Reason magazine advocated an individual private insurance mandate in 2004. Jon Chait summarizes:
The article proposes a plan centered around an individual mandate as a private insurance alternative to the “creeping socialism” proposed by John Kerry, who was then running for president. Now, of course, Reason considers an individual mandate a massive imposition upon freedom and even unconstitutional. (Indeed, Roger Vinson’s ruling that the individual mandate was unconstitutional cites a segment on Reason TV.) Now, the plan as a whole is far from identical to the Affordable Care Act. But its defense of the individual mandate is virtually identical to the case liberals have been making, and which conservatives and libertarians have been angrily dismissing.
I humbly submit that many glibertarians are only against the individual mandate because it’s part of a bill passed by Democrats. Chait also summarized contemporary establishment libertarianism succinctly a few weeks ago:
The view is that libertarianism ought to be organized around economics, and especially opposition to progressive taxation and any attempt to put a price on greenhouse gas emissions.
So the actual libertarian argument against ACA is this: Democrats passed the bill, Democrats are for progressive taxation and regulation of greenhouse gases, therefore the bill is bad.
There’s not much more to it than that.
Redshirt
There’s not much more to any of it – this describes most everything the Republicans do. The Politics of Resentment.
It’s grade school rules, writ large across the Empire, because of Empire.
Kryptik
It all comes down to whether you hate hippies sufficiently enough. That’s all it is.
Damien
So modern day “libertarianism” is just a rubes movement built on the political machinations of energy industry billionaires? You don’t say…
Villago Delenda Est
Opposition to progressive taxation is basically the rich wishing to get a free ride for the entire social infrastructure that makes their wealth possible.
These people do not want to pay for all the shit (contract law, court system, property title, patent law, intellectual property law, police to protect them from their victims, etc) that makes their wealth possible.
They are cheapskates.
They are parasites.
soonergrunt
Reason Magazine…Koch Suckers…six of one, half a dozen of the other…it was ever thus.
Davis X. Machina
If more people studied logic, we could have meaningful abbreviations in news articles, like “Chuck Shumer (D-NY)” and “Jim DeMint (~D SC)”.
Davis X. Machina
…or the ‘Litotes Party’.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Speaking of the politics of resentment, This gem is from Weigel:
From: “David Spielman – FreedomWorks”
Date: Fri, Mar 4, 2011 3:11 pm
Subject: Your Invitation to Support Gov. Kasich on March 8
To: [REDACTED]
Dear [REDACTED],
FreedomWorks, Ohio Tea Party groups and limited-government activists are excited to invite you to our press conference and rally at the state capitol in Columbus on March 8th at 10am to defend the taxpayers of Ohio and offer our support for SB 5. The rally will be followed by delivering hundreds of letters of support we have received from the citizens of Ohio, urging their state Representatives vote YES on SB 5.
Please JOIN US on March 8th! Governor John Kasich, the latest recipient of the FreedomWorks “Legislative Entrepreneur Award”, has been a vocal advocate for taxpayers as he works to rein in runaway spending and a bloated state budget. Gov. Kasich views SB 5, which restricts collective bargaining for public employees, as a crucial bill: “We don’t have a choice but to lower our cost, become competitive, and be in a position where instead of people flying over Ohio, they stop and say, ‘I’d like to create a job there.’” For months, FreedomWorks has been engaged in a local grassroots campaign for SB 5, directing calls and sending letters to urge our target list of state Senators to support the measure.
We are pleased to report that when the Ohio state Senate voted on March 1, one of our targets, Tim Schaffer, was the decided YES necessary to pass the legislation by a razor-thin 17-16 vote margin. Now the bill moves to the state House of Representatives, where FreedomWorks and local groups will be actively soliciting support for SB 5 from state Representatives. Given how close the vote was in the state Senate, we MUST come out to support Gov. Kasich to make sure this bill becomes law.
That elicited this response.
From: [REDACTED]
To: “David Spielman – FreedomWorks”
Subject: Re: Your Invitation to Support Gov. Kasich on March 8
Fuck that union hating motherfucker and fuck you too.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless Phone
I was mildly heartened.
joe from Lowell
That article was written by Ron Bailey, who also writes pieces advocating a carbon tax as superior to cap and trade. Everyone who thinks Ron Bailey would actually support a carbon tax bill if it was offered in Congress and had a chance of passing, please report to the nearest soylent green facility.
I humbly suggest that all glibertarians, like the Republicans who put forward an individual mandate plan in 1993, have always been against it, and only pretend to support it when trying to derail another, better variety of health care reform proposed by Democrats, whether we’re talking about Clinton’s plan in 1993 or Kerry’s in 2004.
Frankly, I think you’d have to be a bit of a fool to take the oh-so-timely, oh-so-brief spurts of support on the right for a system of universal health care that includes an individual mandate – spurts that end the second the Democrats’ efforts to pass HCR are defeated – and conclude that they represent a good-faith expression of what righties believe. Have you ever seen these people, when they are in power, make even the slightest effort to pass these health care reform proposals they allegedly support? I sure haven’t.
Righties believe in saying whatever it takes to defeat progressive proposals.
MikeJ
@Davis X. Machina: If more people studied logic this post would be littered with people yelling modus tollens.
Steve
I disagree a tiny bit, only to the extent that I don’t think they really supported an individual mandate in the first place. They didn’t think it was a massive assault on freedom, sure, but if the staff of Reason suddenly controlled all three branches of government you better believe we wouldn’t get some new health care law with an individual mandate. You know we’d get some Galtian fantasy where we all have to knit our own band-aids out of lint and dustbunnies.
The Republican alternative bill to Hillarycare in 1993 had an individual mandate. In fact, Kaiser went back and analyzed it and found out that that Republican bill had a whole bunch of key features that are now found in Obamacare, the worst bill ever. But the point is, other than maybe a few commies like John Chafee, the Republicans didn’t really support their own bill back then. They proposed it because they needed to have a plausible alternative. But when they controlled the government for 6 years under Bush you sure didn’t see them resurrecting that bill. Their strong preference is to do nothing.
There are plenty of other examples of things conservatives and libertarians claim to support, but they only say it because they need to look like they have an alternative to offer. Here’s an example: conservatives love to tell you how affirmative action is unfair because some middle-class black kid from the suburbs shouldn’t get favored over some poor white kid just off the boat. We should reform affirmative action into a class-based system, they say. You actually hear this a lot. But the chance they would actually support such a system is zero.
Let liberals put a class-based affirmative action system on the table and see what happens. Socialism, the conservatives would scream. It’s redistribution of wealth, you’re taking from the rich to give to the poor! Well obviously. For now, when it’s not actually on the table, they say they support it because they’re full of shit or because they simply haven’t thought it through. It just sounds more reasonable to have an alternative instead of just being against something.
Davis X. Machina
That bill, Ohio SB 5, for most non-adjunct state university faculty, doesn’t just restrict bargaining, it eliminates it, by defining them all as managers, BTW.
And it just about eliminates any possibility of participation by a domestic partner in any of the benefits you can’t now negotiate for anyways.
God knows what else is tucked in there — I expect it’s a multi-front chamber of horrors, Wisconsin-style.
joe from Lowell
It’s a question of “Are they lying now, or are they lying then?”
So, you figure it out: was Reason Magazine lying when they said they supported a federal law mandating the purchase of health insurance, along with a system of taxpayer subsidies for the poor?
Or were they lying whey they said they opposed such a system of subsidies and regulations?
BTW, Ron Bailey went on a Jack Abramoff-sponsored junket to the Northern Mariana Islands – you know, the place with the sweatshops and human trafficking – and then came home and wrote a puff piece about the wonderful, deregulatory freedom he found there. I make sure to point this out every time the man’s name comes up, so that people know who they’re dealing with.
Davis X. Machina
@MikeJ: You say that like it’s a malum in se….
Mike Kay (True Grit)
I’m Shocked!
I’m Shocked!
What will we tell the children!
Steve
@joe from Lowell: I have a comment in moderation, but when it emerges I have this to add to it: carbon tax is another great example of what I’m talking about. Heck, during the health care debate I even heard conservatives saying they would support a single-payer system but couldn’t get behind the tyranny of an individual mandate. Now you know they wouldn’t really support single-payer in a million years.
Mike Kay (True Grit)
…but you see, 9/11 changed everything…
Dennis SGMM
@MikeJ:
If more people studied logic then the Republican party would cease to exist.
kay
This is the best thing.
I don’t even read Reason, but I was almost involuntarily subjected to so much libertarian slippery-slope hysterics on the mandate that I just cannot help but enjoy this immensely.
Stillwater
(fwiw) I completely agree with this sentiment. There is a fundamental inconsistency in actual libertarian positions that I think can only be accounted for by reducing their views to merely opposing whatever liberals/progressives/democrats currently, or historically, supported. I think this is revealed not simply by the erratic shifts in the policies they support/reject, but also by the arguments (such as they are) defending those policies. Usually the key premise in the argument is (something like) if left unchecked, liberal/progressive policy will as a matter of logical necessity turn government into a merciless engine of oppression. That is, in their more honest moments, the simply assert that their purpose actually is to oppose liberal progress.
cleek
politics is not about logic; it’s about persuasion in support of your champion.
Damien
@Dennis SGMM: Then I guess it’s a good thing for the republican party, and bad for our country, that the natural state of human psychology isn’t empiricism or logic, but troop hierarchy reinforcement and kin preference. Too bad for us that game theory also says that a certain proportion of the population will always have psychopathic tenancies since it’s a high risk-high reward survival trait (*.pdf).
Barb (formerly Gex)
@joe from Lowell: You say that like the right views those things negatively. I’m not so sure those words have an effect on the kinds of Americans who are reconsidering child labor laws.
Redshirt
@cleek: This is it entirely. It’s pure tribal dynamics, and you could replace a political party with a sports team or a gang or a village or a cult and the behaviors would be mostly the same. My side = good; Their (the Other) side = bad. The positions and rationales are largely irrelevant.
Clark
And don’t forget this from Matt Welch:
http://reason.com/archives/2009/12/07/why-prefer-french-health-care
kth
The point of Reason is to confer intellectual respectability on policies favored by industry and the ultra-rich. That’s the only reason they endorse legalizing drugs and do muckraking on police abuses: to strengthen the framework for the rich people advocacy.
Balko, Sullum, et al, may care passionately about the things they write about, but the people who keep them fed and sheltered couldn’t care less.
trollhattan
Benen notes fierce dungaree-foe George Will was for high-speed rail, before he was agin’ it.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2011_03/028289.php
Cliff
And yet libertarians wonder why people refuse to take their philosophy seriously.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
Repulsive as it is, I get the libertarian argument for smoking in taverns, restaurants. I can just take my business elsewhere.
But what is the argument for despoiling the planet? Where am I supposed to go if I don’t like it? What planet am I supposed to freely contract for a clean atmosphere?
Caz
You clearly do not understand what makes a libertarian tick. Libertarianism has nothing to do with opposing democrat bills/positions. In fact, libertarianism has much in common with recent democrat bills, including repealing DADT and allowing gay marriage. They never oppose something merely because it was proposed by democrats.
Libertarians oppose republican and democrat bills equally, whenever the bill at issue would curb individual liberty or risk wasteful spending (in a nutshell).
Ash Can
Today’s “libertarians” are Republicans who were sufficiently embarrassed by W that they don’t want to call themselves Republicans anymore.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
Oh, thanks for clearing that up, Caz.
Now, if you could use your extroadinary powers of explaining to please shed light on the substance of the article. Why would a libertarian first support the individual mandate and the withdraw that support?
Mnemosyne
@Caz:
And yet they supported a universal mandate when Republicans were touting it, but as soon as Democrats incorporated it into their bill, suddenly it was the worse imposition on civil liberties EVAH!
So were they lying then, or are they lying now?
NR
This is just more proof of what some of us have been saying all along – the health care bill passed last year is a Republican bill. And yet, for some inexplicable reason, Democrats are cheering about it.
Mnemosyne
@NR:
Because we care more about people having access to health care in the real world than in letting them continue to die while we live in a fantasy world where we craft the most perfectest bill ever?
Yutsano
@NR: Republican does not automatically equal bad. That’s tribalistic thinking. If you can’t evaluate an idea because of the political party that thought it up, the problem is not the idea.
EDIT: @Mnemosyne: Or wot U said. :)
Mnemosyne
@Yutsano:
Republican Richard Nixon founded the EPA, so clearly we need to immediately eliminate it and rebuild it with ideas that come from the right people, not those nasty Republican ones about “clean air” and “water without arsenic in it.”
Yutsano
@Mnemosyne: Along right with dumping the Clear Air Act. And liberalizing our relations with China. That list could go on, which just shows how complicated Nixon was. Still kicking Teddy for not taking his universal health care plan when it came up. It really wasn’t too bad plus it would have evolved into something much better by now.
Chuck Butcher
@Caz:
You clearly do not uderstand what an exercise in futility it is to bring this horseshit around here. Pot/Lib really resembles gay/GOP in that you’d both cease to exist without it. You’ve got a “movement” with either fictional constructs or dysfunctional assholes for heroes building a house of cards based on fairy tales and FYIGM and you think people around here only know about you from random blog posts?
At one time I had pretty extensive contact with the CPUSA and the only sillier conversations I’ve ever had was with Libertarians.
NR
@Mnemosyne: First, insurance does not mean care. For-profit insurance is not designed to provide care. Its purpose is to make profits. The way it makes profits is through denial of care.
And second, if this is such a great bill, why didn’t Bill Clinton sign it back when the Republicans proposed it in 1993? Answer – he didn’t sign it because he knew it was a piece of shit back then. And it remains a piece of shit today.
Chyron HR
@NR:
First, if this is a “Republican bill”, why did every Republican oppose it?
Second, if true pure progressives reject Republicanism in any form, why are you cheering on the Republicans’ efforts to overturn the aforementioned bill?
Kyle
@Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel):
But what is the argument for despoiling the planet? Where am
The Magic of the Marketplace will provide you one.
Mnemosyne
@NR:
Which is why the insurance companies will be much more closely regulated than they are now, and have benchmarks they have to meet in order to be allowed to stay on the exchanges and have access to all of those customers.
The plan is pretty clearly to run the for-profit insurance companies out of business, but I realize you’ll never be happy with a slow death. You want them burned at the stake, like, right fucking NOW and to hell with the huge amount of unemployment that would cause.
Um, no, he didn’t sign it because it was never a bill and was never passed by Congress. Believe it or not, the president can’t take proposals and say, “Hey, that’s great, I’ll just put my signature on this and it will become a law without all of that nasty ‘voting’ that Congress insists on.”
Don’t make me pull out Schoolhouse Rock to teach you that a bill has to pass through both houses of Congress before the president can sign it into law. Clearly you slept through that part of your government class.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
you have to admit, if the gop and their philanthropic foundation, the libertarian party had a goal of preventing real hcr, they have won, and no one seems to realize it.
they have us defending the first bill, the one we had to pass because we had to pass something, and arguing for its provisions, instead of getting back up on the bike and trying harder to go further.
we ought to be trying for round two, we are still fighting about round 1, in round two we can do all the explanation and clarification we need to on round 1, by explaining how we need to go further.
we would be at risk of back tracking if we pushed on.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
err we would not be at risk
should say.
piratedan
libertarians = wannabe hipster Republicans
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@Kyle: In that case I’ll take Venus. It’s where all the ladies are at plus no greenhouse gas problem, right?
Yutsano
@Mnemosyne: I, however, have no such shame about whipping that out.
NR
@Mnemosyne:
Right. The way to run the for-profit insurance companies out of business is to force everyone in America to give them money. Makes perfect sense. Also, up is down, black is white, and ignorance is strength. Actually, you pretty much have to believe that last one to be a Democrat today.
Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. If Bill Clinton had come out in support of the Republican health care bill, it would have passed Congress with a wide bipartisan margin. So I ask again – if this Republican health care bill is so great, why didn’t Bill Clinton support it back in 1993?
Answer: Because it was just as much a stinking pile of shit back then as it is today.
john f
@joe from Lowell: Your point is exactly what I throw in the face of every wingnut talk radio junkie I work with. I also remind them that part of George W’s Social Security reform was having people open up mandatory private retirement accounts
Chris
Libertarians aren’t their own party; they’re the bashful wing of the GOP, just like Blue Dogs (and to some extent, New Democrats) are Democrats who are ashamed of being called Democrats.
A libertarian will say, “We don’t want government to try something (because it might work, and then people might get their hopes up); therefore, government shouldn’t do anything.” A Republican will say, “We don’t want government to try something (because it might work, and make people question the validity of letting rich/powerful people run everything); therefore, government shouldn’t do anything.”
Libertarians are just passive-aggressive about how government inaction works (and how sabotage of government works). They don’t want you to think they’re like *those* guys (Republicans), but the only difference is in how honest they’ll be about how they want things to happen.
Stillwater
@Mnemosyne: The plan is pretty clearly to run the for-profit insurance companies out of business,
But not before (or if) they get provider costs under control. So it’s a win-win.
DPirate
I submit that many regressives are only against the WoT because they’ve realized it is going to cost them money. Hell, John Cole was for it before he was against it.