Yglesias had a glaring hole in his neoliberalism piece that maybe you could address.
Healthcare.
The US could copy any one of 30+ health systems from other rich countries and we don't.
We almost had a similar system with universal coverage in the Nixon administration.
But later, there was a basic inability to believe (despite all of the abundant evidence from decades of other countries) that the government being more involved in healthcare can save money and increase coverage. The US is still in thrall of this part of the neoliberal turn. It's what killed Clinton's attempt and the public option in Obama care.
The government could hardly be MORE involved in healthcare than it is right now. Moving to individual purchase of health insurance with tax credits would not real be LESS involvement, but BETTER involvement that allows a tiny sliver of competition between insurance companies to offer better coverage for the same cost or lower costs for the same coverage. AND it removes a disincentive to employment.
Noah's "developmental state" model he's ideating might just be the answer to this. "Do good things, don't do bad things" is a good motto.
Government involvement in the healthcare sector is very difficult to extricate from. Some areas, such as FDA approval for drugs, unquestionably should be done by the government.
One of the problems of the neoliberal paradigm is that when we see the government doing a bad job, we jump straight to privatization, without considering trying to see if we can get the government to go a good job instead
Not to mention that the bad job is often a *result* of a prior distaste for government action that leads to a self-fulfilling result via bad operational decision and resource rationing.
To play devil's advocate, the argument is there is no system the US could copy since every other system freeloads off America's innovation. Other countries simply pay for the administration of healthcare while using techniques, equipment, and pharmaceuticals all mostly invented in the US. The US is paying for administration and innovation.
Most of what makes us sick is super basic and not expensive to treat.
It is good that we have Keytruda, a monoclonal antibody that is used in PD-L1 positive, non small cell lung cancer, but that is a very small subset of the larger cancer space.
Most expensive drug development is like this, developing super targeted drugs for small specific populations that don't have a good alternative.
This is certainly important, but it isn't like healthcare would collapse without them. The US+Canada pharmaceutical market is about the size of the rest of the world combined (45% of global spending). This is a population of 380 million people. If the US were to reduce spending to European levels, (20% of global spending, 750 million people), that would be about 10% of the global pharma market.
It wouldn't be zero dollars going into pharma, it would just be less.
Imagine if the Italian government argued that they needed to subsidise Maserati and Ferrari because the innovations in those high end vehicles help Ford and Toyota. It would be ridiculous and normal Italians would be pissed.
The US essentially does the same thing for health and we shouldn't.
Do you think the UK has universal coverage? It doesn’t. If you don’t have a decent job you get what the NHS offers. If you have a decent job or pay out of pocket you get the drugs, treatments, scans, the NHS either doesn’t offer or doesn’t offer in a timely manner.
That depends on what you need and when. So, no. That’s not how the NHS works. If it’s urgent you need to pay out of pocket and the many private hospitals will charge you.
My wife is a brit, was hit by a car when she was young, and had completely 'free' reconstructive surgery immediately (this would have been probably $100k+ bill in the US). In fact true urgent care is handled faster in the UK, A&E wait times are shorter.
The difference in waiting times for NON-URGENT care in the UK vs US is about 3 weeks. (various papers, can google)
And, because of the free public option, private healthcare is far far cheaper than the US. It sets a much lower bound on price premium, at which point consumers will just wait for the free NHS option.
I agree that the government is very involved but in the worst ways.
I would say it happens in 2 big ways.
1. The tax subsidy for employer health insurance.
2. We have Medicare and Medicaid.
In Taiwan, everyone is insured under a single government insurer financed by a payroll tax. In the UK, there is the NHS which controls most parts of the system.
The closest to the US is a place like Switzerland or the Netherlands. In these places, there is guaranteed issue. Everyone has to buy a basic private health insurance which HAS to cover a basic floor of services. The private insurers can't turn people away or charge them extra. There is help purchasing if you can't afford it. Both countries also have the government scrutinize the Medical Loss Ratios and approve price increases.
So private insurers there have to cover everyone regardless of age or ability to pay. Risk is pooled across the country and public expenditures are low.
The US doesn't do that.
The US system is set up so that the young, healthy, and wealthy, (who are profitable to insure) are gift wrapped for private insurers. Meanwhile, the elderly and the poor, (who are not profitable) are on the public purse through Medicare and Medicaid.
In every metric we have about administrative cost, Medical Loss Ratios, costs to patients/employers etc. private insurance in the US is abysmal.
But, as good neoliberals, we KNOW that the government is always worse than the private sector, so the idea that private insurance "improves outcomes" or "saves costs" is just accepted, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
If Taiwan or South Korea, both of whom live in actual fear of Communist takeover, can do socialized medicine, why can't the US?
I posit, and I would love to hear how you disagree, that the reason is the power of existing interest groups and the array of reliable neoliberal talking points they can deploy to protect their position.
Our bloated (as a % of GDP) healthcare system is probably the single greatest limit to our future prosperity as a nation. It is the 800 pound gorilla in the room. The albatross around our necks. The biggest nail in our collective coffin. A topic long overdue for Mr. Smith to sink his exceptional analytical skills into.
Yes, we have 30+ sane alternatives for comparison. And an opportunity to create something even better; but still utterly lack the political will to do in the face of the clout of the insurance industry.
It's a mixed bag, in which overpriced Pharma definitely plays a role. But the lion's share of bloat is the private insurance market, which as the middleman, passes on advertising, profits, executive compensation packages and operating costs to consumers.
A separate discussion is why our nearly twice as expensive system underperforms the health outcomes of most EU countries--including stressed ones, like Britain--by almost every metric.
We pay more; get less. And if we can't reimagine and implement a more efficient system, it will form a big part of why China will bury us.
Regarding morbidities resulting from our greater obesity, it can be argued that this is also a reflection of our healthcare system; insofar as our healthcare system--at both the federal and state level--has a strong educational element, that's also reflected in public as well as private school curriculae. EU residents have access to the same pro-inflammatory, high glycemic index foods we do; but for reasons of their own choose to not eat them to a degree that substantially alters their health outcomes.
Or you could argue that our sub-EU American quality of life--for the 90% at least--creates enough stress (which it pretty measurably does) to substantially increase both obesity and pro-inflammatory pathologies.
Good point on how the higher levels of stress in the US helps contribute to obesity (although I believe Noah already covered it in his "Americans are coping ourselves to death" post) although I believe another important point is that (likely due to the corn/HFCS lobby) American processed foods are typically much sweeter than their European equivalents.
Because of greater US obesity, it's pretty much impossible to do an accurate apples-to-apples comparison with nations like Germany on pathologies that are generally acknowledged to be obesity-sensitive. Which leaves everything else; e.g., cancers, most-auto-immune diseases, psychopathologies, etc. Also, because ICD codes, and many (most?) CPT codes are identical, it enormously simplifies study & report data comparisons. To be fair, a ton of US data that *should* factor in obesity--e.g., bone fracture healing time--does not.
Bottom line: by almost every (other) metric, we are inferior to wealthy EU member outcomes. The often superior outcomes of wealthy US residents is dragged sharply downwards by the inferior outcomes of our poorer residents. Yet as a % of GDP we spend roughly twice as much; yet get 25-35% less. Something that if we can't get a handle on, we'll deserve it when China kicks our ass.
This has always been one of the challenges of the intellectual left—an academic viewpoint on the nature of power that might or might not be grounded in reality.
The Hegelian Dialectic, which helped inspire Marx in his formulation of Communism should work. A lot of the examples here with an oversimplified money = power (despite, ironically, a lot of these institutions experiencing formative years where the left causes often had substantially more money especially during the Obama era).
Anyway, the world is complex and “both sides” oversimplifying is bad. Money doesn’t equal power so simply (and human beings don’t tend to be so black and white as “evil corporations” or private equity firms. Additionally, just shrinking government and blindly repealing regulation doesn’t lead to better outcomes either.
A lot of folks seem to forget: economic and political systems are not ends in-and-of themselves. They’re meant to make peoples’ lives better and help people achieve things they want. If they don’t do this, they can and should be changed—as they have through history. We shouldn’t be too precise about dogmatically adhering to our “teams” in capitalism, socialism, neoliberalism, communism, or whatever other “ism”.
I think you misunderstand why people openly endorse dogmatic "teams" like capitalism, socialism et al. Aside from social signalling, "teams" like socialism, capitalism et al. find followers by appealing to a coherent yet flexible set of values ("from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," etc.) that people can use to make moral judgments. At least the people who get invested in politics; most normal people have contradictory moral impulses and follow people on the basis of personality, persuasive ability, and other non-ideological criteria.
I agree with that, though I think that is precisely the problem. (So, not a misunderstanding per se, vs “I think that kind of thing is bad.”) Perhaps the part that I do disagree with is the “flexible” part of your definition of those who are attracted to the teams.
Contradictory moral impulses are normal—as a philosophy major, I am painful aware of that… and also think that it’s more consistent with our real world vs any simplified model that can eliminates contradictions mainly by fiat/axiom.
That’s the exact issue of teams. Real human beings and real human needs will often create circumstances that violate those axioms. A “regular person” will often come to a more reasonable place than someone who needs to ignore certain facts to ensure a worldview/system stays intact. That is, after all, part of why the left needed to embrace greedflation, etc. even if it doesn’t really make much analytical sense. There’s a specific “bad guy” that needs to be bad.
Flexibility would be better. In practice, I find people tend to contort themselves (… which is flexibility in a sense, but not the type I think we both are referring to…) to fit facts into their worldview.
What I would say in defense of my harsher take is that part of how you assess the health of an intellectual movement is by how it reacts to events. When you hit an inflationary bump in the road, for example, do you acknowledge the existence of some tradeoffs and the need to make some painful choices to address the limits of demand stimulation? Or do you do what the thought-leaders in this camp have mostly done, which as Noah has acknowledged in separate posts is mostly double down on stimulus while trying to revive the credibility of price controls as a solution?
When you look at aspects of the "concrete" Bidenonomics agenda that Noah approves of — trying to dismantle regulatory barriers to housing, trying to make the CHIPS Act & IRA a success with permitting reform — who is it who is actually pushing for change? I think it's mostly the more "neoliberal" elements in the Democratic Party and the whole intellectual orientation of this piece is overly invested in slaying the beast of "carbon pricing is the only acceptable climate policy" relative to the whole suite of topics currently under consideration.
I agree with Noah mostly, so I am just going to focus on the areas where we differ:
- I think the Developmental State is more properly used to describe the Asian economic playbook of the 80s that includes financial repression, low wages, export focus etc.]
- I am a bit more concerned than Noah about the deadweight losses of taxation
- I like Geoliberalism as a replacement ideology (no official definition, but I think it should mean Georgism + liberalism; i.e. increase land taxes but keep other taxes and regulation pretty low). Acknowledging there is a huge overlap - eg Singapore could be described as both a developmental state and Geoliberal.
How do we get the money to finance the new developmental state? Can today’s highly partisan and self interested bureaucracy adequately develop this state. Can they execute the plan? The only way to really get new financing is to Europeanize the tax system. Much higher rates on the middle class and the use of a VAT. This would not be popular to the masses. Who ever wins the next election, they need to improve the bureaucracy to better perform in order to carry out any new initiatives.
I think you can make a narrow case that arguments about power should focus on power, and arguments about economics should focus on economics. In some ways it's very "The Economists' Hour" that the accumulation of power is viewed through economic arguments, not just as a normal part of political coalition building, party politics, or industrial/labor relations.
Agreed. Noah doesn't quite state the core problem with this attitude toward power: it's a set of complaints about people using money to get power *by lobbying politicians*. Why do they do that? Because politicians *are the ones with the power*. Even if lobbying succeeds, it does so only by convincing politicians to exert it.
I think there's a general sense on the left that, if not for that dastardly lobbying money, politicians would agree with them and implement their policies. This is not the case.
Noah is right to take on sloppy definitions and hackneyed critiques of "neoliberalism", but I think he underestimates how transformational the "neoliberal turn" actually was.
Take regulation. Nobody can dispute that the administrative state has grown apace since the Reagan years. But it's worth remembering that there was a shift in the type of regulations that administrative agencies began promulgating. Prior to the deregulation movement of the 1970s, large swathes of the American economy were subject to rigid controls on market entry, competition, and even prices. The CAB, the pre-Carter regulator of air transportation, was empowered set price controls on airfares, allocate routes, and even regulate market entry/exit in ways that would be anathema to many progressives today. Ditto for trucking, rail/freight, and the financial sector. Another good example is that old progressive bugaboo stock buybacks; they were mostly illegal (and thus hardly used) until 1982, and now they're a staple policy for high-level corporate managers. We can debate the merits of each of these decisions (as a doctrinaire lefty I'm very critical of them, others less so), but taken in aggregate they were a transformational shift in American political economy (that bugaboo term of neoliberals like Matt Yglesias).
TBH multiple Democratic Presidents had chafed at the power of the ICC and CAB going back to FDR. Even TR really didn't like the ICC and FDR created the CAB and FCC in order to make sure telecoms and airlines didn't fall under the ICC.
And don't forget how Neoliberal deregulation deliberately facilitated M&A's and market concentration to get us to the sorry state we're in today. Where monopolies, duopolies, and oligopolies have been normalized and even lauded. Instead of being actively resisted for killing entrepreneurialism and innovation. And both increasing costs to consumers; while depressing wages.
"Too big to fail" is Neoliberalism's darkest fruit.
There were many TBTF entities on a more localized basis long before Ronald Reagan. Bank of America was TBTF in the state of California, the countries largest state long before Reagan was President and banks could do business across state lines
But Neoliberalism enabled and practically glorified TBTF as some sort of laudable and inevitable product of laissez-faire capitalism. In WSJ, Bloomberg--even Noah's substack--there's either crickets/denial on the anti-innovative, anti-entrepreneurial effects of TBTF, or this "gee! look what we built." self-congratulation.
TBTF, and our GDP-killing healthcare system, are by far the two greatest inefficiencies dragging down the US economy, and the two subjects Noah has yet to address.
Both Truman and LBJ didn't like the CAB restricting entrance to airlines wanting to fly new routes. Perhaps this might be more a legacy of Jacksonian opposition to monopolies but it is a fact that both Truman and LBJ wanted more competition in air travel than the CAB and ironically the airlines themselves wanted.
Great piece, thanks, though I am not really a cheerleader for our current process for income redistribution.
EITC is a great idea which incentivizes work at lower earnings but creates very high marginal tax rates and disincentives later. Same story with Obamacare subsidies- both are a result of political calculation that more votes can be bought giving some people big subsidies rather than more people a little or a sliding subsidy. This is economically incoherent, even thought it is politically astute.
I also think we need to champion work (for benefits) and champion deferred childbirth for people earning too little to raise a family.
Paying people who cannot afford to raise a family to have kids (and statistically they are not as good parents) by taxing the middle and professional class (who statistically are better parents in terms of employment, criminal history, educational attainment and school attendance for their kids) doesn’t seem to be wise strategy.
After welfare reform in the 1990s, but probably due more to good economic conditions, poor black women had fewer children and worked more (even after welfare reform was reversed). This pattern holds true today and is a fantastic development. Black men have had less success in workforce participation. A lot of the benefits these days are more focused on poor Latinos, who still have kids, rather than the old inner city African American tropes.
I am not sure that an illegal immigrant woman who doesn’t work but has two or three anchor babies (SCHIP or Medicaid, public schooling, food stamps, housing vouchers, cost of public school tuition per student) is a great investment and a net gain fiscally over the long term relative to finding ways to make it easier for middle and working class parents to work and have kids.
Again, it comes down to vote buying.
I think we can do better and create more incentives for work, but mostly I agree with your take.
I had some related thoughts in a 1999 paper, The Future of Government: Mixed Economy or Minimal State? I've been rewriting more or less the same thing for the 25 years since then, finally getting some traction
After nearly a century of expansion, the role of government has contracted, at least in qualitative terms, over the past 20 years. The assumption that this is a natural and inevitable trend is mistaken. The success of the ‘mixed economy’ in the period from 1945 to 1970, and the limited benefits generated so far by reforms aimed at a contraction of the role of government, suggest that radical contraction of the role of government is unlikely to be beneficial. Some of the privatisations of the recent past will ultimately have to be reversed either through renationalisation or through the establishment of new public entrants to markets where older public enterprises have been sold off.
Confining this analysis to the economic piece of the puzzle is too limiting. I don't blame Noah for that; he's an economist so that is his lens. But if we're talking about reasserting "the common good" into economics, we need to talk about doing the same to non-economic policy.
Look at Noah's list of items. Most of them are normative.
* Cheap high-quality housing located near to employment opportunities
* Medical care OUGHT to be cheaper.
* The military OUGHT to be capable of defeating our enemies
* Economic life OUGHT to be less of a pain in the butt
* Child care OUGHT to be broadly available and inexpensive
* We OUGHT to significantly limit climate change and CO2
This asserts that government ought to have a hand in providing or subsidizing these things because they are demonstrably good -- these things are part of "the common good" and "promote the general welfare". I agree with that assertion 100%.
But if you're going to open this can of worms on economic policy, you need to do the same with social policy. What does that look like?
* People OUGHT to get married before they have children and stay married afterward.
* Porn OUGHT to be less available.
* Communities OUGHT to foster local ties.
* A family OUGHT to be able to buy a typical suburban home on 1 income.
* Producing virtue OUGHT to be the primary agenda of schools.
There are lots of others, some of which would be more controversial, but using govt to promote even these will give pause to many on the Left. But why? If overturning the liberal paradigm (which I think is a good thing, since it elevates individual autonomy above the common good) makes sense, why stop halfway? If economic liberalism needs to be tempered by considerations of "what is good" (and it does), social and political liberalism need the same.
I don't think the "liberal paradigm" always necessarily elevates individual autonomy over the common good. NIMBYism is a case in point. Where it has a major impact, it is often the result of subsidarity - the idea that government should be local wherever possible, national/global wherever necessary.
Subsidiarity obviously has a long history in political liberalism, and most liberal-conservatives/libertarians in the US are very keen on it. The issue is that it is an assertion of community rights, and one that often comes at the expense of individual rights. I might want to build more housing on land I own, but the local government will block it because the community doesn't want more outsiders moving in. I may want to paint my home in some wild colour but the HOA will block it because they think it's ugly, and so on.
In its most sinister form, it can be abused to do some very bad things. The Civil Rights era in the US was, of course, the story of the central government fighting state and local governments who wanted to oppress African-Americans. Those same segregationists appealed to a version of subsidiarity to justify their right to do what they were doing. They saw their community rights (to pass and enforce racist laws) as trumping individual ones (to live free from racial discrimination).
It's hard then to paint this as political liberalism versus other less individual-focused ideology. Instead there's a tension within liberalism itself over the individual vs. community question.
I would point you to J.S. Mill's Harm Principle (in On Liberty), the the intellectual father of modern liberalism. He asserts that using power to limit another person's free choices is legitimate only to prevent actual physical harm to a 3rd party. He does not distinguish between governmental power (law), economic power (boycott), or social power (exclusion). There is probably no clearer indication of Mill's philosophical importance than the triumph of Sexual Revolution.
Are there people who have fought this in the 20th century? Absolutely. Both on the Left (labor union movement) and the Right (Moral Majority) but neither has been successful long term. The draw of Mill's maximal individual autonomy is just too strong.
For industrial policy in particular, I'd love to see a post (or several) that reviews the cost benefit analysis. I've seen, for example, great analysis of Operation Warp Speed that finds that it was a very good value -- not surprisingly given the many lives to be saved. Same for NIH research. On the other hand I've seen it said of certain industrial policy grants that they create
jobs but at $1M+ cost per job. But my guess is you think that claims like the last one are thin. If there are good studies of industrial policy cost benefit, I'd love to know more.
“Will this limit the scope of government?” was a good intermediate goal for policy.
I think this is mistaken way of viewing "neoliberalism" which I always thought of as using market to achieve social goals. Is it a problem of that framing that avoiding the harms from the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere and limiting the world's dependence on Chinese industrial output were not understood as an important social goals or that the detrimental effects of fiscal deficits on growth were not recognized?
“Neoliberalism was indefinite in its promises — it promised to leave things to the market, and that this would result in unspecified increases in material consumption.”
The assumption of any non-straw version of neoliberalism is that the market is properly regulated to ensure clear property rights, honest transactions, open entrance and exit, controls on excessive negative externalities, and so on. In those developed nations and states and markets which leaned more in the neoliberal direction, we did indeed see massive increases in individual income, wealth, education, health care and so on. Neoliberalism delivered the increases in material consumption, at least in those places most open to the neoliberal agenda. Think the big tech companies (almost none of which come out of over-regulated Europe).
It is true that some lucky developing countries, which adopted an authoritarian catch-up policy, were able to grow faster. However, I would not use that as an argument for what developed states should or even could realistically do.
My take on the situation is that a better case could be built that the biggest problem of the past 50 years was not enough neoliberalism, and indeed a march away from it.
“But nowadays, Americans are starting to get a pretty good idea of the specific things they don’t have, whether because of neoliberalism or anti-growth NIMBYism or for other reasons.”
I fail to see anything on the list where neoliberalism was either a significant hindrance or headwind. I do however see many that would have been improved with more neoliberalism.
• Housing affordability (and walkability) is clearly an issue of too many people being able to prohibit permission, usually by government edict (contra neoliberal)
• Inflation (and the price of food) was pretty low and stable for almost the entire last 40 years, until contra neoliberal (NL), we started sending money to everyone and forced people not to work
• Medical care is the most heavily regulated industry on the planet contra NL
• Military is specifically not NL
• Public safety and order are NL priorities. This is exactly what the government is supposed to focus on.
• Child care, education and universities are again industries with excessive regulation, subsidies and interference.
• Climate change would have been less severe if we hadn’t choked off nuclear with over-regulation. Granted, this is exactly the type of global negative externality which reasonable neoliberals would agree we should address via political means (beyond markets).
In summary, I fail to see where neoliberalism was the problem, nor where abandoning it will make things better. The problem was we never took neoliberalism serious enough.
If you've ever done high school policy debate, the fussing over power should feel very familiar. When I was doing it, a significant chunk of these debates devolved into one side desperately trying to propose a policy like "free school lunch" and the other trying to turn it into a debate about critical legal theory / Marxism / colonialism / etc.
The reason that happened is that if your job is to oppose policies, you can either research every possible policy that might be proposed (hard!) or just be an expert on something esoteric like Marxism and tie every single policy you come across to that (hard in a different way, but less overall work).
Not hard to see something similar happening in the real world. People have hammers. Nails abound.
I have a problem with people who see the government as the solution to all things. I don’t believe them. Let’s take the list of things the Noah lists as the failure of neolibralism.
Cheap high-quality housing located near to employment opportunities
* Low and stable inflation ( I didn’t realize COVID is a neoliberal idea, nor closing the country, disrupting supply chains)
* Cheaper medical care ( none of the OCED, contain prices well. Britain's NHS is a mess; Canadians come to America to get medical care)
* A military-industrial complex capable of resisting America’s powerful new enemies ( this is the result of a political decision of budgets and procurement, not neoliberalism)
Public safety and public order (Seriously? The decision not to prosecute criminals is a neoliberal economic philosophy? Big if true)
Fewer hassle costs in daily economic life ( I have no idea what this is?)
Cheaper child care (This a more societal issue due to changes in family along with more migration of children away from parents. The demise of extended families and the lack of neighbors)
Nicer mixed-use walkable urban areas( you wouldn’t believe how local planning boards work, but I can tell you they don’t work on any philosophy but their own)
Protection from wildfires and floods (the harms of climate change)
Stable food prices( food was relatively stable and cheap before COVID. This is ludicrous to say it is about limited government)
Look, I get it. The turn to Nationalism and the peoples desire for the government to do something, but the government can’t do anything about Bird Flu and the deliberate killing of chickens. The only reason we have too much corn is government interference. Why farmers throw milk away. Pay farmers not to grow certain crops. Why fruits are so expensive is due to a lousy system of being able to have migrant farm workers. The government does that.
Democrat Progressives want to believe they can control life in America, make everything fair, and manage the economy. Bend the world to their desires. It is just spun up in new language. “socialism works, it has just never been tried”.
This is nationalist pandering. A chicken in every pot. For example, Progressives believe drug addiction will just go away if they legalize drugs. Allow retailers to sell drugs. I am not aware of any success with this program as the young are still dying. Tanq, is killing people in Philadephia. It is the same policy of let’s not arrest and charge criminals with crimes and crime will disappear.
Let millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share, as if every millionaire and billionaire is doing something unethical and ill moral. That they don’t earn their money. Bill Gates gave us Windows, which allowed a huge increase in productivity and wealth. Elon Musk gave EVs to Americans. What was is his contribution worth? MRNA Pharmaceuticals gave us a COVID vaccine that typically takes 10 years to develop in 18 mos. How should Moderna be compensated?
The government is there to make sure people and companies play by the rules. Ethanol is the worst program for the Environment ever. There may be a use for government intervention. Maybe Congress needs to figure out a solution for Child Care, but their solution is to throw money at the problem. Biden’s solution was to have caregivers with teaching credentials which would like have raised the cost of Child Care to astronomical amounts.
My church offered child care with one proviso: You, as a mother, had to volunteer once a month to work. In Sweden, mothers share child care duties; the town just provides the place. The government doesn’t think that way. It just wants to pay to solve the problem.
Yglesias had a glaring hole in his neoliberalism piece that maybe you could address.
Healthcare.
The US could copy any one of 30+ health systems from other rich countries and we don't.
We almost had a similar system with universal coverage in the Nixon administration.
But later, there was a basic inability to believe (despite all of the abundant evidence from decades of other countries) that the government being more involved in healthcare can save money and increase coverage. The US is still in thrall of this part of the neoliberal turn. It's what killed Clinton's attempt and the public option in Obama care.
It would be great to get your thoughts.
Coming soon!
The government could hardly be MORE involved in healthcare than it is right now. Moving to individual purchase of health insurance with tax credits would not real be LESS involvement, but BETTER involvement that allows a tiny sliver of competition between insurance companies to offer better coverage for the same cost or lower costs for the same coverage. AND it removes a disincentive to employment.
Kenneth Arrow has a good paper explaining that healthcare might be the one industry that the market can't adequately provide. https://assets.aeaweb.org/asset-server/files/9442.pdf
Noah's "developmental state" model he's ideating might just be the answer to this. "Do good things, don't do bad things" is a good motto.
Government involvement in the healthcare sector is very difficult to extricate from. Some areas, such as FDA approval for drugs, unquestionably should be done by the government.
This is basically the Swiss system and to a lesser extent the Dutch and German systems
One of the problems of the neoliberal paradigm is that when we see the government doing a bad job, we jump straight to privatization, without considering trying to see if we can get the government to go a good job instead
Not to mention that the bad job is often a *result* of a prior distaste for government action that leads to a self-fulfilling result via bad operational decision and resource rationing.
To play devil's advocate, the argument is there is no system the US could copy since every other system freeloads off America's innovation. Other countries simply pay for the administration of healthcare while using techniques, equipment, and pharmaceuticals all mostly invented in the US. The US is paying for administration and innovation.
Most of what makes us sick is super basic and not expensive to treat.
It is good that we have Keytruda, a monoclonal antibody that is used in PD-L1 positive, non small cell lung cancer, but that is a very small subset of the larger cancer space.
Most expensive drug development is like this, developing super targeted drugs for small specific populations that don't have a good alternative.
This is certainly important, but it isn't like healthcare would collapse without them. The US+Canada pharmaceutical market is about the size of the rest of the world combined (45% of global spending). This is a population of 380 million people. If the US were to reduce spending to European levels, (20% of global spending, 750 million people), that would be about 10% of the global pharma market.
It wouldn't be zero dollars going into pharma, it would just be less.
Imagine if the Italian government argued that they needed to subsidise Maserati and Ferrari because the innovations in those high end vehicles help Ford and Toyota. It would be ridiculous and normal Italians would be pissed.
The US essentially does the same thing for health and we shouldn't.
Do you think the UK has universal coverage? It doesn’t. If you don’t have a decent job you get what the NHS offers. If you have a decent job or pay out of pocket you get the drugs, treatments, scans, the NHS either doesn’t offer or doesn’t offer in a timely manner.
In the US, if you went to the hospital, you get a bill for 67,000$.
The NHS has far better coverage than the US does.
That depends on what you need and when. So, no. That’s not how the NHS works. If it’s urgent you need to pay out of pocket and the many private hospitals will charge you.
This is categorically false.
My wife is a brit, was hit by a car when she was young, and had completely 'free' reconstructive surgery immediately (this would have been probably $100k+ bill in the US). In fact true urgent care is handled faster in the UK, A&E wait times are shorter.
The difference in waiting times for NON-URGENT care in the UK vs US is about 3 weeks. (various papers, can google)
And, because of the free public option, private healthcare is far far cheaper than the US. It sets a much lower bound on price premium, at which point consumers will just wait for the free NHS option.
Private healthcare is far cheaper, that’s true. And most people above middle class have that option. But it’s not free.
You can get private insurance here starting at 50/mo - so almost all income groups can afford it.
Both anecdotally and statistically it’s a far superior system
[free speech guy]
I think the government is very involved in health care!
Did you mention it in your neoliberalism series?
I agree that the government is very involved but in the worst ways.
I would say it happens in 2 big ways.
1. The tax subsidy for employer health insurance.
2. We have Medicare and Medicaid.
In Taiwan, everyone is insured under a single government insurer financed by a payroll tax. In the UK, there is the NHS which controls most parts of the system.
The closest to the US is a place like Switzerland or the Netherlands. In these places, there is guaranteed issue. Everyone has to buy a basic private health insurance which HAS to cover a basic floor of services. The private insurers can't turn people away or charge them extra. There is help purchasing if you can't afford it. Both countries also have the government scrutinize the Medical Loss Ratios and approve price increases.
So private insurers there have to cover everyone regardless of age or ability to pay. Risk is pooled across the country and public expenditures are low.
The US doesn't do that.
The US system is set up so that the young, healthy, and wealthy, (who are profitable to insure) are gift wrapped for private insurers. Meanwhile, the elderly and the poor, (who are not profitable) are on the public purse through Medicare and Medicaid.
In every metric we have about administrative cost, Medical Loss Ratios, costs to patients/employers etc. private insurance in the US is abysmal.
But, as good neoliberals, we KNOW that the government is always worse than the private sector, so the idea that private insurance "improves outcomes" or "saves costs" is just accepted, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
If Taiwan or South Korea, both of whom live in actual fear of Communist takeover, can do socialized medicine, why can't the US?
I posit, and I would love to hear how you disagree, that the reason is the power of existing interest groups and the array of reliable neoliberal talking points they can deploy to protect their position.
Well said.
Our bloated (as a % of GDP) healthcare system is probably the single greatest limit to our future prosperity as a nation. It is the 800 pound gorilla in the room. The albatross around our necks. The biggest nail in our collective coffin. A topic long overdue for Mr. Smith to sink his exceptional analytical skills into.
Yes, we have 30+ sane alternatives for comparison. And an opportunity to create something even better; but still utterly lack the political will to do in the face of the clout of the insurance industry.
Isn't US health _care_ massively overpriced though (mostly due to rent seeking by pharma companies) not just US health _insurance_?
It's a mixed bag, in which overpriced Pharma definitely plays a role. But the lion's share of bloat is the private insurance market, which as the middleman, passes on advertising, profits, executive compensation packages and operating costs to consumers.
A separate discussion is why our nearly twice as expensive system underperforms the health outcomes of most EU countries--including stressed ones, like Britain--by almost every metric.
We pay more; get less. And if we can't reimagine and implement a more efficient system, it will form a big part of why China will bury us.
How much are worse US health outcomes down to factors (eg higher obesity rates) that aren't really the fault of the health care system itself?
Regarding morbidities resulting from our greater obesity, it can be argued that this is also a reflection of our healthcare system; insofar as our healthcare system--at both the federal and state level--has a strong educational element, that's also reflected in public as well as private school curriculae. EU residents have access to the same pro-inflammatory, high glycemic index foods we do; but for reasons of their own choose to not eat them to a degree that substantially alters their health outcomes.
Or you could argue that our sub-EU American quality of life--for the 90% at least--creates enough stress (which it pretty measurably does) to substantially increase both obesity and pro-inflammatory pathologies.
Good point on how the higher levels of stress in the US helps contribute to obesity (although I believe Noah already covered it in his "Americans are coping ourselves to death" post) although I believe another important point is that (likely due to the corn/HFCS lobby) American processed foods are typically much sweeter than their European equivalents.
Because of greater US obesity, it's pretty much impossible to do an accurate apples-to-apples comparison with nations like Germany on pathologies that are generally acknowledged to be obesity-sensitive. Which leaves everything else; e.g., cancers, most-auto-immune diseases, psychopathologies, etc. Also, because ICD codes, and many (most?) CPT codes are identical, it enormously simplifies study & report data comparisons. To be fair, a ton of US data that *should* factor in obesity--e.g., bone fracture healing time--does not.
Bottom line: by almost every (other) metric, we are inferior to wealthy EU member outcomes. The often superior outcomes of wealthy US residents is dragged sharply downwards by the inferior outcomes of our poorer residents. Yet as a % of GDP we spend roughly twice as much; yet get 25-35% less. Something that if we can't get a handle on, we'll deserve it when China kicks our ass.
Why is there so little obesity in East Asian countries generally, compared to the Americas, Europe or (more in women than in men) the Middle East?
Wasn't Hillarycare basically a Canadian-style system that would have eliminated private health insurance altogether?
This has always been one of the challenges of the intellectual left—an academic viewpoint on the nature of power that might or might not be grounded in reality.
The Hegelian Dialectic, which helped inspire Marx in his formulation of Communism should work. A lot of the examples here with an oversimplified money = power (despite, ironically, a lot of these institutions experiencing formative years where the left causes often had substantially more money especially during the Obama era).
Anyway, the world is complex and “both sides” oversimplifying is bad. Money doesn’t equal power so simply (and human beings don’t tend to be so black and white as “evil corporations” or private equity firms. Additionally, just shrinking government and blindly repealing regulation doesn’t lead to better outcomes either.
A lot of folks seem to forget: economic and political systems are not ends in-and-of themselves. They’re meant to make peoples’ lives better and help people achieve things they want. If they don’t do this, they can and should be changed—as they have through history. We shouldn’t be too precise about dogmatically adhering to our “teams” in capitalism, socialism, neoliberalism, communism, or whatever other “ism”.
I think you misunderstand why people openly endorse dogmatic "teams" like capitalism, socialism et al. Aside from social signalling, "teams" like socialism, capitalism et al. find followers by appealing to a coherent yet flexible set of values ("from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," etc.) that people can use to make moral judgments. At least the people who get invested in politics; most normal people have contradictory moral impulses and follow people on the basis of personality, persuasive ability, and other non-ideological criteria.
I agree with that, though I think that is precisely the problem. (So, not a misunderstanding per se, vs “I think that kind of thing is bad.”) Perhaps the part that I do disagree with is the “flexible” part of your definition of those who are attracted to the teams.
Contradictory moral impulses are normal—as a philosophy major, I am painful aware of that… and also think that it’s more consistent with our real world vs any simplified model that can eliminates contradictions mainly by fiat/axiom.
That’s the exact issue of teams. Real human beings and real human needs will often create circumstances that violate those axioms. A “regular person” will often come to a more reasonable place than someone who needs to ignore certain facts to ensure a worldview/system stays intact. That is, after all, part of why the left needed to embrace greedflation, etc. even if it doesn’t really make much analytical sense. There’s a specific “bad guy” that needs to be bad.
Flexibility would be better. In practice, I find people tend to contort themselves (… which is flexibility in a sense, but not the type I think we both are referring to…) to fit facts into their worldview.
Many well-taken points here.
What I would say in defense of my harsher take is that part of how you assess the health of an intellectual movement is by how it reacts to events. When you hit an inflationary bump in the road, for example, do you acknowledge the existence of some tradeoffs and the need to make some painful choices to address the limits of demand stimulation? Or do you do what the thought-leaders in this camp have mostly done, which as Noah has acknowledged in separate posts is mostly double down on stimulus while trying to revive the credibility of price controls as a solution?
When you look at aspects of the "concrete" Bidenonomics agenda that Noah approves of — trying to dismantle regulatory barriers to housing, trying to make the CHIPS Act & IRA a success with permitting reform — who is it who is actually pushing for change? I think it's mostly the more "neoliberal" elements in the Democratic Party and the whole intellectual orientation of this piece is overly invested in slaying the beast of "carbon pricing is the only acceptable climate policy" relative to the whole suite of topics currently under consideration.
I agree with Noah mostly, so I am just going to focus on the areas where we differ:
- I think the Developmental State is more properly used to describe the Asian economic playbook of the 80s that includes financial repression, low wages, export focus etc.]
- I am a bit more concerned than Noah about the deadweight losses of taxation
- I like Geoliberalism as a replacement ideology (no official definition, but I think it should mean Georgism + liberalism; i.e. increase land taxes but keep other taxes and regulation pretty low). Acknowledging there is a huge overlap - eg Singapore could be described as both a developmental state and Geoliberal.
I think there's a big overlap in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan too! Land reform is a geoliberal policy! Wolf Ladejinsky was a Georgist! :-)
How do we get the money to finance the new developmental state? Can today’s highly partisan and self interested bureaucracy adequately develop this state. Can they execute the plan? The only way to really get new financing is to Europeanize the tax system. Much higher rates on the middle class and the use of a VAT. This would not be popular to the masses. Who ever wins the next election, they need to improve the bureaucracy to better perform in order to carry out any new initiatives.
This is a great question, and I'm going to be writing more about this soon.
I think you can make a narrow case that arguments about power should focus on power, and arguments about economics should focus on economics. In some ways it's very "The Economists' Hour" that the accumulation of power is viewed through economic arguments, not just as a normal part of political coalition building, party politics, or industrial/labor relations.
Agreed. Noah doesn't quite state the core problem with this attitude toward power: it's a set of complaints about people using money to get power *by lobbying politicians*. Why do they do that? Because politicians *are the ones with the power*. Even if lobbying succeeds, it does so only by convincing politicians to exert it.
I think there's a general sense on the left that, if not for that dastardly lobbying money, politicians would agree with them and implement their policies. This is not the case.
Noah is right to take on sloppy definitions and hackneyed critiques of "neoliberalism", but I think he underestimates how transformational the "neoliberal turn" actually was.
Take regulation. Nobody can dispute that the administrative state has grown apace since the Reagan years. But it's worth remembering that there was a shift in the type of regulations that administrative agencies began promulgating. Prior to the deregulation movement of the 1970s, large swathes of the American economy were subject to rigid controls on market entry, competition, and even prices. The CAB, the pre-Carter regulator of air transportation, was empowered set price controls on airfares, allocate routes, and even regulate market entry/exit in ways that would be anathema to many progressives today. Ditto for trucking, rail/freight, and the financial sector. Another good example is that old progressive bugaboo stock buybacks; they were mostly illegal (and thus hardly used) until 1982, and now they're a staple policy for high-level corporate managers. We can debate the merits of each of these decisions (as a doctrinaire lefty I'm very critical of them, others less so), but taken in aggregate they were a transformational shift in American political economy (that bugaboo term of neoliberals like Matt Yglesias).
TBH multiple Democratic Presidents had chafed at the power of the ICC and CAB going back to FDR. Even TR really didn't like the ICC and FDR created the CAB and FCC in order to make sure telecoms and airlines didn't fall under the ICC.
And don't forget how Neoliberal deregulation deliberately facilitated M&A's and market concentration to get us to the sorry state we're in today. Where monopolies, duopolies, and oligopolies have been normalized and even lauded. Instead of being actively resisted for killing entrepreneurialism and innovation. And both increasing costs to consumers; while depressing wages.
"Too big to fail" is Neoliberalism's darkest fruit.
There were many TBTF entities on a more localized basis long before Ronald Reagan. Bank of America was TBTF in the state of California, the countries largest state long before Reagan was President and banks could do business across state lines
But Neoliberalism enabled and practically glorified TBTF as some sort of laudable and inevitable product of laissez-faire capitalism. In WSJ, Bloomberg--even Noah's substack--there's either crickets/denial on the anti-innovative, anti-entrepreneurial effects of TBTF, or this "gee! look what we built." self-congratulation.
TBTF, and our GDP-killing healthcare system, are by far the two greatest inefficiencies dragging down the US economy, and the two subjects Noah has yet to address.
You've asserted all of those things, without showing any evidence. This makes sense since they're generally (outside of a few examples) not true.
Both Truman and LBJ didn't like the CAB restricting entrance to airlines wanting to fly new routes. Perhaps this might be more a legacy of Jacksonian opposition to monopolies but it is a fact that both Truman and LBJ wanted more competition in air travel than the CAB and ironically the airlines themselves wanted.
Great piece, thanks, though I am not really a cheerleader for our current process for income redistribution.
EITC is a great idea which incentivizes work at lower earnings but creates very high marginal tax rates and disincentives later. Same story with Obamacare subsidies- both are a result of political calculation that more votes can be bought giving some people big subsidies rather than more people a little or a sliding subsidy. This is economically incoherent, even thought it is politically astute.
I also think we need to champion work (for benefits) and champion deferred childbirth for people earning too little to raise a family.
Paying people who cannot afford to raise a family to have kids (and statistically they are not as good parents) by taxing the middle and professional class (who statistically are better parents in terms of employment, criminal history, educational attainment and school attendance for their kids) doesn’t seem to be wise strategy.
After welfare reform in the 1990s, but probably due more to good economic conditions, poor black women had fewer children and worked more (even after welfare reform was reversed). This pattern holds true today and is a fantastic development. Black men have had less success in workforce participation. A lot of the benefits these days are more focused on poor Latinos, who still have kids, rather than the old inner city African American tropes.
I am not sure that an illegal immigrant woman who doesn’t work but has two or three anchor babies (SCHIP or Medicaid, public schooling, food stamps, housing vouchers, cost of public school tuition per student) is a great investment and a net gain fiscally over the long term relative to finding ways to make it easier for middle and working class parents to work and have kids.
Again, it comes down to vote buying.
I think we can do better and create more incentives for work, but mostly I agree with your take.
I had some related thoughts in a 1999 paper, The Future of Government: Mixed Economy or Minimal State? I've been rewriting more or less the same thing for the 25 years since then, finally getting some traction
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ybqteskqqt0sthyh0j9aw/Quiggin-J.-Australian-Journal-of-Public-Administration-1999-The-future-of-government-mixed-economy.pdf?rlkey=99lz1cuydve9rx3emqlc3lyrg&dl=0
Abstract
After nearly a century of expansion, the role of government has contracted, at least in qualitative terms, over the past 20 years. The assumption that this is a natural and inevitable trend is mistaken. The success of the ‘mixed economy’ in the period from 1945 to 1970, and the limited benefits generated so far by reforms aimed at a contraction of the role of government, suggest that radical contraction of the role of government is unlikely to be beneficial. Some of the privatisations of the recent past will ultimately have to be reversed either through renationalisation or through the establishment of new public entrants to markets where older public enterprises have been sold off.
Confining this analysis to the economic piece of the puzzle is too limiting. I don't blame Noah for that; he's an economist so that is his lens. But if we're talking about reasserting "the common good" into economics, we need to talk about doing the same to non-economic policy.
Look at Noah's list of items. Most of them are normative.
* Cheap high-quality housing located near to employment opportunities
* Medical care OUGHT to be cheaper.
* The military OUGHT to be capable of defeating our enemies
* Economic life OUGHT to be less of a pain in the butt
* Child care OUGHT to be broadly available and inexpensive
* We OUGHT to significantly limit climate change and CO2
This asserts that government ought to have a hand in providing or subsidizing these things because they are demonstrably good -- these things are part of "the common good" and "promote the general welfare". I agree with that assertion 100%.
But if you're going to open this can of worms on economic policy, you need to do the same with social policy. What does that look like?
* People OUGHT to get married before they have children and stay married afterward.
* Porn OUGHT to be less available.
* Communities OUGHT to foster local ties.
* A family OUGHT to be able to buy a typical suburban home on 1 income.
* Producing virtue OUGHT to be the primary agenda of schools.
There are lots of others, some of which would be more controversial, but using govt to promote even these will give pause to many on the Left. But why? If overturning the liberal paradigm (which I think is a good thing, since it elevates individual autonomy above the common good) makes sense, why stop halfway? If economic liberalism needs to be tempered by considerations of "what is good" (and it does), social and political liberalism need the same.
I don't think the "liberal paradigm" always necessarily elevates individual autonomy over the common good. NIMBYism is a case in point. Where it has a major impact, it is often the result of subsidarity - the idea that government should be local wherever possible, national/global wherever necessary.
Subsidiarity obviously has a long history in political liberalism, and most liberal-conservatives/libertarians in the US are very keen on it. The issue is that it is an assertion of community rights, and one that often comes at the expense of individual rights. I might want to build more housing on land I own, but the local government will block it because the community doesn't want more outsiders moving in. I may want to paint my home in some wild colour but the HOA will block it because they think it's ugly, and so on.
In its most sinister form, it can be abused to do some very bad things. The Civil Rights era in the US was, of course, the story of the central government fighting state and local governments who wanted to oppress African-Americans. Those same segregationists appealed to a version of subsidiarity to justify their right to do what they were doing. They saw their community rights (to pass and enforce racist laws) as trumping individual ones (to live free from racial discrimination).
It's hard then to paint this as political liberalism versus other less individual-focused ideology. Instead there's a tension within liberalism itself over the individual vs. community question.
I would point you to J.S. Mill's Harm Principle (in On Liberty), the the intellectual father of modern liberalism. He asserts that using power to limit another person's free choices is legitimate only to prevent actual physical harm to a 3rd party. He does not distinguish between governmental power (law), economic power (boycott), or social power (exclusion). There is probably no clearer indication of Mill's philosophical importance than the triumph of Sexual Revolution.
Are there people who have fought this in the 20th century? Absolutely. Both on the Left (labor union movement) and the Right (Moral Majority) but neither has been successful long term. The draw of Mill's maximal individual autonomy is just too strong.
We need a new "Neo-Social Democracy" that corrects the perceived failures of "Neo-Liberalism": progressive consumption tax,
more generous child allowance, EITC, unemployment insurance
elimination of employer purchased health insurance,
Pigou taxation/ subsidies of negative/positive externalities,
merit based immigration,
free trade for ABC (Anyone But China),
Deficits =< Σ(expenditures with NPV>0)
YIMBYism,
regulatory reform according to CBA
DEI in the service of MEI.
For industrial policy in particular, I'd love to see a post (or several) that reviews the cost benefit analysis. I've seen, for example, great analysis of Operation Warp Speed that finds that it was a very good value -- not surprisingly given the many lives to be saved. Same for NIH research. On the other hand I've seen it said of certain industrial policy grants that they create
jobs but at $1M+ cost per job. But my guess is you think that claims like the last one are thin. If there are good studies of industrial policy cost benefit, I'd love to know more.
I think the benefit of industrial policy is not jobs, but rather the things that are created by industry!
“Will this limit the scope of government?” was a good intermediate goal for policy.
I think this is mistaken way of viewing "neoliberalism" which I always thought of as using market to achieve social goals. Is it a problem of that framing that avoiding the harms from the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere and limiting the world's dependence on Chinese industrial output were not understood as an important social goals or that the detrimental effects of fiscal deficits on growth were not recognized?
Wasn't the rise of Chinadependence more a case of the neoliberal global economic order being gamed by a very powerful bad actor (the CCP)?
“Neoliberalism was indefinite in its promises — it promised to leave things to the market, and that this would result in unspecified increases in material consumption.”
The assumption of any non-straw version of neoliberalism is that the market is properly regulated to ensure clear property rights, honest transactions, open entrance and exit, controls on excessive negative externalities, and so on. In those developed nations and states and markets which leaned more in the neoliberal direction, we did indeed see massive increases in individual income, wealth, education, health care and so on. Neoliberalism delivered the increases in material consumption, at least in those places most open to the neoliberal agenda. Think the big tech companies (almost none of which come out of over-regulated Europe).
It is true that some lucky developing countries, which adopted an authoritarian catch-up policy, were able to grow faster. However, I would not use that as an argument for what developed states should or even could realistically do.
My take on the situation is that a better case could be built that the biggest problem of the past 50 years was not enough neoliberalism, and indeed a march away from it.
“But nowadays, Americans are starting to get a pretty good idea of the specific things they don’t have, whether because of neoliberalism or anti-growth NIMBYism or for other reasons.”
I fail to see anything on the list where neoliberalism was either a significant hindrance or headwind. I do however see many that would have been improved with more neoliberalism.
• Housing affordability (and walkability) is clearly an issue of too many people being able to prohibit permission, usually by government edict (contra neoliberal)
• Inflation (and the price of food) was pretty low and stable for almost the entire last 40 years, until contra neoliberal (NL), we started sending money to everyone and forced people not to work
• Medical care is the most heavily regulated industry on the planet contra NL
• Military is specifically not NL
• Public safety and order are NL priorities. This is exactly what the government is supposed to focus on.
• Child care, education and universities are again industries with excessive regulation, subsidies and interference.
• Climate change would have been less severe if we hadn’t choked off nuclear with over-regulation. Granted, this is exactly the type of global negative externality which reasonable neoliberals would agree we should address via political means (beyond markets).
In summary, I fail to see where neoliberalism was the problem, nor where abandoning it will make things better. The problem was we never took neoliberalism serious enough.
If you've ever done high school policy debate, the fussing over power should feel very familiar. When I was doing it, a significant chunk of these debates devolved into one side desperately trying to propose a policy like "free school lunch" and the other trying to turn it into a debate about critical legal theory / Marxism / colonialism / etc.
The reason that happened is that if your job is to oppose policies, you can either research every possible policy that might be proposed (hard!) or just be an expert on something esoteric like Marxism and tie every single policy you come across to that (hard in a different way, but less overall work).
Not hard to see something similar happening in the real world. People have hammers. Nails abound.
I have a problem with people who see the government as the solution to all things. I don’t believe them. Let’s take the list of things the Noah lists as the failure of neolibralism.
Cheap high-quality housing located near to employment opportunities
* Low and stable inflation ( I didn’t realize COVID is a neoliberal idea, nor closing the country, disrupting supply chains)
* Cheaper medical care ( none of the OCED, contain prices well. Britain's NHS is a mess; Canadians come to America to get medical care)
* A military-industrial complex capable of resisting America’s powerful new enemies ( this is the result of a political decision of budgets and procurement, not neoliberalism)
Public safety and public order (Seriously? The decision not to prosecute criminals is a neoliberal economic philosophy? Big if true)
Fewer hassle costs in daily economic life ( I have no idea what this is?)
Cheaper child care (This a more societal issue due to changes in family along with more migration of children away from parents. The demise of extended families and the lack of neighbors)
Nicer mixed-use walkable urban areas( you wouldn’t believe how local planning boards work, but I can tell you they don’t work on any philosophy but their own)
Protection from wildfires and floods (the harms of climate change)
Stable food prices( food was relatively stable and cheap before COVID. This is ludicrous to say it is about limited government)
Look, I get it. The turn to Nationalism and the peoples desire for the government to do something, but the government can’t do anything about Bird Flu and the deliberate killing of chickens. The only reason we have too much corn is government interference. Why farmers throw milk away. Pay farmers not to grow certain crops. Why fruits are so expensive is due to a lousy system of being able to have migrant farm workers. The government does that.
Democrat Progressives want to believe they can control life in America, make everything fair, and manage the economy. Bend the world to their desires. It is just spun up in new language. “socialism works, it has just never been tried”.
This is nationalist pandering. A chicken in every pot. For example, Progressives believe drug addiction will just go away if they legalize drugs. Allow retailers to sell drugs. I am not aware of any success with this program as the young are still dying. Tanq, is killing people in Philadephia. It is the same policy of let’s not arrest and charge criminals with crimes and crime will disappear.
Let millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share, as if every millionaire and billionaire is doing something unethical and ill moral. That they don’t earn their money. Bill Gates gave us Windows, which allowed a huge increase in productivity and wealth. Elon Musk gave EVs to Americans. What was is his contribution worth? MRNA Pharmaceuticals gave us a COVID vaccine that typically takes 10 years to develop in 18 mos. How should Moderna be compensated?
The government is there to make sure people and companies play by the rules. Ethanol is the worst program for the Environment ever. There may be a use for government intervention. Maybe Congress needs to figure out a solution for Child Care, but their solution is to throw money at the problem. Biden’s solution was to have caregivers with teaching credentials which would like have raised the cost of Child Care to astronomical amounts.
My church offered child care with one proviso: You, as a mother, had to volunteer once a month to work. In Sweden, mothers share child care duties; the town just provides the place. The government doesn’t think that way. It just wants to pay to solve the problem.