Why do we disagree?

This question matters.  It determines the scope of debate and helps us understand differing viewpoints.  It is also answered with confusion or misinformation with hilarious frequency.  I'll touch on how to think about these disagreements and briefly highlight some examples of confusion in the tax and voter ID debates.  Anyway, why do we disagree?

In politics, it seems to come down to a few things:

1. Differing, empirically testable, ideas about the world (facts)
2. Differing, empirically testable, ideas about how the world works (models)
3. Differing ideas about the proper values and goals of society 
4. Differing ideas about the proper powers of government

or, if you like:

1. What is the world like?
2. What can we do about it?
3. What should we do about it?
4. How shouldn't we do it?

None of that is terribly controversial, but I think that people often confuse the origins of their disagreement.  

I often, for instance, hear conservatives saying that the government shouldn't raise taxes on the rich, but depending on who you talk to, the answer to why varies a lot.  For some it is "because they are job creators", but for others it is "because it isn't fair".  These world views have the same conclusion, but different implications.  We can, to some extent, test the proposition that raising taxes will mean less job creation.  If a person genuinely believes this to be the primary reason not to raise taxes on the rich, then empirical arguments are the most appropriate forum of discussion.  For the "it isn't fair" person, the proper arguments are philosophical--diminishing marginal utility, &c.  Of course, people often convolve many different types of reasons, or simply hold positions as an aspect of group identity, but the basic point still stands.

Now, I don't think it is impossible to convince people to change their positions in 3 & 4 type disagreements, but it's substantially harder.  It is, however, possible to give people better access to facts, and in many cases that changes the nature of the discussion for the better.

Presenting evidence of the extremely low incidence of voter ID fraud, for instance, seems to have shifted the debate from "we need to curb rampant voter ID fraud" to "it is right and proper for voters to show ID in order to vote".  In other words, the debate has shifted from an empirical one to an ideological one.  From my perspective, that is good, because ideological questions are the only valid questions to ask voters in my idealized constitutional anarchy model of government.   Voters are, in fact, quite bad at discerning which facts and models best reflect the real world.  But, they are excellent at determining what they think are good goals to focus on as a society, and what they think are categorically unacceptable ways of achieving those goals.

I'll have more on practical applications of this idea, and ways in which it might help move the debate forward in a later post.

A Libertarian model for Government Funding

Libertarian morality basically works around two fundamental property rights.  Each person owns their own body, and the bounty of nature is owned by all.  By trade, and by fair access to the bounty of nature, things are produced, exchanged, and improved, and the engines of capitalism start to fire.  In this model, the important thing is to ensure that property rights and contract law (which is really just an extension of property right to include the right to exchange) are protected.  Interestingly, this provides a clear area for the proper operation and implementation of government - counter to the anarcho-capitalist ideas that seem to follow necessarily from libertarianism.  Note, that the libertarian arguments for anarchism differ starkly from the arguments I have presented here earlier.  Frankly, I find the moral autonomy argument for anarchism much stronger than that of libertarianism, but I think it's worth exploring the libertarian ideas because they seem to dominate political discourse in a lot of ways.

The fundamental moral logic behind libertarianism is that each person possesses his or her own body, and all the things s/he creates using things fairly traded or gotten from the bounty of nature.  Now, the commonly recognized flaw in this kind of morality is that the "bounty" of nature isn't all that bountiful when you compare it to the entire needs of the human race over all of history.  In some sense, libertarians concede that we collectively own natural resources, but argue that they aren't scarce enough to spend time fighting over.  Unsurprisingly, this causes some issues when the resources in question really are scarce.  Another way of thinking about this is that libertarians believe that the only truly scarce resource is human labor.  Anyway, this collective ownership of natural resources combined with the scarcity problem provides what I see as an interesting niche for government.  Here's the plan.

Each nation is the sole owner of "nature" within its borders.  In other words, it owns all the land, all the air, all the sea, all the wildlife, basically all the stuff that isn't people or made by people.  It derives this right because it represents the people not just now but in the past and future... those people who collectively own all of nature's bounty.  They then rent the use of portions of that natural bounty to the entrepreneurs who want to use it.  They levy this rent... let's call it a tax... based on the market value of the nature, and on the expected risk of damage to nature by the tenant.  Just as landlords charge premiums for pets, the government might charge premiums for, say, high pollution.  The government then can invest this money in the protection and improvement of its property.  They improve their property by making it a more attractive place to live... increasing competition for the property and allowing them to increase rents. Offering universal healthcare, or utilities, or cleaner facilities, or safer business environments to occupants might all be value increasing ways to spend that money.  Now, in some sense, the government is a monopolist, but since the people who are competing for the resources it provides are in fact the owners of the government, the monopoly doesn't provide the leverage necessary to properly enable extortionary pricing. I think we can reasonably argue about whether or not this is the best way to manage the shared ownership of nature, but it does seem to be fundamentally compatible with libertarianism, which is win enough for me.  Any problems?

On Government and the Free Market (part 2: intellectual property law)

Spoiler: Copyrights and Patents ruin Perfect Markets, hassle software companies, bolster the plutocracy, prevent market forces from producing free digital goods and services, and make me Angry at night.  Here's why we should get rid of them:

On Government and the Free Market (part 1: Healthcare)

Generally, I'm a huge fan of the free market.  I think competition is a powerful force for good, and I'd like to see less government intervention in a wide variety of market activities.  However, whenever I talk about healthcare, I'm basically totally socialist.  Many people might see these views as inherently contradictory, but I'm not sold and this post is about why.

My views are held together by an understanding of the theoretical basis for the modern fondness for free-markets.  It's called Pareto Optimality, and basically what it means is that a Perfect Market  will (provably) reach an equilibrium where no one can possibly get any better off without someone else having things worse.  Zero-sum doesn't immediately sound exciting, but consider the alternative scenario in which many people are unnecessarily worse off and you might get a sense of why this result is a Good Thing.  I think (though I'm not sure), that this proof is part of the reason Austrians (EDIT: Austrians do not hold this belief.  For a fairly thorough primer click here) and other Libertarians are so fond of unfettered capitalism.  It is, however, worth noting that where that equilibrium is (in terms of final distribution of goods) depends on initial distribution of wealth, so even if we did have a perfect market we might have to think about setting up initial conditions properly so everyone was alive and moderately well at the end.

Now, before you get all worried about proper wealth distribution, please recall that our markets aren't perfect (obviously).  The question of why they aren't naturally leads to my beliefs regarding the role of government in the market.  A lot of the time, as libertarians are eager to point out, the government is the force moving markets away from their ideal.  They do this primarily by increasing the barrier to entry into various businesses.  Common tactics include patent law, licensing restrictions (especially zoning ordinances), quality controls, subsidies, tax codes, loopholes, and all sorts of other things.  When I get angry and yell about plutocracy in government, that's usually what I'm on about - wealthy corporations and individuals buying themselves special treatment... Unions and other powerful groups lobbying to entrench their interests (like cab medallions &c).  That stuff is bad news; we shouldn't put up with it.  It distorts outcomes, hides costs, and generally creates long term structural problems in the economy.  If you think I sound like a libertarian right now, it's because I agree with them totally on these points.

However, some markets aren't perfect for reasons completely separate from government.  Health Care appears to be one of those markets.  There are a lot of reasons for this, but the basic issue is that people can't really tell good care from bad.  This is particularly true of the very ill.  Sick people given the right treatment often die anyway, and sometimes very ill people get better despite bad treatment or no real treatment at all.  There's no clear signal of quality, and if consumers can't tell what's good, they very clearly can't effectively choose the proper treatment.  Patients can pick their doctors by bedside manner, but not by efficacy.  Furthermore (and this is vital), patients who need care most can't really make ANY choices about their care.  They may be unconscious, rushed to the nearest care provider, and subjected to whatever life-saving treatment the doctor on call deems necessary.  And then there's the problem of infinite demand.  Most people (rightly) value their lives over just about anything else.  Combine that with the fact that people are terrible judges of quality of medical care, and you can see why such giant amounts of money go into bad treatments.  How can a proper market operate under those sorts of constraints?  My answer, and Kenneth Arrow's (a Nobel Laureate economist who worked out some of the perfect market stuff I mentioned earlier) is that it can't.

But don't take the theorist's word, look at the facts.  The U.S. spends hilariously more money on health care than any other country -- with the most private system (though the U.S. health care market is also horribly burdened by government interventions... in particular drug patents).

 Our government, insuring just our elderly and very poor, manages to spend a larger share of GDP on healthcare than the Canadian government spends on every. single. Canadian.

This is insanity. You don't even have to look abroad to notice that the socialist way is better... take the VHA.  So when markets can't work like they're supposed to, I'm okay with government stepping in to do the job.

(If you're about to make claims about health outcomes in other countries, I suggest you read the linked articles first... U.S. health outcomes are generally similar to or worse than our socialist peers')

Next up: macroeconomic interventions