What is up with Matt Yglesias always posting things that I am thinking or have thought but are not articulate enough to express. Or, perhaps this is some sort of digital Socratic method in which I am fooled into thinking I always believed it. Here is a three-fer from today
There’s really nothing I find more annoying that the lazy attribution of policy differences to vaguely defined “cultural” norms. For example, Jacob Weisberg writes that:
Health care systems are not just policy choices but expressions of national character and values. The alternatives he describes work better than ours not just because they’re well-designed and competently managed but because they reflect the expectations and traditions of their societies.
Now the implication of the Weisberg Thesis is that the UK is more culturally aligned with Spain than it is with Canada. And that Canada is more aligned with South Korea than with the UK. And that the Netherlands has more in common with Japan than with Scandinavia. I don’t think that outside of the context of trying to make a cute point about health care, anyone would seriously try to argue in favor of any of those claims.
Strong federalism is even the enemy of sensible decentralization. Since the states are “sovereign” and represented as such in the Congress, there’s no way to reorganize America’s administrative subdivisions no matter how anachronistic they’ve become. Thus some states, like California and Texas, have grown to immense proportions while other states (Wyoming, e.g.) are tiny and shrinking. And we can’t set up sensible administrative units that might reflect how people’s lives are actually lived. Hoboken and Manhattan are in totally different jurisdictions even while New York City can have its local transportation ideas foiled by state legislators from Rochester. Some parts of the DC suburbs are involved in the governance of Norfolk and other parts of the DC suburbs are involved in the governance of Annapolis, but there’s no level of government at which DC and its suburbs can collaborate on common issues
But it doesn’t follow that tax policy should cater to the idiosyncratic interests of high-earning union members any more than it should cater to the idiosyncratic interests of high-earning people in general. Over the long-term, organizing health care around employment is a bad idea. And financing health care through giant hidden tax subsidies is also a bad idea. But eliminating the tax exclusion in one fell swoop would be unfair and politically infeasible. Curbing its applicability to high earners would, however, be a step in the right direction, raise some necessary funds for health reform, and help put us on the road to cost control.
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