Not Thing A, and Not Thing B

 

February 16, 2019

Any functioning society engages in some degree of state intervention – much like any functioning adult maintains some measure of self-control.  In its purest form, the state acts as guardrails for commerce and comity, enabling freedom of movement, expression, creation, and transaction within defensible bounds.  And that is what it is meant to do.  Without the state, there is no money, no legal framework for any contract.  No shared infrastructure, no common defense.  Thus fails the hackneyed “government is bad” cliché routinely trotted out over these last forty or so years during which we’ve watched our bridges crumble while much of our society languished in a downward socioeconomic death spiral and we achieved a level of disparity and division not witnessed in a century.

The intellectual laxity of the current “capitalism vs. socialism” question is therefore exasperating.  Employment of these terms so monolithically diminishes any measurable credit in economic and public policy debate.  Ideology, like policy, is a continuum - not a binary set of choices.  The appropriate debate concerns the degree to which we have state intervention, not if we have state intervention, nor whether one’s ideology is either thing A or thing B.   The chronic trope that the center-left would prefer the United States become another Venezuela via “socialism” is as absurd as suggesting one’s neighbors would prefer a tin shack to their comfortable suburban colonial.  No one wants that.  Similarly, one cannot credibly assert that Nordic countries, with their comparatively higher standards of living and superior metrics to the U.S., are at once both unlike socialist Venezuela, and yet unworthy of study and some possible emulation because that would be socialism.

Should we provide some sort of social safety net, or not?  Do Social Security and Medicare count?  Or, as they are state interventionist and redistributive of income, should they be scrapped?  Where does that leave you?  Your parents?  If we can agree that education is a public good, should we continue to support it?  And if we observe that a healthy citizenry is a productive and comparatively inexpensive one, should we support that, too?  Is healthcare thus a public good, like education?  Every other industrialized nation seems to think so. 

The sooner we all acknowledge that government – wherever we choose to place it around the center of the chart – is the least worst of narrow options, the sooner we can all work together on discerning (absent self-destructive hyperbole) which necessities, rights, and public goods require policy intervention and to what degree those policies are most effective for our progress and competitive advantage as a nation of thoughtful and neighborly citizens committed to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.