The War III

Once again I am drawn into a discussion of the ideological war that’s taking place in the country. This morning James Joyner muses over the philosophy of taxation:

First, aside from the odd anarchist here and there, nobody’s arguing that we shouldn’t pay some taxes. The debate is over how high they should be, who should pay them, on what they should be charged, whether and the degree to which they should be progressive, and so forth.

Second, few of us really think taxation is theft, exactly. But they’re extracted coercively. And politicians have powerful incentives to use the tax power mischievously, buying votes with other people’s money, and to distribute the burdens most heavily on those without enough voting power to punish them come election time. So, it’s not exactly a textbook social contract.

Aside from the odd Spoonerite, who by my experience are far more highly represented in the blogosphere than in the general population, the acrimonious debate going on in the country today in the editorial pages of the nation’s newspapers, on television, and in the blogosphere is between Lockeans and Rousseauans. Both believe in a social contract. Both believe that enforcing the social contract by force is legitimate.

They differ on an important detail. To the best of my ability to determine modern Rousseauans believe that so long as the collective preserves a veneer of democratic process there are no limits to what it can do. Lockeans on the other hand believe that unless the collective operates within predetermined limits a tyranny of the majority is not only possible, it is inevitable.

Unfortunately, the framing of the issues of today—higher or lower taxes, extending healthcare benefits to all (or more), and so on—pre-concedes the outcome.

Take the healthcare debate, for example. I am convinced that a majority of Americans, maybe most, would be willing to tax themselves so that everybody in the country could enjoy an American level of healthcare services at European prices. They should: we’d be spending a third of what we spend now. I think it’s possible that a majority of Americans would be willing to tax themsleves so that everybody in the country could enjoy a European level of healthcare services at European prices.

That has never been on offer. The most that was proposed in the debate is increasing taxes to extend a presumably American level of healthcare at American prices and, afraid that this will be transmogrified into a Third World level of healthcare at American prices, Americans’ wariness of the plan that has resulted is manifest in its declining poll results.

We could achieve a European level of healthcare services at European prices (which I, for one, would be more than satisfied with) but only by doing what our European cousins do: remove insurance companies from the picture or, at least, restrict their earnings and cut the earnings of healthcare providers in half.

Does anyone believe that the final healthcare bill that was enacted, if subjected to an up or down vote at the outset, would have passed? Or that the American people would have voted for it if it had been put before them? No. Or, worse, that what was enacted was politically possible in a sense that a thousand, cleaner, better bills were not? That outcome is not to be blamed on compromise but on logrolling, a completely different phenomenon, the foundation of our current political system and IMO a totally corrupt practice. In the end the only constituency that the outcome served was the legislators themselves.

The problem is endemic in our system and isn’t isolated to healthcare reform. You can see the like in the similarly vacuous financial reform bill and the impasse on energy, the environment, and any number of other issues. The sides have staked out their positions, the arguments have been framed in ways that the sides find comfortable, and they won’t consider solutions outside of that restrictive framing. The ideological war and the process by which legislation is enacted are at the center of our inability to effect urgently needed reforms, an inability that has the potential of bringing our whole society into collapse.