does; it forces everybody to improve or die.

So we’re always promised that if we turn the magic of the free market loose in some new area — if we get rid of public schools, say, and let the market educate our kids, or if we stop regulating healthcare and let hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies compete freely — we’ll see the same incredible progress we’ve seen in computers. Everything will get better and cheaper in ways no one can imagine now.

But how do we know that the education market or the healthcare market won’t turn out to be like shaving? What if, instead of low prices and spectacular improvements, we get high prices funding marketing campaigns that obscure and denigrate the low-profit-margin solutions that already exist and actually make sense?

Realistically, it could go either way. Neither the computer market nor the shaving market is an invention of some political propagandist. Both exist in the same economy.

Capitalism is double-edged that way. Sometimes the market inspires scientists and engineers to build a better mousetrap. But sometimes it’s the advertisers who turn out to be slicker and sharper than the rest of us.

By weeklysift | Tagged | Comments (11)

Believe in America, Mitt

July 16, 2012 – 9:04 am

Now available on t-shirts. Click the image.

When Mitt Romney wrapped up the Republican nomination in April, I framed the next phase of the campaign in terms of four narratives: pro/anti-Obama and pro/anti-Romney. The anti-Romney narrative was:

You should vote against Romney because he’s not on your side. His policies favor the rich because he’s rich, he’s always been rich, and the rich are the only people he understands or cares about.

In the last few weeks we’ve seen Obama’s people establishing that narrative and Romney’s people floundering to counter it. The threads of that story are Romney killing American jobs while he was at Bain Capital and Romney maneuvering around taxes by running his money through Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, and Switzerland.

When this stuff came up in the Republican primaries, Romney toughed it out by saying his critics were jealous of his success, he did nothing illegal, and he wasn’t going to talk about it.

Those answers worked then for two reasons:

But Romney should fire whoever told him the same answers would work now. The Republican establishment may have whipped Gingrich and Perry into line, but they can’t make Obama back off. And general-election swing voters do see tax evasion as a moral issue. It’s not enough for Romney’s high-priced accountants to follow the letter of the law. When the rich wriggle out of taxes by using special dodges not available to working people, that’s not clever, it’s sleezy.

Plus, it undermines the pro-Romney narrative, which I phrased like this:

This country is going the wrong way and Romney is a smart executive who knows how to turn things around.

Sure, Romney is smart. But is he Steven Jobs smart or Bernie Madoff smart? Swiss bank accounts, Bermuda shell corporations, deals where Romney walks away with all the money and everybody else gets screwed … what does that sound like?

Once you get past first impressions, the argument over Bain turns technical, which is never good for a politician trying to dispel a bad odor. (That’s what Lee Atwater meant when he said, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing” — a line Romney misquoted and apparently doesn’t understand.) Romney’s defense against the job-exporter charge is that Bain outsourced to Mexico and China only after Romney left in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympics. That answer temporarily convinced New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who, in a remarkably balanced analysis, concluded that Obama’s attacks were false … until the next shoe dropped and he had to write an update.

The next shoe was the Boston Globe uncovering filings with the SEC in which Bain listed Romney as CEO up to 2002 and said he made a six-figure salary for what he now claims was a no-show job. Also, when Massachusetts Democrats challenged his residency prior to his 2002 run for governor (partly because Romney had been avoiding state taxes by listing his Utah home as his primary residence), Mitt claimed he was merely “on leave” from Boston-based Bain, making Massachusetts his real home.

So where Romney lives, who he works for, and the location of his money all vary depending on who’s asking and why.

Shifty. Sleezy. And in retrospect, maybe not as clever as he thought.

On Friday, Romney broke out of his bubble and let himself be interviewed by every major news network other than MSNBC. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t understand the playbook for such situations. Unlike, say, Barack Obama trying to settle the Jeremiah Wright controversy or the Clintons responding to Gennifer Flowers’ charges, Romney offered no deeper insight into himself and no broader frame for the story as a whole. Instead, he just put his own face behind the unconvincing denials his people had already offered.

Two media responses to the Romney interview blitz sum up how ineffective it was. Rachel Maddow (of the spurned MSNBC) laughed at the situation:

And Forbes’ T. J. Walker captured how little Romney had settled in 35 Questions Mitt Romney Must Answer About Bain Capital Before The Issue Can Go Away.

Meanwhile, there’s some evidence that the Bain story is moving the polls in swing states, where Obama is running ads like this one.

But at this stage, the main thing is the narrative, not the polls. Come November, both Romney and Obama will need a closing argument to convince those last few undecideds. That argument will have to build on the stories being established now. “I’m a smart executive” is not going to do the job.

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In Search of a Unified F***-Up Theory

July 9, 2012 – 12:37 pm

The biggest mystery of recent years is: Why are all our institutions failing at the same time? Think about it:

  • We just had a banking crisis that required trillions of dollars of bailouts and interest-free loans to the very people who caused it and profited from it. No one went to jail, in spite of massive evidence of criminality. More-or-less nothing has been done to prevent the same thing happening again.
  • Our election campaigns have become open bidding wars. As a result, Congress is largely unresponsive to the desires of anybody who’s not rich, and the number of people who rate the “honesty and ethical standards” of congressmen as high or very high is an anemic 7% — the same rating lobbyists get.
  • The public distrusts scientists. Among scientists who study climate, 97% believe in man-made global warming. But only about half of the public does, and that’s a recovery to 2009 levels after a considerable dip.
  • The Catholic Church has been rocked by its pedophilia scandal. And the worst of it is this: When bishops found out, they uniformly protected the guilty priests rather than the innocent children. That part of the scandal goes all the way to the Pope, and there’s been no house-cleaning of implicated bishops.
  • Public expectations of presidential candidates have plummeted. In 2000, Al Gore was tagged with being a “serial exaggerator” after saying a few mostly true things. This year, much of Mitt Romney’s stump speech consists of publicly debunked lies, and it’s not an issue. Voters shrug and say that all politicians lie.
  • The Supreme Court has become partisan. People have always complained that the Court’s legal philosophy was too liberal or too conservative. But only since John Roberts and Sam Alito replaced David Souter and Sandra Day O’Connor have major cases routinely been decided on 5-4 party-line votes. Today, if the president who appointed you was Republican or Democrat, that’s the side you take. The shock of Roberts’ ObamaCare decision wasn’t his legal reasoning, it’s that he crossed party lines.
  • In discussions about baseball’s Hall of Fame, the main topic isn’t how good players were, it’s whether they cheated or not. It’s very possible that the biggest stars of the 1990s — Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa — won’t be in the Hall.
  • Both Presidents Bush and Obama embraced the doctrine that the president can rain death on countries we are not at war with. If Americans get killed in the process, too bad. American citizens might even be the target.
  • Trust in journalism has collapsed. Again and again, the press has been the watch-dog that didn’t bark: Iraq’s non-existent WMDs, the housing bubble, and so on. Plus, they’ve increasingly practiced he-said/she-said journalism that punts the question of what is true. Newspapers are closing, reporters are being laid off — and yet, at the top, the marquee journalists remain the same no matter how many stories they screw up. The marquee pundits keep their jobs no matter how often they are proven wrong.

It goes on and on. All eras experience some institutional failure, but usually when one institution fails, you can take refuge in another: When Al Capone had city government in his pocket, the feds took him down. When the political process denied justice to blacks, the courts provided it. When Nixon’s White House was corrupt, Congress, the judiciary, and the press performed well.

What’s bizarre and unsettling about our era is that there seems to be nowhere to turn. Why is that? What’s making all our institutions suspect at the same time?

Devil theories. If you’re a certain breed of conservative Christian, what’s going on is obvious: The Devil and his minions are stepping up their malignant activities in preparation for the End of the World. And various secular subcultures have their own devil theories: the Koch Brothers, the worldwide socialist conspiracy, and so on.

While I’m no fan of the Kochs, all these one-big-conspiracy theories seem nutty to me. (I’ll bet lots of eras had evil billionaires.) But I do have to give them this: A devil theory is an answer on the scale of the problem. 

Conspiracy theorists respond to our attempts to be rational with: “What? You think this is all a coincidence?”

They’ve got a point. This situation begs for a UFT (Unified Failure Theory, or, as I sometimes call it, Unified Fuck-Up Theory), something that pulls it all together. But could we get a non-crazy one?

The meritocracy did it. If you read classic mysteries, you’ve seen this situation before: The clues link up here and there, but don’t make sense when you put them all together. Usually that means that the murderer is somebody who is off your radar completely, either because you’re trained not to see them (the butler) or you trust them implicitly (the vicar or the victim’s loyal-but-mousy sister).

That’s the approach Chris Hayes takes in Twilight of the Elites. Whatever ties these failures together must be something we’re incapable of doubting. Otherwise we’d have seen the connection by now.

What is it that all our smartest people believe in implicitly? The meritocracy. The principle that the most talented, hardest working people should rise to the top.

And while belief in the meritocracy is self-serving for those who do make it to the top, it’s more than that: All the social progress of the last half-century — civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights — justified itself in meritocratic terms: If you are good at what you do, you should rise, even if you don’t look like the people currently on top.

But what if elite failure — bankers who can’t bank, representatives who can’t represent, immoral moral leaders, and so on — is the dark side of the meritocracy?

What is meritocracy? Hayes says meritocracy depends on two principles: inequality and mobility. There is a top to rise to, and nothing but your own limitations can stop you from rising.

The problem is that the combination is unstable: When inequality passes a certain point, the people on top become powerful enough to screw up mobility. Eventually, no matter where they came from originally, the meritocratic elite comes to look on itself as a class and pursue its own interests.

The first example Hayes gives is the best: his alma mater, Hunter College High School in Manhattan.

Entrance to Hunter rests on a single “objective” measure: one three-hour test. If you clear the bar, you’re in; if not, you’re out. There are no legacy admissions, and there are no strings to pull for the well connected.

Hunter’s racial/ethnic composition never matched New York City’s, but the gap has widened in recent years. The entering class was 18% black/Hispanic in 1995, but just 4% in 2009.

Why? The test-prep industry. If you’re almost Hunter quality but have money, you can train to pass the test. If you’re just barely Hunter quality and you don’t have money, you’ll get aced out.

New York’s wealthy elite has figured out how to game the system for its children. And Hunter’s selection process has not kept up because … why would it? People powerful enough to make the system ungameable are precisely the ones who want to game the system.

Entitlement. What happens when a meritocracy gets corrupted like this? The appearance of rigorous competition remains, leaving the elite with an undeserved sense of entitlement: We are the ones who passed the test, so we deserve the cookies.

Such a ruling class would have all the competitive ferocity inculcated by the ceaseless jockeying within the institutions that produce meritocratic elites, but face no actual sanctions for failing at their duties or succumbing to the temptations of corruption. It would reflexively protect its worst members, it would operate with a wide gulf between performance and reward, and would be shot through with corruption, rule-breaking, and self-dealing as those on top pursued the outsize rewards promised for superstars.

But such a ruling class would also not be as smart as it thinks it is. It might, for example, think it has come up with a totally new and foolproof way to handle financial risk — and screw it up.

It would also see success as its own justification, an attitude that Hayes connects to Enron and the mortgage bubble. The people making the most money must be the smartest, and anyone who tries to tear them down is just jealous.

Co-opting Obama. Newcomers to the ruling class really did have to jump some hurdles, and as a result they have undue faith in the class they have entered into. President Obama, for example, cannot shake his faith in the experts. Surely the bankers must be the right people to fix the banking system. The businessmen must be the right people to revitalize business. If they weren’t the smartest people in the room, they wouldn’t have made it to the top, right?

Fractal inequality. This is my favorite phrase from the book. No matter how high you rise — the 1%, the 0.1%, the 0.001% — there always seems to be a higher level where the real action is. Again, Hayes uses his own experience well: When he finally got an invitation to the Davos meetings, it seemed like evidence that he had really made it. But once there

you realize that in the context of Davos attendees, you are a member of the unwashed masses

And the people you look up at are the unwashed masses of an even higher level.

As a result of this fractal inequality, everybody is constantly struggling to rise higher, grasping for whatever advantage they can get, and no one reaches a position where they can relax and turn a beneficent eye to the people below.

Distance. Representative democracy was supposed to close the distance between the rulers and the ruled. Leaders were supposed to spring up from among the people, and then go off to represent them in Congress.

Again, that’s been circumvented. No one who isn’t already well connected can hope to raise the money necessary to run for Congress or just about any other major office. And so we have a huge social distance between the leaders and the led.

That distance leads to disasters like New Orleans. The evacuation worked very well, Hayes points out, for people with cars. The leadership just underestimated the number of people without cars or what they would be likely to do, even though that information was available if anyone had thought to look for it.

So that’s the picture in failure after failure: A entrenched and entitled elite, hyper-competitive within itself, but distant from the people their actions affect.

What to do? It’s a basic part of our political rhetoric that we want equal opportunity, but want the government not to try to equalize outcomes. Hayes thinks that position is naive. With sufficient inequality of outcome, equality of opportunity is impossible. Meritocracy needs some inequality (or there’s nothing to win). But too much inequality destroys the meritocracy itself. So Hayes’ solutions are all about seeking more equality of outcome.

A second approach is something I’ll explore next week: moving towards a more anarchic system, where less responsibility is delegated and less is expected or demanded of elites. The text for that discussion will be The Leaderless Revolution by Carne Ross.

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The Economics of Leviticus

July 9, 2012 – 11:59 am

Culture war conversations often end with a verse from Leviticus, the old testament book of laws. After the verse has been quoted, it does no good to point out that the implied solution is impractical or unfair or causes needless suffering. God has given his command and we should be carrying it out, whether it makes sense to us or not.

Strangely, though, the economic parts of Leviticus aren’t quoted with the same air of ultimate authority. If they were, Biblical literalists might have to become radicals rather than reactionaries.

For example, when vulture capitalists ruin towns by closing factories and shipping jobs overseas, someone might quote Leviticus 19:9-10, which clearly denounces business practices that wring out every last dime of profit.

When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner.

The foreigner? You mean, like, illegal aliens? Could be. Leviticus 19:33-34 says:

When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.

It doesn’t say anything about a green card, it just says “resides among you in your land”. (Don’t argue with me, argue with God. I’m just reading literally.)

But by far the most radical part of the book is Leviticus 25, the chapter that institutes the Jubilee Year.

Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan. The fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; do not sow and do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the untended vines. For it is a jubilee and is to be holy for you; eat only what is taken directly from the fields. In this Year of Jubilee everyone is to return to their own property.

“Their own property” includes anything that has been sold or repossessed:

If one of your fellow Israelites becomes poor and sells some of their property … [and] if they do not acquire the means to repay, what was sold will remain in the possession of the buyer until the Year of Jubilee. It will be returned in the Jubilee, and they can then go back to their property.

Basically, every 50th year all mortgages and foreclosures are cancelled and land goes back to its original owners. Anybody whose debts forced them into slavery is freed.

I know what you’re thinking: “That would never work.” And you’re absolutely right: It would never work with our modern capitalist notion of private property. But guess what? Leviticus has a completely different understanding of property:

The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers. Throughout the land that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land.

So the Earth itself belongs to God, while human deed-holders only own what the land produces.

If you sell land to any of your own people or buy land from them, do not take advantage of each other. You are to buy from your own people on the basis of the number of years since the Jubilee. And they are to sell to you on the basis of the number of years left for harvesting crops. When the years are many, you are to increase the price, and when the years are few, you are to decrease the price, because what is really being sold to you is the number of crops.

Leviticus was talking about an agrarian economy. If you wanted to apply this today, you might generalize to something like this: The Bible does not support private ownership of the means of production. The owner owns the product, not the means of production.

Taking Leviticus 25 seriously would force a sweeping re-visioning of the economic system. That would be a lot of work, and cause a certain amount of distress for the people who own property under our more free-trading definition. Why go to all that trouble? Unless you think this the Word of God or something.

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What the Court Decided About ObamaCare

July 2, 2012 – 1:05 pm

Thursday, the Supreme Court announced its decision that the individual healthcare mandate, and hence the Affordable Care Act as a whole, is constitutional. It was a 5-4 decision, with Chief Justice Roberts siding with the Court’s four liberals and Justice Kennedy (the usual swing vote) joining the other three conservatives.

I was thrilled. Yes, Roberts got to that decision in an odd way (more on that later), and states were given the option to opt out of the Medicaid expansion. (I expect Republican governors to posture a lot about this, but I have a hard time believing they’ll actually refuse.) But the alternative was stark: We’d be back to square one on health care, stuck with 50 million uninsured Americans, spiraling healthcare costs that are already the highest in the world, and no plan on the table to fix any of it.

So we should all take a moment to do a happy dance.

Done? OK, now let’s look at this in a wider perspective.

History. Democrats have been trying to get some form of national health insurance since Truman. LBJ got Medicare and Medicaid passed in the 60s. Clinton tried and failed to get universal health care in the 90s.

Fear that Democrats might someday succeed in passing a Medicare-for-everybody plan that put private health insurance companies out of business caused the conservative Heritage Foundation to propose an individual mandate in the 1989 report Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans. The Republican alternatives to HillaryCare in the 90s usually claimed not to have mandates, but tax credits were jiggered to produce the same result: If you chose not to have insurance, you paid more to the federal government.

And of course, an individual mandate is a key and necessary provision of RomneyCare in Massachusetts, which Mitt explained here:

The interesting detail in all of this conservative campaigning for an individual mandate was that its constitutionality was never addressed as a problem. As long as it was a conservative alternative to Democratic proposals, no one challenged the mandate’s constitutionality.

In May, Salon’s Andrew Koppelman asked the question: When did the individual mandate become a constitutional issue?

The first exploration of Congress’s authority to enact a mandate was a paper by Mark Hall, which he posted on SSRN in February, 2009. (I have not been able to find even a hint of the constitutional objection before Obama’s election, even though mandates have been proposed, mainly by Republicans, since the early 1990s.) He concluded that the mandate easily followed from existing commerce clause jurisprudence. … The first published claim of unconstitutionality that I have been able to find is a July 10, 2009, Federalist Society paper by Peter Urbanowicz and Dennis G. Smith. They created the now notorious action/inaction distinction, declaring that “Congress would have to explain how not doing something – not buying insurance and not seeking health care services – implicated interstate commerce.”

Before that, nothing. Crickets.

What Roberts Said. So this is where we are: I did a happy dance because the Court’s partisan Republican majority only managed four votes to shoot down a Republican healthcare idea that Democrats finally managed to pass. Their constitutional objection was based on an ad hoc legal theory that simply did not exist until a few months before Congress passed the law.

Worse, in giving his OK to ObamaCare, Roberts still signed off on the ad hoc action/inaction theory and rejected the Commerce Clause justification that seemed obvious to everybody only two years ago. Instead, he re-interpreted the mandate as a tax and found justification for it in Congress’ constitutional power to tax:

The Federal Government does not have the power to order people to buy health insurance. Section 5000A  would therefore be unconstitutional if read as a command.  The Federal Government does have the power to impose a tax on those without health insurance. Section 5000A is therefore constitutional, because it can reasonably be read as a tax.

Now, I can’t complain too much about this, because I’ve been lamenting for months that the mandate would obviously be constitutional if Congress had just replaced the word penalty with tax. Of course, if they had done that, it’s possible that conservatives would have trumped up some novel legal theory that limited the Taxing Clause. Who knows? If you want to throw out a law badly enough, you can always come up with something.

The Ginsburg Dissent. If you want to see what would have been a 9-0 decision in the 1990s, and probably even an 8-1 or 7-2 decision two years ago, scroll past the 59 pages of Roberts’ decision and read the dissent by Justice Ginsburg. (She dissents from Roberts’ reasoning, but not his conclusion that ObamaCare is constitutional. So she is also technically part of the majority that Roberts is writing for.)

There is a very striking difference in tone between Ginsburg’s opinion and both Roberts’ opinion and the joint dissent by the four conservative justices. Ginsburg consistently talks about reality, giving examples and statistics about what is happening here and now in the healthcare market. Meanwhile, Roberts and the conservative bloc mainly discuss bizarre fantasies in which Congress might force everybody to buy broccoli.

At the root of the conservative rejection of the Commerce Clause justification is the idea that Congress’ power to regulate commerce does not include the ability to “create” commerce by forcing people to buy a product (health insurance) they otherwise would not. The objection rests on two points:

  • Individuals should be able to escape Congress’ commerce-regulating power by not participating in the regulated markets.
  • Individuals can choose not to participate in the healthcare market by not buying insurance, not going to the doctor, etc.

The first point sounds reasonable, but has no real basis in legal precedent. And Ginsburg correctly observes that because accident and illness strike even young and apparently healthy people without warning, and because emergency rooms are obligated to treat first and ask for payment later, the second point is just false. Individuals actually cannot avoid adding risk to the health-care system.

Insurance companies and health-care providers know that some percentage of healthy, uninsured people will suffer sickness or injury each year and will receive medical care despite their ina­bility to pay. In anticipation of this uncompensated care, health-care companies raise their prices, and insurers their premiums. In other words, because any uninsured person may need medical care at any moment and because health-care companies must account for that risk, every uninsured person impacts the market price of medical care and medical insurance.

This is also inherently a national problem, precisely the kind of thing that the Founders wanted Congress to have the power to solve.

States cannot resolve the problem of the uninsured on their own. Like Social Security benefits, a universal health-care system, if adopted by an individual State, would be “bait to the needy and dependent elsewhere, encouraging them to migrate and seek a haven of repose.” Helvering v. Davis, 301 U. S. 619, 644 (1937).

In normal times, that would be that. As a unanimous Court wrote in Katzenbach v. McClung (1964)

Where we find that the legislators, in the light of the testimony and facts before them, have a rational basis for finding a chosen regulatory scheme necessary to the protection of commerce, our investigation is at an end.

But these aren’t normal times, so Ginsburg has to attack Roberts’ examples directly.

An individual “is not ‘active in the car market,’” the Chief Justice observes, simply because he or she may someday buy a car. The analogy is inapt. The inevitable yet unpredictable need for medi­cal care and the guarantee that emergency care will be provided when required are conditions nonexistent in other markets. That is so of the market for cars, and of the market for broccoli as well. Although an individual might buy a car or a crown of broccoli one day, there is no certainty she will ever do so. And if she eventually wants a car or has a craving for broccoli, she will be obliged to pay at the counter before receiving the vehicle or nour­ishment. She will get no free ride or food, at the expense of another consumer forced to pay an inflated price.

So no, it doesn’t follow that Congress can make us eat broccoli if the Commerce Clause allows an individual mandate.

The Medicaid expansion. One of the ways ObamaCare increases the number of people with coverage is that it expands eligibility for Medicaid. Everybody under 65 with a household income less than 133% of the poverty line becomes eligible.

Medicaid is a federal/state partnership, so the expansion can only happen if the states go along. The ACA tries to make it painless for the states to cooperate by covering 100% of the cost of the expansion for the first two years, and 90% thereafter. It tries to make the expansion painful to turn down by saying that Medicaid is a take-it-or-leave-it deal. States can go along or lose the Medicaid funding they already get.

Roberts found that this was too coercive, though he didn’t specify what makes a non-cooperation penalty too high. Ginsburg finds that the Medicaid expansion is within the normal power of Congress to offer funding with conditions, and does not see the take-it-or-leave-it part as a penalty at all, since each year is a new appropriation, subject to its own conditions.

Future Congresses are not bound by their predecessors’ dispositions; they have authority to spend federal revenue as they see fit. The Federal Gov­ernment, therefore, is not, as the Chief Justice charges, threatening States with the loss of “existing” funds from one spending program in order to induce them to opt into another program. Congress is simply requiring States to do what States have long been required to do to receive Medicaid funding: comply with the conditions Congress prescribes for participation.

As I said above, I doubt the states will opt out anyway. If they do, then ObamaCare will cover somewhat less than 30 million new people, and the opting-out victims will be poor and near-poor people.

The conservative dissent. Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Kennedy combine in a dissent that is both radical and polemic, full of scary quotes about the Commerce Clause turning into “a font of unlimited power” or “a general authority to direct the economy”.

Its conclusion is that the ACA must be thrown out in its entirety.

Think about that: Based on a legal theory that did not exist two years ago, and whose advocates are almost entirely in conservative think tanks, the Court came within one vote of striking down the biggest piece of social legislation in half a century.

Salon’s Paul Campo has an even scarier theory: Looking at internal evidence in the text, Campo speculates that the conservative dissent was originally written to be the majority opinion, and that Roberts changed his mind late in the game.

So we dodged a bullet, and the country gets to have RomneyCare. Unless it elects Romney. Then the Happy Dance will be over.

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What the Court Decided About Immigration

July 2, 2012 – 11:55 am

Last Monday, the Supreme Court struck down three of the four challenged sections of Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, S.B. 1070. As usual, the media covered the event as if it were nothing but a pivotal game in a partisan play-off series, and went back and forth on whether this was victory or defeat for the Obama administration.

Don’t be distracted or confused. If you read the decision, the outcome is pretty clear: It’s a victory for people who want to see immigrants (documented or undocumented) treated fairly. It’s a defeat for anybody who wants the police to hound Hispanics out of Arizona.

S. B. 1070 was passed by the Arizona legislature and signed by Governor Jan Brewer in April, 2010. The Obama administration challenged the law in court before it could take effect, and a federal injunction has prevented Arizona from enforcing it until the case was settled.

Well, now it’s settled. Three of the four challenged provisions were struck down immediately:

  • Section 3 made it a state crime for a non-citizen to fail to carry documentation authorizing their presence in the country.
  • Section 5C made it a state crime for an undocumented alien to seek or accept employment.
  • Section 6 authorizes Arizona state police to arrest without a warrant any non-citizen who they have reason to believe has committed an offense that would make them deportable.

Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, with Chief Justice Roberts and three justices from the Court’s liberal wing (Breyer, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor) concurring. Justice Kagan recused herself because she was in the Obama administration when the case was being prepared, and so might appear to have a conflict of interest. (Recusal decisions are up to the justices themselves. Liberal justices take these decisions seriously. Conservatives like Thomas and Scalia do not, even when money is involved.)

The reason Governor Brewer claimed victory and some liberals complained of defeat was that the Court did not strike down the fourth provision, 2B, which Justice Kennedy summarized like this:

Section 2(B) of S. B. 1070 requires state officers to make a “reasonable attempt . . . to determine the immigration status” of any person they stop, detain, or arrest on some other legitimate basis if “reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien and is unlawfully present in the United States.” Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. §11–1051(B) (West 2012). The law also provides that “[a]ny person who is arrested shall have the person’s immigration status de­termined before the person is released.”

This section is why S.B. 1070 became known as the “papers please” law. It conjures up visions of police harassing anybody with brown skin or an accent, and locking them up until they can prove they’re in the country legally. (You always go swimming with your passport, don’t you?) Such behavior is certainly in line with the expressed purpose of the law, which is to pressure undocumented immigrants until they “self-deport”. And I’m projecting here, but I’d guess that many S.B. 1070 supporters will consider it a bonus if legal Hispanic immigrants leave the state too.

So why didn’t the Court strike 2B down? Justice Kennedy’s reasoning shouldn’t give any comfort to the people who want to harass Mexicans. It all hangs on the timing of the case and on that phrase “reasonable attempt”.

The administration sued before the law went into effect, before Arizona police came up with enforcement guidelines, and before the state courts had a chance to rule on whether those guidelines follow the state constitution. Kennedy doesn’t want to assume that those people won’t do their jobs properly.

At this stage, without the benefit of a definitive interpretation from the state courts, it would be inappropriate to assume §2(B) will be construed in a way that creates a conflict with federal law.

Justice Kennedy could imagine state courts toning 2B’s interpretation down to something like this: As long as we’re holding you for something else already, we might as well check with ICE to see if you’re in the country legally, and if not, see what they want us to do with you.

However, Kennedy also envisioned an interpretation where police would hold brown-skinned jaywalkers (rather than just ticketing them as usual) or extend the detention of other suspects while waiting for immigration information, which (since the rest of the ruling established that immigration is federal territory) is none of their business anyway. Kennedy left little doubt that this would be seen as an unreasonable attempt to determine a person’s immigration status.

So the Court didn’t endorse 2B, it just let Arizona off with a warning. If 2B comes back to the Court as a racial profiling case with actual victims, it will get struck down then.

If you doubt that reading of the Court’s decision, think about this: None of the liberal justices felt the need to write a dissenting opinion. That should tell you who won.

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I Was Undocumented in Arizona

July 2, 2012 – 11:06 am

Real Americans carry ID

When I turned 50 a few years ago, I started doing something sort of paranoid: I always jog with my driver’s license and medical card, in case I have a heart attack. So far it’s never come in handy, but I keep doing it.

Paranoia has its costs, though. Almost two weeks ago, I was at Logan Airport in Boston when I flipped my wallet open and stared at an empty plastic window. My driver’s license was in a t-shirt pocket in my laundry hamper. I had no other photo ID.

My first thought was to change my flight and come back tomorrow, but that would mean missing a whole day of the conference I was going to – the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Phoenix – so I went with my second thought: See what happens.

I got a boarding pass from a machine that didn’t care what I looked like, then waited in line with everybody else and apologetically told my story to the TSA guy. He called over a supervisor, who looked at what I did have: two credit cards and prescription bottle. Making no promises about what would happen when I tried to come home, he let me through.

Eight days later, TSA in Phoenix was more thorough. They scoffed at my credit cards and pill bottle, as well as at my business card (which has a photo), and the ID the conference had given me. They asked about my health-insurance card, which of course was keeping my driver’s license company in the laundry hamper. They would have liked to have seen some mail with my address on it or maybe a utility bill, which I might have packed if I had known I was going to forget all my other ID.

So they called up a government database and started asking me questions about myself: my address and phone number, my wife’s maiden name, other towns I had lived in, and so on. Some of the stuff I didn’t know, like the names of the neighbors in my apartment building. Eventually they did an explosives-residue test on my hands, and then let me through.

At no time was I treated with anything other than respect. No one implied that I was a criminal or that I was trying to get away with something.

While I was undocumented, I learned two things of political significance:

First, those advocates of voter-ID laws who claim it’s no big deal because you already need a photo ID to do absolutely everything else in this society – they’re just wrong. A lot of people will ask for a photo ID, but if you don’t have one they work around it. For example, some places took my credit card without asking. When someone did ask, nobody batted an eye when I said, “Oh, never mind, I’ll pay cash” or called my wife over to charge it on her card. They may have had other work-arounds, but I didn’t ask.

TSA definitely will work with what you have, because they’re just trying to verify your identity, not stop you from traveling. On the other hand, when you try to vote in a Republican state, you run into a process that absolutely won’t work if you don’t have an official state-issued photo ID, and even a state-university ID isn’t good enough. That’s unusual, and you have to wonder if that’s because the purpose is to stop you from voting.

Second, it was ironic that I was on my way to Phoenix, and that one of the things I would do there was protest the Arizona immigration law, S.B. 1070, which is sometimes known as the papers-please law.

I wandered around Arizona for a week with no proof that I’m a US citizen other than my white skin, my Illinois accent, and a nice pair of khakis. Nobody cared. I never had to explain myself and I never had cause to be afraid.

Everybody who heard my license-in-the-hamper anecdote thought it was funny and wanted to know how I got through TSA. But if I’d been brown, poor, and speaking with a heavy Hispanic accent, the story might not have been so entertaining.

So I was undocumented in Arizona and nothing happened. No drama, no excitement.

That’s how white privilege usually shows up: Nothing happens. Think about that the next time you’re out in public and nothing is happening.

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If Not ObamaCare, What?

June 18, 2012 – 12:36 pm

One way or another — either by decree of an activist Supreme Court or by winning in November and repealing the Affordable Care Act — Republicans are aiming for a post-ObamaCare world. What would they do then?

Despite the rhetoric against it, ObamaCare has never been just an extension of federal power for its own sake. It is an attempt to solve a serious problem: When President Obama took office, something like 50 million Americans did not have health insurance. Millions more had hollow health insurance: Their most likely health problems were labeled “pre-existing conditions” and not covered. Also, yearly or lifetime caps on what the insurance company had to spend meant that people were only covered if they didn’t get too sick. In short, millions of Americans with some kind of insurance still faced bankruptcy if they had major health problems.

The ACA is not a perfect solution. Some people will still fall through its cracks, but ObamaCare imposes federal standards that do away with hollow insurance, and (when it fully takes effect in 2014) it will considerably shrink the pool of uninsured Americans.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether this was the best we could do, or whether the same or better results might have been achieved more efficiently with either more or less government intervention. But reasonable people can’t argue with this: If ObamaCare gets repealed, we’ll then face the same serious health-care problem that President Obama faced when he took office.

What would President Romney do about it?

The Romney campaign web site has a page about that. At first glance, it looks like a serious plan: It has 15 bullet points, each of which looks like a link to some detailed position paper. However, they aren’t links; they’re just bullet points formatted in blue.

That’s all you get.

Blanks, not bullets. A few of the 15 are standard conservative talking points that sound good but are basically empty, like capping malpractice awards. (I’ve explained before why I think this will accomplish very little. Short version: Malpractice awards themselves are a trivial part of the overall healthcare budget, and claims about “defensive medicine” don’t hold up when put to the test. States that cap malpractice awards don’t suddenly see their healthcare costs drop.)

Another empty bullet: “Prevent discrimination against individuals with pre-existing conditions who maintain continuous coverage.” Good as that sounds, it just restates what the HIPA Act established in 1996. People who spend their 20s in some Starbucks-barista type job could still be out in the cold when they finally do try to get insurance later on.

And yes, it would be nice to have “IT interoperability”, “non-litigation alternatives to dispute resolution”, and “Consumer Reports-type ratings of alternative insurance plans”, but none of that is going to help you much if you get cancer. And actually guaranteeing such stuff would be too much government intervention anyway, so Romney just pledges to “encourage” and “facilitate” these changes.

States and individuals lose power to corporations. Romney’s website highlights this quote:

I believe the better course is to empower the states to determine their own health care futures.

And yes, the substantive parts of the Romney plan do appear to move responsibility and decision-making from the federal government to states and individuals. However, when you assemble the bigger picture the bullet-points paint, the real story is that power moves to the insurance companies.

Here’s how: The federal government gets out of the standards-making business, apparently returning that power to the states. However, the bullet “Allow consumers to purchase insurance across state lines” undoes all that state power. If consumers can purchase insurance in any state, then states can’t regulate the health insurance sold to their citizens. If Vermont has high consumer-protection standards and New Hampshire low ones, then health insurance companies will only offer Vermonters policies written in New Hampshire.

You could argue that the market will provide whatever consumers demand, but we’ve seen this scenario play out before, when interstate banking was deregulated in 1999. If you have a Citicorp credit card, you send your payments to South Dakota. Bank of America payments go to Texas. That’s because those states have low consumer-protection standards. Would you like to have a Visa protected by the more consumer-friendly laws of, say, Massachusetts? Good luck with that; you won’t find one.

The same thing happened 100 years ago with corporate charters. Half of all U.S. corporations are chartered in Delaware, because Delaware won the race to the bottom.

So we know pretty well what will happen to health insurance if there are no federal standards and insurance companies can sell across state lines: States will race to the bottom until a few states say that health-insurance companies can do whatever they want. Then all policies will be written in those states. There won’t be anything you can do about it, because nobody you can vote for will have any control.

Block grants. Romney’s first bullet reads “Block grant Medicaid and other payments to states”. The cost of Medicaid is currently shared between the states and the federal government. (This article says the feds pay 60% in Texas.) For its contribution, the federal government gets to establish standards.

A block-grant approach would have the federal government say, “Here’s some money for Medicaid; spend it however you want.” By writing that check, the federal government would completely discharge its responsibility for providing health care to poor people.

The assumption behind this approach is that federal standards are inefficient. Left to its own devices, a state might get more out of the money than it does with the feds looking its shoulder. That may or may not be true, and it can work in either a conservative or a liberal direction. (Vermont is hoping for some kind of no-strings arrangement as it moves towards a single-payer system.)

But something else happens when you move the federal government out of the picture: You break the link between poor people’s health care and the Federal Reserve.

As we have seen since 2007, the federal government can borrow money in large quantities even during a financial crisis. And since dollars are created by the Federal Reserve, it is literally impossible for the federal government to go bankrupt as long as it owes dollars.

But states can go bankrupt, and the threat of bankruptcy can force them to do otherwise unthinkable things. Since 2007, states have been canceling projects and laying people off in droves — not because they wanted to destroy jobs and not because they suddenly discovered they didn’t really need teachers or firefighters or highways. But tax receipts were down, needs were up, and something had to give.

If there were no federal standards and federal money involved, Medicaid would be the obvious place to cut during a  crisis. (Texas keeps looking at abandoning the Medicaid system anyway,  even if it means losing the federal money.) Sure, some people would die, but they’re poor and don’t have press agents, so who would notice? (When did you last see a headline like “Sick homeless man dies in alley”? Do you think it never happens?) And if the poor decided to move to a more compassionate state, so much the better. Win/win.

In short, a state Medicaid program can’t provide the same security as the current system. States can promise whatever they want, but in a crisis those benefits would vanish.

And even in good times, states would feel pressure to race to the bottom. Be hard on poor people and maybe they’ll go somewhere else.

Responsibility. Everybody looks with horror at the upward-sloping trend in healthcare spending. But there are two ways to deal that trend: Figure out how to deliver care to everyone more efficiently, as most European countries do. Or push the responsibility off on somebody else, with the ultimate result that federal government won’t be held responsible when there’s no money to take care of people.

Romney wants to go in the second direction. Under President Romney, we could expect more and more people to have hollow insurance policies (written in whichever state allows the hollowest insurance). More and more people will either go bankrupt when they get sick, or will depend on state programs that go unfunded in hard times.

Stacked up against that future, ObamaCare looks pretty good.

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What Senate Candidates Deserve Your Support?

June 18, 2012 – 10:53 am

Last week a Sift-reading friend told me she had set aside some money to contribute to Senate candidates, and wondered where I thought it would be best spent.

We agreed that this is a good time to contribute. In general, early money is more valuable than late money, but (if you’re like me) you’d usually rather see your money spent in the general election than during the primary. So one of best times to contribute is right after the primaries bring the race down to a Democrat vs a Republican.

There are 33 Senate races this year, but a few simple criteria will narrow down the candidates worth contributing to or volunteering for.

I’ve never claimed to be non-partisan. (I try hard to keep the Sift honest, but I’m not trying to be neutral. I write what I believe, not just what I want you to believe.) So it shouldn’t surprise anybody that my first criterion is that I’m only considering candidates who will caucus with the Democrats. (That would include independents like Bernie Sanders of Vermont and probably Angus King of Maine.) Anybody committed to vote for Mitch McConnell as majority leader is off my list.

Second, the race should be close. I love Bernie Sanders, but I expect him to win with or without me. Real Clear Politics currently rates 8 races as toss-ups: Florida, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Whether that’s your serious-support list or not depends on how optimistic/pessimistic you are about what will happen between now and November. If you expect a big Democratic surge that isn’t showing up in the polls yet, then you might want to reach for one of RCP’s “leans Republican” seats, like Arizona, where Richard Carmona currently trails by about 11%. If you expect the opposite, you might want to defend one of the “leans Democratic” candidates, like Sherrod Brown in Ohio, ahead by 8%.

I don’t really have a hunch about the trend, so I’ll stick with the toss-ups. Next, I want strong progressive voices in the Senate. I want somebody who’s going to make me proud, not just be slightly better than a Republican. That takes Bill Nelson of Florida (not to be confused with Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who is worse) off my list. He has a history of joining Republicans on issues like eliminating the estate tax, and he’s generally one of the last Democrats to get on board for things like raising the debt ceiling. So, Bill, I’ll be rooting for you on election night, but I can think of people more deserving of my time and money.

Elizabeth Warren

Two candidates that jump right out at me are Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin. Both of them will face an avalanche of out-of-state money, Warren from the financial industry and Baldwin from the religious right.

Elizabeth Warren. Warren you’ve probably heard of, even if you’re not from Massachusetts. I first noticed her when she was chair of the Senate’s TARP Oversight Committee. She did several very plain-spoken, hard-hitting interviews on Rachel Maddow’s show where she laid out exactly how opaque the program was and how few of the underlying problems were being fixed.

The best argument for putting Warren in the Senate was the Jamie Dimon testimony to the Senate Banking Committee. (More about that in the Nuggets.) Warren is exactly the person who should have been in that room.

She’s a Harvard law professor, so her opponent Sen. Scott Brown is trying to tar her with the Harvard elitist label. But she wasn’t born into the Harvard strata of society, she started in the working class and climbed the ladder. She understands ordinary people and wants to be in a position to watch their backs.

Current polls are about as close as polls can be: Brown 43.8%, Warren 43.5%. I expect Warren to win a close race for three reasons: Undecideds have a tendency to break against the incumbent, Massachusetts is a blue state, and Warren’s supporters are genuinely enthusiastic about her. But Wall Street really hates Warren, so Brown will have a lot of money to spend.

Tammy Baldwin. Unless you live in Wisconsin, you may not know much about Tammy Baldwin. She’s been in Congress for 14 years, and is the only openly lesbian congresswoman. (She was already out of the closet when she ran in 1998. Up until that time, the only gay representatives had come out while in office.) In 2010, National Journal’s ratings had her tied for being the most liberal member of the House.

Now, my first thought on hearing those facts would be: She’s going to get crushed. But so far that’s not happening. The Republican primary isn’t until August, and the RCP average has her trailing former Governor Tommy Thompson by 8.7%. But that average is skewed by a Rasmussen poll with a huge Republican bias (Thompson ahead 52%-36%).  The other two polls have her behind Thompson by manageable numbers: 4% and 6%, which could just be name recognition. Marquette University’s poll has her ahead of the other two likely Republican candidates.

There’s also no guarantee Thompson wins the primary, or gets through unscathed with the Club for Growth gunning for him. Chuck Todd sums up the race and interviews Baldwin:

Other toss-up Democrats. Claire McCaskill isn’t exactly an inspiring progressive voice. (National Journal rates her exactly in the middle as the 50th most liberal senator.) But this is Missouri we’re talking about; what did you expect? I think she’s doing as much as the voters will allow, and that holding this seat is key to holding the Senate. Polls: Rasmussen has her behind by double digits, but PPP says the race is tied.

Jon Tester in Montana is another incumbent Democrat in a Republican state. Don’t expect his support on, say, gun control. But his heart is in the right place when it comes to keeping Wall Street in check. PPP and Rasmussen disagree about who is ahead.

Immigration is likely to be a huge issue in the Nevada race. Shelley Berkley is challenging the incumbent Dean Heller, who was appointed when John Ensign resigned in disgrace. Nevada is a swing state that’s been trending blue as the Hispanic vote increases, but Republicans keep offering far-right candidates. Heller is a typical senate Republican, rated the 73rd most liberal senator. Berkley supports the DREAM Act; Heller wants to build a bigger border fence. The non-Rasmussen polls have this as a neck-and-neck race.

In Virginia, Tim Kaine vs. George Allen is a marquee match-up. Kaine has been governor and Allen senator. (Allen famously lost to Jim Webb in 2006 after the Macaca gaffe.) So far, I haven’t found anything thrilling on Kaine’s web site, and he seems to be running a vague I-was-a-good-governor campaign. But he’s narrowly ahead in the swingiest of swing states.

I confess I had never heard of North Dakota candidate Heidi Heitkamp until this morning. She’s running in a red state as a former state attorney general who fights for the people. Her web site is focused on local North Dakota issues, and I really have no idea how progressive she’d be. (She favors the Keystone Pipeline that environmentalists oppose.) Polls have her neck-and-neck with Rep. Rick Berg.

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