The Nature of the Beast

I’ve long viewed public policy as philosophical kin to ecology. They’re both the science of tweaking complex systems, and both pose similar dilemmas for people who seek to alter the rules of the game.

I hate mosquitoes. It’s not enough that they leave me welted and itchy all summer; they carry diseases that contribute to the deaths of millions every year. It would be easy to say, “let’s kill the bastards,” throw some money at the problem, and drive them to whining, bloodsucking extinction. But what would the spiders, bats, and frogs eat? I may not like mosquitoes, but they matter to someone (or something). We need to look at the bigger picture. Will the other animals adapt to a mosquito-free world? Can we maybe just make mosquitoes leave us alone, or itch less? Can we go after the diseases they carry, and deal with the nuisance? My nuisance and pestilence is someone else’s bread-and-butter.

I also hate health insurance companies. Every year I find out that another $10-100 will be taken out of my paycheck to hand over to company whose profit model depends on not handing that money over to the doctors I see, who then must nickel-and-dime me so they can pay their own bills. It would be easy to hand the insurance companies’ responsibility over to the government and let them sort it out like they already do for old people on Medicare. It would be a lot cheaper. But what would the hundreds of thousands of people who work for the insurance companies do? What about all the people being paid to process claims at my doctor’s office? What about everyone who’s getting paid to keep the system just the way is? Couldn’t we make some more incremental changes? If cost is the real problem, aren’t there other solutions aside from a scorched earth policy on 16 percent of our economy? My expensive bureaucratic burden is lots of people’s livelihood.

The point is that personal, ideological, and political preferences don’t exist in a vacuum. Making changes to the supply of something (mosquitoes, health insurance) while ignoring the demand (frogs, workers), leads to massive imbalances and serious unintended consequences. In our system, a lot of the smaller, less interesting policy questions are handled with nuance and grace. But the bigger ones that people argue about over dinner, like taxation and the role of government, are not. The modern-day conservative notion of “starving the beast” of government has a clear goal in mind, but only looks at the supply side in achieving that goal. But you’re not starving the beast. You’re starving the taxpayer, and they vote. They say that if you take away the supply of funds (lower taxes), the demand for services will go away. But it doesn’t. Instead, people continue to demand the public goods they always have demanded, but finance it with the cheap debt that’s a byproduct of being the world’s currency. Instead, we end up in acrimonious debates about debt when all of us would rather be debating about what the government should and shouldn’t do.

If it is a conservative goal to limit government, one of the smartest things they can do is hand the public the tab. Instead, they hide it from the hungry public, but point out that their credit cards are maxing out. Only then can public demand for services match the supply of money to pay for it. If it’s a progressive goal to expand the role of government, the cost of doing so should be made clear. They hide the bill too, only they say that debt is cheap and limitless, so who cares?

Policy change must look at what sort of balance will be struck after the fact. Services do good, but they cost money. Cuts save money, but take away from the things people like. And debt helps us avoid making the real tradeoffs. In nature, cutting the food supply means that those who demand it will either look elsewhere or die.  In politics, cutting revenue means that we go into debt or default. In both cases, demand remains, at least until something cataclysmic disrupts it. It doesn’t take a treehugger to believe that.

They Really Hate Romney

Thousands of journalists and bloggers write about politics and political figures as if their insights were revelation, each seeking overlooked or understated views on this or that piece of contemporary trivia. Herman Cain is an alleged serial sexual harasser, but maybe there is a humanistic back story. Michelle Bachmann makes seriously outlandish and occasionally dangerous claims, but maybe she’s just being ironic like all the kids do these days. The youth vote is hot, after all. Those examples are fabrications; their only goal to describe the nature of the politics blog beast. What is really interesting is the front-runner.

But Romney’s narratives are almost always dry, policy-driven, predictable rehashings of his tendency to go where the wind blows. He was pro-choice before he was pro-life. He was pro-health-reform before he was pro-social-darwinism. The most personal criticism I’ve ever heard about the man is some legend about the Romney family strapping the (occupied) dog crate to the car roof when they went somewhere on vacation in 1983. In the runup to the 2008 elections, this was billed as “emotion-free crisis management.”  And I thought that “no-drama” Obama had the corner on that market.  

We know that Romney is winning the GOP nomination race despite anemic polling, uninspired, triumphalist campaigning, and a somewhat causal adherence to the doctrines of his doctrinaire political party. The Republican electorate hopes that someone, anyone, will present a serious challenge to Romney, and ultimately Obama. But time and again, the realities of a modern political campaign come calling on their latest cloying, saccharine flavor of the month. Inevitably, someone says something stupid, or some skeleton emerges from some closet, and the money and enthusiasm disappear without a trace. Again and again, they are resigned to the inevitability of a Romney candidacy.  

If I were emotionally engaged in who wins the GOP nomination, I’d be irate. After three years of (heavily subsidized) activism against a president in the opposing camp, after all the conservative talking heads spelling out the party message in no uncertain terms, and all the games of to-the-death-chicken on Capitol Hill, it comes down to this callow, glorified used car salesman in a Teflon suit and a weathervane for a moral compass. I’d be looking for anybody but this guy too. But there is no one else.

Last time I checked, the average GOP voter is highly motivated by ideology and emotion. People liked Ronald Reagan because he seemed like a nice guy with a sunny temperament and a knack for making strong statements against a cold war enemy that was already crumbling under its own weight. People liked George W Bush because he looked like their goofball high school buddy, even as he made them feel safe in a dangerous world. They hate Obama because he’s nothing like anyone they know, and, unless he is actively campaigning, comes off as a professorial and condescending.

For most people, finding a president they can get behind is not about policy. It’s about what you hear over lunch at work, what your friends and family say, or, if you’re civic-minded, what you see on the half-hour of nightly news you watch. And nobody likes Romney. He is stiff, phony, nakedly ambitious and opportunistic, occasionally nasty towards his opponents, over-privileged from birth, father to a Stepford family, and an owner of too-perfect hair. Every characteristic that makes the man a winner in life makes him a loser in presidential politics.

Too many bloggers and journalists obsess about Romney’s policy positions, and whether he is “conservative” enough for the modern GOP. Too many people take Rick Perry’s desire to abolish three cabinet-level federal agencies he couldn’t remember, or Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan as gospel, making anything Romney says sound reasonable and eminently presidential in reply.  But it’s not about policy any more than Boss Tweed passing out free beer at the polls, or Huey Long stoking the fires of depression-era Louisiana’s working poor. It’s about hitting certain emotional chords among people who might show up to vote in on an Iowa morning in the dead of winter. People who are cerebral enough to pay attention to this campaign in its early stages seem utterly deficient in their analysis of the emotional language driving these candidates. There is so much earnest analysis by people whose intuitions and inklings have grown atrophied by too many years of trying to be taken seriously by other serious people.

We all know that Romney is supported by the GOP establishment; a shadowy group whose sole motivation is to keep all their money and make much, much more. We mostly suspect that he will probably win this nomination by the grace of his powerful friends, and for lack of an alternative. But they all really do hate him, even his savvy and influential benefactors. None of this is revelation, but it’s important all the same.