Obamacare and the politics of deception
Such resigned cynicism is, of course, exactly what Barack Obama was supposed to deliver us from. “Hope and Change” meant hoping for that change. At the Iowa Democratic party’s Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner in November 2007, Obama gave a speech so well received it propelled him to victory in the Iowa caucuses, then to winning the presidential nomination and election. The candidate declared, “Telling the American people what we think they want to hear, instead of telling the American people what they need to hear, just won’t do.” Democrats, he said, have “always made the biggest difference in the lives of the American people . . . when we summoned the entire nation to a common purpose — a higher purpose.”
And that’s where things become complicated: Summoning the entire nation to a higher purpose often requires telling people what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear. What people wanted to hear was that the higher purpose of guaranteeing “quality, affordable health care for every American,” to use Obama’s words, could be had easily and painlessly. And it turned out that this historic goal was surprisingly attainable. “Most of this plan,” the president told Congress in a September 2009 address on health-care reform, “can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health-care system, a system that is currently full of waste and abuse.” Giving millions of uninsured Americans health insurance, and improving coverage for millions more who already had insurance, not only wouldn’t increase the federal deficit, but was “a step we must take if we hope to bring down our deficit in the years to come,” Obama had explained earlier that year.
Americans also wanted to hear that a reformed health-care system would help them rather than cost them, not just as taxpayers but also as patients and ratepayers. The administration was glad to oblige. A November 2009 post on the White House blog cited research and congressional testimony by MIT economist Jonathan Gruber (a health-care adviser to the administration) to share the glad tidings that the legislation taking shape would unleash a torrent of benefits. The bill being considered by the House would lower premiums for individuals while improving coverage, according to Gruber. Small businesses, too, had “little to fear, and much to gain, from health reform,” since the money it saved them would lead to hiring more workers and increasing their take-home pay.
What Americans needed to hear about health-care reform was different. They needed to hear that health-care reform’s benefits would entail costs, because a republic equipped with that knowledge would be prepared to weigh the inescapable trade-offs fairly and realistically. What they needed to hear, for example, was that “covering people with health insurance doesn’t save money,” as — surprise! — MIT economist Jonathan Gruber told the Washington Post in January 2014. That whole gauzy notion of reforming the health-care system as a way to reduce public and private medical expenditures was, it turns out, “sometimes a misleading motivator for the Affordable Care Act.” Gruber tells us now what we needed — but apparently couldn’t be trusted — to know then: “The law isn’t designed to save money. It’s designed to improve health, and that’s going to cost money.”
The original noble lie, in Plato’s Republic, was an attempt to solve a fundamental political problem: inducing men, who are strongly inclined to advance their own interests, to sacrifice those interests for the sake of their country. The particular dilemma Socrates addresses is that cities need fierce guardians to protect them from foreign enemies, but are then left with no one to protect them from the guardians. His noble lie addresses that conundrum by convincing guardians that their own interests and the well-being of the city are one and the same. Specifically, if the guardians are tricked into thinking they were born of the earth they protect, they’ll regard the homeland as their mother and all its citizens as their brothers, and will never wish to abuse those they defend.
Classical liberalism (think John Locke, not John Rawls) offered a different way to reconcile individual interest and political duty. Self-interest, rightly understood and pursued, was the public interest. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest,” Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations. We can reduce and ultimately eliminate the discord within and between nations by inducing people to focus on commerce and industry, which can make everyone who plays that positive-sum game better off. “He that encloses land, and has a greater plenty of the conveniences of life from ten acres than he could have from a hundred left to nature,” according to Locke’s Second Treatise, “may truly be said to give ninety acres to mankind.”
Modern, Rawlsian liberalism is distinctly uncomfortable with this Lockean solution. Even though New Deal–era dreams about a centrally planned economy have been abandoned, liberals refuse to accept that a decent society can rest on the alchemy that purports to turn private interests into the public interest. Franklin Roosevelt hailed Irish and Hibernian societies around the country on St. Patrick’s Day in 1937 for their fealty to the motto “Not for ourselves, but for others.” That spirit, he said, should animate not just charity but private and public life, given that “selfishness is without doubt the greatest danger that confronts our beloved country today.” Similarly, Barack Obama’s equation of common purposes with higher ones signals that private purposes are inherently low. Progress, moving from the lower to the higher, consists of claiming successive arenas of life that have been private in the name of what should be public.
This project is well suited — to Europe. As Jonah Goldberg once wrote, Sweden’s cradle-to-grave welfare state “succeeds as much as it does because it governs Swedes.” Centuries of primacy by central authority have disposed Europeans to rely on government dispensations, and to defer to its decisions about who gets what, when, and how. American liberals see their work as a heroic struggle — both noble and arduous — because, in the words of The New Republic’s John Judis, “since the country’s founding, Americans have always had an abiding distrust of the federal government.” There have been occasional breakthroughs — in the 1930s and, more briefly, the 1960s and after Obama’s election in 2008 — but the default setting is the public’s robust skepticism of government.
Hence, the noble lie. Liberals deplore but cannot disregard a fundamental political reality: Americans don’t know or want what’s good for them. So many people suffer from correctable failings, Michelle Obama told campaign audiences in 2008, because our country is “just downright mean.” If the selfish, shortsighted voters are to be brought around to embrace the only remedy, the liberal agenda, liberal polemicists need to portray its benefits in maximal terms while insisting its costs are minimal or even negative. The only “price” people will pay is to enjoy more and more benefits. In order to get Americans to institute — little by little, but ultimately in its entirety — a Scandinavian safety net, one must assure them every step of the way that its benefits won’t require anything resembling Scandinavian taxes or regulations.
(part 3 to come--must read material; use link for entire piece)
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372344/print
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