Re: Aca
 

I keep arguing that your liberty can be restricted by government and non-government actors alike. So my hypothetical of the island where you cannot get around for different reasons. You basically concede the point, and change the subject to talk about what to do about it, suggesting that the government cannot give you everything you want (a 0% mortgage or a lightning-powered unicycle). What to do about is a separate question, but as a predicate, you at least pretend to care about liberty, and don’t dispute that your liberty can be threatened by what private actors do.

If you cannot buy health insurance, you have less liberty and less freedom than if you can.

I agree that many libertarians care whether the government takes away your freedom, but not whether private parties take away your freedom. You seem to be in this camp. I keep pushing you to give some principled reason to distinguish between the two, and you can’t. If you care about liberty, you should support things that the government does that further liberty.

You say that justifying government action on the basis of promoting liberty “opens the barn door” too far, which strikes me as a very weird thing for a libertarian to say. Too much liberty! Scary! Maybe you think this because you don’t consider taxation to threaten anyone’s liberty, which is also truly weird. Once you accept that just about any government action affects different liberty interests in different ways, and involves trade-offs, you start to see that the barn doors are not so wide open, and that libertarianism is a foolish infatuation.

Does this mean you have a right to health insurance? I never said that. You keep changing the subject to talk about rights, something I’m not talking about.

You also have this odd notion that it’s OK for the government to do things that diminish liberty so long as people have a notional choice to opt out of the market entirely. As if deciding not to drive is really a choice that many people could make, and as if deciding not to drive does not itself greatly reduce one’s liberty. You have articulated a principle here, just not one that is consistent at all with an interest in liberty.

Then you argue that “government cannot force people to subsidize the coverage of others by compelling them to buy certain products.” Why not? Isn’t that what government is? The government forces you to pay taxes, and it uses those taxes to pay for things that necessarily involve cross-subsidies. The government builds roads, schools and army bases, all of which benefit some people more than others.

Now, you also argue that the ACA doesn’t increase choice, because those over thirty cannot buy catastrophic coverage. That’s the right question to be asking, but you’re ignoring what the individual market was doing before the ACA. Yes, it was possible to buy certain kinds of coverage that the ACA forbids. The reason the ACA forbids that coverage is that the provision of those policies undermines the market’s ability to provide other coverage that more people want. If you assume away that problem, as you are wont to do, then indeed you can assume away the ACA’s regulation as unnecessary. Once you accept that people actually want to be able to get coverage for pre-existing conditions and preventative care, and that the ACA makes this possible, then the libertarian game is up. Libertarianism healthcare policy involves pretending that necessary regulation is unnecessary, and/or that people don’t want to buy the insurance coverage that people actually want to buy. And the older person who wants to buy only catastrophic coverage is out of luck, just like the pacifist who doesn’t want his tax dollars to pay for nuclear weapons.

You say that you don’t believe that healthcare markets can work better when they compete to provide services, as compared to a government monopoly. Does that mean you think all hospitals should be nationalized? All doctors should work for the government? I assume the answer is “um, not that,” in which you’re not actually making a libertarian argument about rights, but an empirical argument about what works better in specific markets.

On your privity/Timmy point, we’ll have the government act as a quasi-broker, but intermediating the transaction. You pick which services you want to buy, as offered by different private parties, but you tell and pay the government, which pays the private party to serve you. Bingo — no privity.

Finally, on the trash removal hypotheticals, you duck the question because you don’t have a good answer. My hypothetical illustrates that if the government requires you to buy a service, you can be better off purchasing it from a private party than from a government monopoly, a point you were resisting. Your hypothetical is not apt to that question at all. You’re just arguing that government regulation limits your choices by preventing you from buying the sort of product forbidden by the regulation. Well, duh. You can’t buy children’s toys adorned with shards of broken glass, either.

To which you will say, people don’t want those toys, but they do want catastrophic coverage. To which I will say, go back to the justification for the ACA regulations, which is that allowing health insurers to provide certain kinds of cut-right coverage prevents insurers from offering other kinds of insurance that lots of people want.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

"The federal government is an insurance company with an army."

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C9dFl7MXYAA4EXy.jpg

Re: Aca
 

You left out that ACME is so cheap because it was dumping the trash it collected in a dumpster behind city hall. It's easy to be cheap when you're providing crappy service.

Although I wouldn't sign up for Ty's hypo either. St. Paul is currently fighting over how to reduce the number of haulers making use of the public alleys to collect trash and there's no way I would trade the municipal-provided (probably contracted, don't even know) service we get in Minneapolis for it.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Can you replace this with a link?

TM

Re: Aca
 

If you're born without a trust fund, you have less liberty and freedom than one who is born with a trust fund. If you're born in Alaska, you have less liberty in terms of physical mobility in winter than someone in Los Angeles. If you have an 85 IQ, you have less liberty in terms of school choice than if you're born with a 140 IQ.

That's a mischaracterization. They can care about both, but realize there is no realistic cure for private party liberty inhibition of the sort you describe. All labor is by definition subject to curtailing of liberty by economic compulsion. (Sure, you can quit any time you like, but you'll suffer for it, etc. See Marx for the rest...) It's a baseline human reality that men exercise power over one another all the time. In fact, as is more and more apparent in recent years, the only real law followed by anyone anymore is the law of power - which is, he who has power inflicts his will on others. This is a loss of liberty those without power. Shall we now set about curing this essential law of human nature, of human interaction? That's a bit... ambitious. Even for a utopian.

I just did. The argument that the govt should intervene any time anyone's liberty is impeded by a private party is absurd.

We can have an argument of degree (which I was trying to have). I'm fine with medicare expansion because I think HC is a unique area of societal importance in which the govt may intercede and assess a tax.

This is a far more reasonable thing than your suggestion that any time a private party precludes the liberty of another, govt intervention is warranted.

You don't have a right to health insurance. But the govt has a right to tax, and this includes taxing us to expand medicare.

You may characterize it as notional, but that choice is an important bright line. If you force a man into a market, with no opt-out option, he is a prisoner of it. He has no incentive to find a way around the problem. Even if he innovates and finds a solution, the law mandates he participate as has been dictated. This inhibits dynamism.

Again, that the govt does the buying, rather than directing you to buy something, is an essential difference. Additionally, those are all items of huge cost which only the govt could aggregate the resources to purchase.

And again, nobody is compelling privity between you and a corporation. If you're okay with the govt saying, "Ty, buy insurance from [insert corp]," you're okay with the govt saying, "Ty, buy toothpaste from [insert corp]." This is a dangerous crack in the dam.

More simply stated, the ACA has taken choice away from one group in order to provide it to another.

I do not buy the argument that the group desiring the more comprehensive policies is larger than those who'd seek to pare costs by purchasing catastrophic policies. I think, empirically, the latter would be much larger, as people are strapped for cash and seeking low cost variants of almost everything since the financial crisis.

I think what the ACA has made a choice. It has decided to give the people who need comprehensive plans priority over those who'd seek value, at cost to those who'd seek value.

The only game here is that the architects of the ACA have quite overtly chosen the interests of those desiring comprehensive plans over those who want catastrophic plans. It has forced the latter group to subsidize the former.

The argument I raised, way, way back when, was that this "choice" may not need to be made. I suggested there was an albeit politically unrealistic, but economically feasible way to satisfy both groups's interests.

Incorrect. No one would argue that people do not want to buy comprehensive plans. Of course they do. I think Libertarians are simply noting that, by inhibiting the liberty of people who want catastrophic plans in order to provide other people with those comprehensive plans, you are choosing one group over the other. You are inhibiting the liberty of the value-seeker in favor of the liberty of a comprehensive policy seeker. You have picked a winner and a loser, and that is not argument, but simple fact.

Er, out of "liberty."

No I did not. My support for medicare expansion is based on a legal concern about compelling people to buy products from corporations, not an economic belief that medicare is a better delivery mechanism.

Of course not. But in regard to certain hospitals, I'm sure there'd be benefit to putting them under govt control.

I don't like it, but it's better than compelling a direct purchase.

You can't buy children's toys with glass shards because they are a danger - a proper use of regulation. There is no danger or other compelling interest in buying trash removal from a reputable service that meets your minimal needs. In my hypothetical, the govt is again choosing one party's interests over the other's. The bungalow owners' interests have been placed below those of the McMansion owners.

I'll put aside my argument that this choice needn't be made -- that both can be satisfied by a direct purchaser elective/preventative care model. We've argued that to death.

What you have described throughout this post, over and over, is a choice. You say we can only satisfy one of two groups with mutually exclusive goals: Those seeking comprehensive coverage (pre-existing care, maternity, etc.), and those seeking catastrophic plans. If you leave the market alone, the former will not get what they want, but the latter will continue to enjoy their liberty to purchase what they want. If you intervene, preventing the latter from purchasing what the market would otherwise give them, and compelling them to pay more for broader coverage, the former will get what they want and the latter will not only lose what they had, but have to spend more for that which they did not want.

This is not a general enhancement of liberty. This is weighing of the liberties of two parties, with a decision that the "liberty" (I've not conceded you're misusing the term) of one is more important than that of another. You can justify that as a societal need, or an allowed result of proper regulatory power. But I'm sorry... however many semantic and logical contortions you go through, this is not, and never will be, a policy grounded in the interests of liberty.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Someone (you?) had a way to link to a smaller version of images on Twitter -- can someone tell me how to do that?

Re: Aca
 

I'm just going to sever this part of the conversation. You and I agree that liberty can be threatened by both public and private power, and that it's utopian to think we can make this go away.

Fortunately, I'm not saying anything so utopian. I'm saying that different things that the government does have different implications for liberty, and that people who at least profess to care about liberty should care about private threats to liberty just as they do about public threats.

Surely you're not saying that because we can't completely make such problems go away, we shouldn't try to do anything about them at all. Because that would be silly.

Re: Low Standards
 

I'm really hoping that the worst thing Trump does today is screw up the Easter Egg Roll. That would make it the most successful day of his administration so far.

Re: Aca
 

I haven't argued that, so you don't need to worry about that straw horse.

Remarkably, this was a response to my observation that I'm not talking about rights. I'm still not talking about rights, until the very end of this post. The idea that more liberty is good does not imply that anyone necessarily has a right to anything. Here's a challenge for you: If I don't refer to "rights," try responding without the word "right."

Agree with every sentence but the first. What is the bright line? If you don't let someone drive, he is effectively a prisoner. It's silly to think that you've avoided an imposition on liberty by giving someone a notional but completely unrealistic choice to opt out. As a result, your commitment to liberty seems highly circumstantial.

Why? Why does this difference matter? What does privity have to do with liberty?

There are really ways that the government can provide insurance in a way that private parties cannot -- that privatized Social Security, disability and health insurance don't function as well as when the government is involved.

Yes.

Everyone wants to pay less, and no one has enough money, but the idea that people don't want preventative care or coverage of pre-existing conditions, to take two examples, is downright loopy.

It's not "value." It's buying partial coverage because you can't get the coverage you want. What people want is comprehensive coverage.

What you really object to is the idea that relatively healthy people are forced to pay more for their coverage in order to subsidize people who aren't as healthy. No?

I'm very clear about that. I think there are many, many people who want the coverage that the ACA requires, and *very* few people who genuinely only want to buy catastrophic coverage because they prefer to self-insure for preventative care, pre-existing conditions, mental-health care, and the other things the ACA requires. Most people are risk averse when it come to health care, for good reasons. Moreover, the people who are the least risk averse are young, and tend to become more risk averse as they grow old, so forcing them to buy coverage is like forcing them to save money for their own retirement -- still an imposition on their liberty in some sense, but forcing them to subsidize themselves.

So if a taxpayer has to buy something either way, and what they buy is better if they buy it from a private company, why does the privity make anyone worse off in any way?

[I say, so interpose the government between the buyer and seller to avoid privity.]

I don't like it, but it's better than compelling a direct purchase.[/QUOTE]

Why don't you like it? Sounds like it solves your privity problem absolutely. One starts to suspect that your objection isn't really about privity.

No, of course not. You are mixing my hypotheticals to avoid their points. You can't buy toys with glass shards because they're dangerous. For the same reason, you can't buy health insurance under the ACA with coverage for mental health problems, because otherwise people will die.

Basically, yes.

Nothing is "a general enhancement of liberty" without some tradeoffs. Everything the government does involves tradeoffs. If you are taxed to pay for the Army, you are forced to give up some of your money or go to prison, but you get national security to protect you from foreigners who might come and take your liberty away. If the government recognizes a right to free speech, you get to say whatever you want but you are surrounded by people who get to say whatever they want.

Because we value some of these liberty interests more than others -- e.g., the right to free speech more than the right not to hear stuff you don't like -- the tradeoff seems pretty easy, but it's still a tradeoff. The government requires you to drive on the right side of the street, taking away your ability to drive wherever you want on the street. Because this solves a coordination problem and is so obviously beneficial for everybody, we don't worry about the lost freedom to drive on the left.

The ACA is like this. The right to sell insurance to people that doesn't cover really basic things is not a right that matters to anyone. And the right to buy catastrophic coverage is like the right to drive on the left side of the road -- maybe it sounds great in the abstract, but not when you realize that it's screwing things up for most people who just want to be able to use the car to get places, and just want to have decent health insurance, and didn't ask to be a part of anyone's libertarian thought experiments. Solving these problems actually improves people's choices and liberty in real ways.

Re: Aca
 

We've found a considerable bit of agreement here.

First, I care about both public and private threats to liberty. An excellent example of this is my apprehension toward any policy that compels direct contracting with private entities. The line between govt and corporations is already blurred enough. The last thing we need to do is hand the people who are already writing our regulations (via lobbyists, to create barriers to entry against competition), exempting themselves from competition (drug price negotiation), and enjoying bailouts a device by which they can create new govt-compelled consumers for their products.

Second, as I noted before, I welcome an argument of degree on the extent to which liberty may be curtailed. I think your better argument would have been the one you've now offered: The ACA's favoring of comprehensive plan purchasers over catastrophic plan purchasers is a choice, based on a worth societal goal. I'd argue in response that, yes, there's a lot of heft to that position, so we should try to balance the interests of both groups. I'd say this balancing could be achieved by creating a few more layers of policies in the ACA, beyond silver, bronze, etc. If we wanted to, we could provide customized products to consumers, while still observing some parameters that preserve the necessary subsidization and risk pooling necessary to make pre-existing condition plans possible.

Re: Aca
 

Which just happens to be a thing that neither you nor anyone else had any concern about until the ACA passed.

Sneaky tyranny is the worst tyranny.

Again, there has never been a line. A thing that is a creation of state law is not a thing that is conceptually separate from the government.

Yes, that's a super elementary point, but so is yours.

When we start sliding down this slope, I'll be with you. But we're not going to, so maybe chill for now?

Oh, and if a corporation can do all of those things to get customers, why deal with the herculean task for getting a federal mandate statute passed and signed into law?

Re: Aca
 

I've been anti-corporate state for a long time. That I think we should relax regs doesn't mean I support corps generally. As I noted, regs are written in great part by corps, to stifle competition. Corps don't want competition. As Thiel states, "they want as close to a monopoly as they can get."

I say let them enjoy loose regulation. And when they collapse, let them die, and their pieces be sold to those who can use them. Including, perhaps most notably, the banks. TBTF is TBTExist.

Govt created drivers licenses. Is it forever tied at the hip to the auto industry? It also created passports. Is it inextricably intertwined with the travel industry?

See the Thiel paraphrase above. Nothing Is Ever Enough for a corporation. Particularly in a volatile economic climate like ours. All that can be done to eliminate risk must and will be done.

(There's a great argument Cowen missed in the Complacent Class, by the way. He fails to adequately highlight the tie between financial risk management, short termism, and lack of innovation. It's the need to deliver each quarter, dependably, that's fucking us hardest.)

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I dunno. I usually do a google image search and select one that doesn't do a number on the margins. Couldn't find one this time.

TM

Re: Aca
 

This is non-responsive. Exactly no one had "apprehension toward any policy that compels direct contracting with private entities" until Randy Barnett was looking for an argument against Obamacare. The fear is entirely motivated and entirely political.

Honestly, it's weird that you're still flogging an argument that wasn't even strong enough to get Roberts on board.

No, they aren't. That can happen, but it's not at anywhere near "great part."

Never mind the consumers, or their life savings, who die in the meantime.

The 1890s were fun!

This doesn't mean anything.

Try again, because this is stupid. Just to refresh, you're saying corporations are things that are distinct from the government and I'm saying their only existence is by government act.

So, yeah, driver's licenses and passports are not distinguishable from the government. Nor is a legal entity with the rights and responsibilities dictated by law neatly distinguishable from government.

Re: Aca
 

This chat board has become so fucking wordy. Here's some fuzzed out psychedelic funk to start your week. The Daily Dose is Sir Stanley. "I Believe I Found Myself."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m23uu5Yz-Y