Matt Zeitlin

Jon Cohn has an excellent article on the Netherlands that makes a rather obvious point that seems to elude some leftie activist: it’s possible to have a health care system that does everything any leftie wants — accessible quality care to everyone without a government run health care option. Now, this is a bit complicated because we already have a bunch of “public options” of varying degrees — Medicare, VA, federal employees and so on — but the basic point that a public option, especially any public option could have ever passed through the Senate, is not the be all end all of health care reform needs to be repeated over and over.

The big difference between the Netherlands and the US, even if we pass the Baucus bill, is how they treat insurance companies:

Still, there’s a catch. A big catch. Private insurance in the Netherlands works because it operates more or less like a public utility. The Dutch government regulates industry practices tightly–more tightly than the reforms now moving through Congress propose to do in the United States. The public insurance option was supposed to make up for that deficiency, at least in part, by setting a standard for service and affordability that the private industry would have to meet–and by offering a fail-safe option in case the private plans simply couldn’t keep up. If Congress ends up gutting the public plan, in part or in whole, then it needs to work even harder on making private insurance work. And it’s an open question whether that will happen.

I’m a bit more sanguine than many liberals on how much a possible bill could do on this front. Any bill that passes will have some basic, necessary regulations like community rating, some kind of mandate and guaranteed issue which will the foundation of any health care system that rests on treating private insurers as public utilities. I think that once we have some sort of system in place, there will be pressure to make the system better as more people are directly invested in it through higher taxes and the mandate. Of course, there’s a fear that all the mandate+subsidize system will do is lead to insurers competing not on quality, but on the skimpiness of benefits and through better marketing and advertising.

Another general point to consider when dreaming up health care systems is path dependence. Atul Gawande has made the point that just about every system we lefties admire wasn’t built up from scratch in a day. Instead, countries faced dilemmas of coverage and equity and built on what systems they had. There are both good political and pragmatic reasons to approach health care reform this way, which means that we should probably be focusing all of our efforts on making the insurance regulations and the exchanges as good as possible.

In some ways, the case of Roman Polanski is incredibly simple. If we were to imagine an otherwise unremarkable man who plied a 13 year old girl with alcohol and quaaludes and then raped her, we would have no sympathy for him and none of the excuses that are made for Polanski would be made for him. He is, simply, morally culpable for a horrible act and that should be held against him forever.

But our legal system is not one that fairly, accurately and satisfactorily judges moral culpability and then apportions punishments. Instead, in the case of Polanski, there is a good argument to be made that re-trying or imprisoning him now would be an offense to due process procedures and rights, which we tend to think supersede questions of guilt. One can appeal to this legal and procedural complexity — namely that Polanski was about to be screwed by a judge and prosecutor colluding with each other — without making any excuses for behavior or obscuring the rather clear fact that he raped a 13 year old girl. I think that some feminists, like Scott Lemiuex and WAM, in their noble effort to focus on Polanski’s unambiguous criminality in the face of morally odious defenses of him, have too hastily dismissed these procedural concerns as simply yet another defense for the indefensible.

Now, I hate to use myself as a counter-example, but I think it’s indeed possible to think that Polanski is indeed a rapist and that imprisoning him or retrying him (remember, he had originally arranged to be sentenced to time-served) would be problematic. The way our legal system works is to separate moral and procedural concerns, I think we are complex enough to do the same.

There are two Irving Kristols. One is the wide-ranging, detached and influential New York Intellectual of the 40s, 50s and most of the 60s. This was the man who was at the center of an intellectual culture whose scope and influence is only rivaled by Bloomsbury and 1930s Vienna. Although his colleagues produced more substantial work of lasting import (Daniel Bell, Seymour Lipset, Nathan Glazer), Kristol was hardly some intellectual dilettante.

But then in the 1970s and onward, he turned into one of the most dangerous creatures that can exist in the public sphere: the ironic, cynical ideologue. Matt Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan both point out that Kristol openly and blatantly disregarded expertise in economics when selecting supply-side pieces to be published in the Public Interest and maintained a thoroughgoing agnosticism despite publicly insisting that religion was necessary for the maintenance of the values that hold society together. Kristol himself, the philosopher king of the Republican Party, could maintain a basically faithless, cosmopolitan life among intellectual elites of all political stripes, but the masses could not. It’s not so much that he made arguments for the superiority of white-middle class values and religion in bad faith, it’s that his entire intellectual style — whatever is good for the Republican Party is true — doesn’t admit any difference between good and bad faith.  When you see his son, William, be so cynical and cavalier about the truth or any objective standards for candidates besides the ability to provide a short-term boost to a flagging Republican presidential campaign (Palin, Sarah) you are seeing the inevitable result of his father’s style.

Of course, Kristol’s heirs could use some cynicism — the conservative movement’s obscene faith in the magical ability of supple side tax cuts is nothing if not sincere — but it should be recognized that much of the synthesis that defines the conservative movement was conceived in a way that regarded intellectual honesty and skepticism as a crutch.

PS – Even if you don’t think that “ideas” or intellectuals are the driving forces of political coalition building or success, it’s still worth pointing out that the conservative movement reveres Kristol.

I haven’t been posting nearly enough. It’s two parts moving in, two parts seeing people I haven’t seen in three months and one part playing Madden ’10 on the 37 inch flatscreen that came in this morning. I am, however, still twittering like a fiend. So if you need that daily dose of wry, informed and impetuous commentary on current events, check out the feed.

As much as I despise the Notre Dame Fighting Irish,  I understand why NBC signed a deal with them and I understand why their game against an unranked, middle of the road Big 10 team is getting national coverage on ABC. A lot of people like the Irish, and a lot of people like Michigan. But the mere fact that much of America is besotted with a team that hasn’t a won a major bowl since 1990 and has gotten their asses handed to them whenever they do slip into BCS bowl doesn’t mean that America’s sports media should pretend that Notre Dame is any sort of threat to do something special this year. They are ranked 18, and with BYU and Boise State both looking to go undefeated while beating some real talent, Notre Dame will probably get squeezed out of an at-large BCS bid.

But because of the relentless hype any halfway decent Fighting Irish team gets, they are going to be part of the conversation. And it’s all a huge scam. Because the Irish isn’t in a major conference, they aren’t required to play any good teams — with the exception of their annual game against USC, where they routinely get demolished — but they play all their games on national TV and can beat up on the weak opposition with everyone watching. Because of college football’s partial reliance on polls for deciding who gets to play in bowls And since the entire college football community knows that getting Notre Dame into a BCS game means more hype and ratings, they get every break when it comes to getting that elusive at-large bid. I almost hope they only lose two games this year and get into a BCS bowl and get crushed by a far superior, less media-beloved team. Kinda like in 2001, when an absurdly talented Oregon State team crushed Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl.

In other college football news, I’m not a betting man, but if I were, I would take USC to cover the spread. Terrelle Pryor is a very talented quarterback. He’s not Vince Young. USC’s defense is amazingly good. USC doesn’t lose to highly ranked out-of-conference opponents, they lose to mediocre Pac 10  teams.

UPDATE: So, obviously, USC didn’t cover the spread against Ohio State. In fact, they looked pretty shaky. That USC isn’t in a full-on rebuilding year — having lost their key skilled position players and the core of their defense — is a testament to how amazingly deep they are. The game also revealed something that everyone who’s watched a decent amoung of Big 10 football knows — Tyrelle Pryor is an amazing athlete, a fantastic scrambler and a fearsome runner with a cannon hanging off his shoulder. But when he’s forced to pass and win games, he leaves a lot to be desired. He’ll have to get much better before the Vince Young comparisons make any sense

Finally, after electing a president who wasn’t defined by an irresponsibly belligerent response to the murder of 3,000 Americans, I think we can gain some perspective on how the events that day revealed much of America and its political leadership to be fundamentally weak, immature and irresponsible.

Many countries have seen tragedies. Many countries have been attacked by outsiders. And they have nearly all responded by drawing in on themselves and becoming more hostile to the outside world. But America is different. Our understandable anger and paranoia turned into something horrible, not only for those Americans who have seen their constitutional values destroyed and their friends and relatives sent off to die in a pointless war, but for all the Iraqis and Afghans who have died needlessly or have found themselves locked up in a Kafka-esque island fortress for being aligned with the wrong warlord in the Hindu Kush. One would hope that America’s size, strength and influence would breed a certain sense of responsibility and humility, an awareness of how our actions affect the entire world, for good as well as evil. Instead, we had a political class intent on war and the nullification of our the principles that are the supposed bedrock of our nation.

Instead of tempering our anger and fear and distrust, they played on it. The media and the public, instead of being wary of demagogues who use times of fear to advance nefarious ends, were enthralled with the idea of projecting power and strength, with little care for the consequences we’d bring upon ourselves or inflict on to others. We were hurt and humiliated, but not chastened.

In stark contrast to the collective failure of our leaders, the culture has largely recovered. Though the memory of 9/11 was manipulated by those who have nothing but contempt for our cosmopolitan, urban centers that are the driving force of our culture and our economy, the victims were largely New Yorkers. They were blue staters, living in a city whose greatness is a product of its diversity and dynamic cultural energy, values that a revanchist, hostile right can’t stand. And New York, the site of the attacks, recovered. There were those who talked about how humor and irony would be impossible after 9/11. How New Yorkers would give up their decadence, get settled down and have kids. But it never happened. New York retained its essential cosmopolitan identity. Comedy and irony, two great American values which seem to be infused into the lifeblood of our cultural capital, are still with us. New York is still New York, though scarred. It’s noteworthy how the culture of American — that ineffable product of 300 million people interacting and desiring and producing — survived the trauma of that day, while our politics, which is marked by unconscionable amount of cynicism, bad faith and utter uncaring for those hurt by the power wielded by America, could not. It suggests that while we can come under the thrall of bad people, we are still, in some sense, good.

Dana Goldstein points out that, as far as explicit subsidies for the purchase of health insurance goes, just about any conceivable health plan is tilted towards helping the poor more than the middle classes. In a straight dollars sense, this is true: “At 300 percent of poverty — $66,150 for a family of four — Baucus requires a family to spend 13 percent of its income on health care before government subsidies kick in. That’s a burdensome $8,600.”

But that seems to be ignoring the real problem for the middle class regarding health insurance. I’m not so sure it’s cost, or , if it is cost, that’s not what people are complaining about or are worried about. The cost of normal health insurance, notwithstanding large, unexpected expenses, is pretty well hidden from a lot of people, especially if they get coverage from their employer. The problem is, instead, for the self-employed or people who might lose their job and have to buy health insurance .It’s a security problem, not a coverage problem. All the consumer protections — guaranteed issue, community rating, no preexisting conditions, caps on out of pocket expenses — are a huge boon to everyone who isn’t super rich and purchases health insurance.

In some sense, you want most people to pay for a good portion of their normal health expenses on their own. What you don’t want is people being too poor to afford health care, people going bankrupt paying for health care, or people not being able to purchase reasonably priced insurance because of preexisting conditions. And just about any Democratic plan, from the Baucus compromise to the tri-committee bill, gets us closer to those protections being a reality.

See Nick Beaudrot as well.

Matt Miller has a good op-ed in the Post arguing that progressives shouldn’t die on the public option hill, and that a bill that includes exchanges, subsidies, a mandate, guaranteed issue and community rating would be a vast improvement over the status quo. Or, as Ezra Klein puts it, such a bill would be “the most important progressive policy passed since Lyndon Johnson.”

Miller’s case against single payer, or against any giant change to the health insurance system, is similar to the point Atul Gawande made in his January New Yorker piece on various industrialized countries journeys to universal health care. We’re stuck with a system where private insurers are going to be providing health care (or paying for it) for the vast majority of Americans. So, we should build on that system and try to turn insurance companies into something approaching highly regulated utilities? I understand both the practical and ideal arguments for this. For one, massive, wrenching changes to the health care system can have tons of unintended consequences. Also, a single payer system (as opposed to a socialized one) will probably have trouble avoiding costs and won’t be able to progress to a kind of mandate+capitation system that we’re approaching in Massachusetts.

But for the practical objections, would a switch to a single payer system really be all that wrenching? After all, we already have Medicare. If the Democratic proposal were just Medicare for all, that would be an almost textbook example of building on what we already have. Hell, we could build on the Veteran’s Administration health system, which is a Britain style socialized system.

So, after coming out in outline form in June, Baucus has released a plan that seems exactly the same. As Ezra Klein puts it, “If no Republicans sign on to this bill, it will be hard to view the past few months as anything but wasted time in which the president’s poll numbers got hammered and health-care reform became more difficult.”

Basically, the bill is what I predicted the final health care bill that makes it to the president’s desk will be: “Subsidies to 300 percent of poverty. Medicaid to 133 percent of poverty. Insurance market regulations. Prevention. Wellness. Exchanges.” And, to pay for it, an excise tax on “gold-plated” insurance plans, which is just a complicated way of “capping the employer tax exclusion on plans that cost more than $21,000.”

I think when this health care bill gets to the President’s desk, the big question is why it took so long for a basic outline that had been around for months to turn into reality. When the health care debate started in honest, it became clear that the left wing position, as represented by the Progressive caucus and the Democratic, non-Blue Dog House caucus was the Baucus plan with more subsidies and a public option. Because of the way Senate moderates operate, who necessarily control the final form of a bill that has to pass a 60 vote Senate, the final bill would have to extract a pound of progressive flesh. Because Senate moderates are most likely to both be concerned about the spending and deficit implications of progressive social spending and are the most in hoc with the insurance companies, those pounds of flesh take the form of the public option and of more generous subsidies for the poor and middle class to buy health insurance. And so, you have the Standard Democratic Health Plan with Medicaid subsidies going to 133% of poverty instead of 150% and insurance subsidies going to 300% of poverty instead of 400%.

I understand why progressive activist types, who are basically primed to accuse any Democratic administration of selling out to a phony Washington policy consensus, are upset by such a bill. But considering how difficult (i.e. impossible) it has been for any President, even under the best of circumstances, to pass universal health care, endless gripping about something like the Baucus bill going into the law will be seen, ten or twenty years down the road, as being petty and short-sighted.

As surely you’ve heard, Amanda Carpenter of the Washington Times dug up Van Jones — Obama’s Green Jobs frontman and hero the climate change activism community — signing a petition put out by “911Truth.org” that called for an “immediate public attention to unanswered questions that suggest that people within the current administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.” And the right, which has been gunning for Jones for a while, is going nuts, as is expected.

This isn’t at all surprising, and frankly, I’m surprised that it took this long for some of Jones’s radical past to come back to haunt him. As Alex Pareene explains, after Jones graduated from Yale Law School, was a “a “full-on Marxist” in early ’90s California. He joined a revolutionary Marxist group and protested police brutality.” Basically, during the 1990s and early 00s, he was part of the “Ella Baker Center For Human Rights,” which was an Oakland based left-wing group that mostly concerned itself with criticizing the police, incarceration and other pet issues of the Bay Area far-left activist community. He ran in the same circles as decidedly not-mainstream types such as, for example, Medea Benjamin, founder of Code Pink. Basically, he was the exact type of urban, far-left community organizer that conservatives really despise. And  for a relatively mainstream public figure, he has a recent past that’s far outside the accepted American consensus.

But, right around the same time he signed the Truther petition, he began his transformation into the Van Jones of today: the foremost activist for the “Green Economy,” which is mildly utopian vision where labor, upper-middle class environmental activists and urban minorities all unite around a shared vision where a government encouraged conversion to a clean energy economy provides full employment for union workers in rust belt states and for alienated urban youth. He’s also an incredibly savvy organizer, and most importantly, a great self-promoter. Jones, in his environmentalist guise, has been feted by all sorts of extremely mainstream folk (most noticeably Thomas Friedman) and is basically a saint for those who global-warming activism.

So, it makes sense that the right would go after him. He’s both beloved by the Left and is pretty vulnerable because of his past associations. As for whether he should stay on in his White House role as a “relatively low-level bureaucrat trying to steer stimulus funding toward green-job programs,” I wouldn’t be particularly upset if the White House threw him under the bus. No matter what, he’ll still be an exalted figure among climate-change and environmental activists and will be able to put his incredible charisma, energy and vision to good use without a White House position.

PS – And now, not surprisingly, he’s resigned.

In a review of Amartya Sen’s latest book, the Economist offhandedly makes a common criticism of Rawls:

In the courtliest of tones, Mr Sen charges John Rawls, an American philosopher who died in 2002, with sending political thinkers up a tortuous blind alley. The Rawlsian project of trying to describe ideally just institutions is a distracting and ultimately fruitless way to think about social injustice, Mr Sen complains. Such a spirited attack against possibly the most influential English-speaking political philosopher of the past 100 years will alone excite attention…

Rawls held that social justice depended on having just institutions, whereas Mr Sen thinks that good social outcomes are what matter. Strictly both could be right. The practical brunt of Mr Sen’s criticism, however, is that just institutions do not ensure social justice. You can, in addition, recognise social injustices without knowing how a perfectly fair society would arrange or justify itself. Rawlsianism, though laudable in spirit, is too theoretical, and has distracted political philosophers from corrigible ills in the actual world.

Sen’s criticism is hardly an original one. Much of the backlash against Rawls, led by Raymond Guess and others, has been around exactly this point. In blunt terms, he’s too abstract, too concerned with institutions to provide a real political program for those concerned with justice. But this criticism always seemed a bit too pat.

Yes, it’s true, in A Theory of Justice, Rawls does not provide his opinion on hot-button issues or give an historical account of how real, existing liberal societies came to be. But it’s a little unfair to make a criticism of Rawlsianism based just on the works of Rawls himself. Other thinkers, deeply inspired by Rawls, are very concerned with “corrigible ills in the actual world.” Susan Moller Okin, for instance, is someone who took basic Rawlsian ideas about fairness and justice and then turned into a practical political theory of liberal feminism, with all the concern for the real world ills facing women and policy suggestions you would want from a political philosopher. Thomas Pogge is another example of someone working in a broadly Rawlsian framework to address the very issues (global justice, broadly) that Sen is so concerned about. Now, both Pogge and Okin are also critics of Rawls, but they don’t throw out the entire Rawlsian manifold when they turn to discuss their own pet issues. It’s by this process is, of course, that most philosophical or theoretical schools develop It’s a weird category error to say that a certain school of thought isn’t broad or encompassing enough, and then only look at one of its thinkers.

It’s hardly news that centrist D.C. types aren’t huge fans of any effort to prosecute C.I.A. agents for torture or the figures in the Bush administration who paved the way for torture. But David Broder’s latest column, where he criticizes Eric Holder for looking into the possibility of prosecuting C.I.A. agents who exceeded O.L.C. guidelines in interrogations, draws an interesting analogy that really shows how wrongheaded the push to absolve the Bush administration is:

In times like these, the understandable desire to enforce individual accountability must be weighed against the consequences. This country is facing so many huge challenges at home and abroad that the president cannot afford to be drawn into what would undoubtedly be a major, bitter partisan battle over prosecution of Bush-era officials. The cost to the country would simply be too great.

When President Ford pardoned Nixon in 1974, I wrote one of the few columns endorsing his decision, which was made on the basis that it was more important for America to focus on the task of changing the way it would be governed and addressing the current problems. It took a full generation for the decision to be recognized by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation and others as the act of courage that it had been.

It’s worth remembering what happened in the wake of Watergate, and more importanlty, the extensive revelations of all sorts of nasty and illegal executive branch behavior. The people directly involved with the Watergate robbery and subsequent cover-up — with the obvious exception of Nixon himself — went to jail. Furthermore, the Church Commission led to a bunch of new rules regulating the behavior of intelligence and law enforcement agencies. But almost as soon as those rules were passed, conservatives started grousing about how they restricted the president’s freedom of action. And even if the Reagan administration didn’t immediately violate the rule of FISA, their behavior in Iran-Contra clearly showed that they didn’t really care for any formal restraints on executive activity.

Fast forward to 2001. 9/11 happens, and the Bush administration promptly throws out FISA, the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture and domestic criminal and military law prohibiting torture. Why did they do this and think they could get away with it? Because no political or jurisprudential actor has had the stomach to actually make presidents and high executive branch officials pay for their overreaches of executive power. Or, to put a fine point on it, Ford pardoned Nixon, just as Obama wants to “look forward, not backward.” Now, what’s tricky is that, in a very basic sense, Broder is right about the consequences of any investigation into Bush-era torture. It will derail Obama’s agenda, it will look petty and political and will embitter everyone.

But here’s the thing: the same thing would have been true about not pardoning/actually prosecuting Nixon. Eventually, if we think that these laws we have are important and should be upheld, we’re going to have to bite the bullet and enforce them. And yes, it will hard to do so, and, in the short term, it will seem somewhat hopeless. But if we can make it so executive branch officials will actually be deterred from lawbreaking, it will be worth it. Otherwise, we might as well not have these laws at all.

I know I’m a bit late to this, but Motoko Rich’s New York Times piece on the movement in English classes to let kids read what they want to read is worthy of comment. It’s important to clarify just why we have students read books, or literature. One reason is to expose them to worlds and people they aren’t familiar with, so as to expand their moral imaginations. Another is to educate them about the (America/Western/Whatever) tradition that they are part of. But, on a day to day basis, the reason books are assigned to be read is so that papers can be written about them. It’s not an accident that the equivalent of “writing” classes in American high schools are “English” classes. In the same class where you read the Scarlet Letter, you learn how to write an argumentative essay, along with perfecting all the mechanics of good prose writing.

So the question of assigning books is really a question about which of the goals of a high school English class are the most important and the most achievable. I have a rather dim view of both the interest of Americans — young and old — in literature (and, sorry Lev Grossman, I’m a snob about what counts as literature) and an even dimmer view of getting high school students to appreciate or understand “good” books in the setting of an English class. Now, I have a similarly dim view of the writing abilities of many people, but learning how to construct a good written argument in readable, decent prose is an actual important life-skill of the sort that every 18 year old (or really 14 year old) ought to possess. So, if letting kids read what they want to read, or perhaps as a compromise, pick from a list of books, is the best way to get them to learn how to write about said books, then let them pick.

All that being said, there a few books that every American high school really ought to read, just so they know more about the country they live in. Down to the very core, they should be Huckleberry Finn, so they get some of the main motivating ideas and themes of American life in the 19th century (individualism, traveling in search of self-actualization, why Europe sucks, the ability of people to transcend the prejudices of their birthplace and so forth), The Great Gatsby (basically all the opposite lessons of Huck Finn: the persistence of class, the social and personal effects of industrialization, the [un]attainability of the American Dream) and Invisible Man (being Black in America). Now, you can quibble with the specifics here, but the number of books that it’s worth the cost of forcing kids to read is relatively small.

PS – Drum, Yglesias and Kevin Carey all have good stuff.

Jonah Lehrer notes a study showing that consumption of small amounts of alcohol is associated with more exercising and notes that “it’s yet another piece of evidence suggesting that booze, at least when consumed in moderation, isn’t a public health threat.”Why, then do”most states have a sin tax on alcohol – a drink that seems to protect the heart, prevent dementia, raise levels of good HDL cholesterol and makes us go jogging.”

Lehrer is being pretty fishy here. For one, all the evidence about alcohol consumption being associated with health concern consuming relatively mild amounts of alchol. A sin tax, of, say, 20 cents per can of beer (or equivalent amount of alchol in wine, liquor etc) won’t affect the mild drinkers that much. Instead, pace Mark Kleiman, a sin tax will reduce the amount of alcohol consumption among people who drink a lot. And the benefits of such a tax would be considerable. Kleiman estimates that such a tax “would reduce the assault rate by at least 5%, and maybe as much as 20%.” Also, it wouldn’t do much to tax moderate drinkers. In a review of Philip Cook’s book, Paying the Tab, Kleiman aruges that a doubled alcohol tax “would mean a tax increase of less that $100 a year” for someone who had two drinks a day.

What’s somewhat distressing about Lehrer’s misinformation regarding alcohol taxes is that I was able to pull up actual numbers about the incidence and effects of alcohol taxes in about 30 seconds of googling. This stuff isn’t hard.