I’m With Stupid

On balance, however, the positions taken by the right-wing populists on these issues are basically simplified versions of those taken by the most sophisticated libertarian and limited-government conservative economists and policy scholars

As far as I can see, this is true, although if I were Ilya Somin blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy, I would try to hush it up.

Among the puzzles is that one of Ron Paul’s 2008 positions — deep suspicion of the Fed — has gone mainstream, but those sophisticated libertarians still don’t see him as one of their own.

But more to the point – would Somin be similarly generous in allowing, say, that 9/11 Truthers were arguing “an extreme version of” the “genuine point” that the Bush administration could have and should have done more to prevent it? I doubt it – perhaps I’m wrong.

Arguing that Bush deliberately caused 9/11 is not a “extreme version” of the genuine point that he could have done more to prevent it (which by the way I believe he could have). It is a very different sort of claim altogether. By contrast, the (false) claim that the health care bill creates death panels is a more extreme version of the true claim that it will lead to government rationing of various types of medical treatment. Death panels are simply a more explicit (and more offensively named) form of rationing than the bill actually contemplates.

#5

I think you need to distinguish between the “left” and the Democrats. The Democrats have decided -in fact, let’s be generous and call it a calculated bargain- to take $ from Big Finance so that they can compete in campaigns campaigns and implement a center right agenda.

Surely Michael Moore agrees w/ this analysis, but would also conclude that attacking Obama won’t further progressive causes, it will undermine potential turnout for ’10 and ’12 and lead to a reactionary agenda. The best PR for the “left” is to publically push for progressive causes, support Obama as a pragmatic leftist, and excoriate Republicans and centrist Dems. Of couse, all this is consistent w/ privately acknowedging that Obama is doing his best to undermine his own power.

I would disagree that the right-wing populists haven’t responded in “worse ways”. I see references to ideas that it’s their duty to rise up and overthrow the government and that the tree of liberty is washed in the blood of, etc, etc. Also, “Kill him!”. But perhaps I’m not properly across this issue and the teabagger movement and the more sinister elements are separate?

The reason the teabaggers and the libs sing the same songs on the economy is because the same paymasters are calling the tune. One of the richest men in the world is running the buses to ferry people to Bachman rallies. Health insurance lobbies and Rupert Murdoch have massively underwritten the tea parties. This is not populism; it’s, to coin a term, Poputurf. If poputurf sounds like something your dog would do, well, how apt.

This kind of argument does not help Somin’s credibility much. The, “populists are all bad but if I had to choose one movement I’d choose this one” approach is just very weak. It’s a setup to assault your political opponents with lots of unfair attacks while denying the validity of any counter-criticisms by distancing yourself from those unpleasant aspect of the movement whenever you are pinned down on a specific point. The only response is to ignore or to mock; Somin has already established that he is not going to engage anyone fairly on this one.

… the Birthers, the people who think ACORN stole the election, Sarah Palin’s death panels, those who think Obama is a muslim, Glenn Beck’s FEMA concentration camps, fears over Obama’s Hitler youth squad, claims that the health care bill gives subsidies to illegal aliens, the people who think their taxes have gone up when they’ve gone down, those who claim Obama is deliberately aiding terrorism, accusations that Obama hates white people, those who call the President a Nazi and/or a Communist, those who openly speak of treason, etc …

Ilya Somin isn’t talking about nuttiness in general. He’s talking about the economic policy content of what’s being said on the pinhead right. And your lengthy list only confirms that he’s pretty much correct. The only economic populism in your list involves complaining about taxes, something Americans have been doing since the original tea party, and which incidentally is a membership requirement at the Cato Institute. Barbara Walters asked Sarah Palin about economic policy. Her response was pure supply side orthodoxy (http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=9111608, includes ads, sorry).
So Somin’s got it right. He is with stupid.
The only thing I’d add, as per #4, is that if electoral incentives remain on current trends he shouldn’t count on that staying unchanged through the midterms.

Bert, he clearly was talking about nuttiness in general, as per his statement, “There has been relatively little advocacy of strange, crackpot ideas or weird conspiracy theories.” I don’t know how you draw the conclusion that only a narrow version of economic populism counts, if one could even parse the movement that finely. He speaks of Obama and Obama’s policies in general, and he even goes so far as to give a half-assed defense of “death panels”. Why wouldn’t he have just said, “I wasn’t referring to health care” instead of trying (and failing) to explain why it wasn’t nutty?

That aside, I think it’s pretty clear that the Teabagger movement has little to do with economics of any stripe and is quintessentially an anti-Obama movement. None of their economic complaints make any sense, even on their own terms. Deficits, taxes, and bailouts weren’t bad — or at least not worth protesting and threatening treason over — until Obama came into power.

Well, I’m impressed by Ilya Somin’s sheer gall. Henry gives an example of how he was challenged on the Death Panels slur and his wholly inadequate and laughable defense and he has the gall to come her and virtually repeat said lame defense. Never heard of the guy. I guess his interesting stuff was in the distant past and has been rationed out of existence. As for the Volokh Conspracy, I’ve always considerd Volokh to be only a somewhat smarter Glenn Reynolds, which isn’t saying much. Push comes to shove and he’ll always yield to the authoritarians.

Bert, simple question: Is health care an “economic issue” of which Solin refers to, yes or no? Either way you must, by logical necessity, be wrong in one or more of your claims.

I was just looking at his second update, where he talks about Beck’s “Obama’s a racist” comment. Apparently that doesn’t count because it was an isolated incident rather than a widely circulated talking point.

I think if there’s confusion here, it’s Sorin’s.
My apologies for the abruptness in my previous comment.

I’m trying to identify the features of the sophisticated version that have been abstracted away, and drawing a blank.

The part most tea-partiers miss is that it’s also bad when Republicans do it.

Is comment #5 actually from Somin or is someone posting under his name?

the (false) claim that the health care bill creates death panels is a more extreme version of the true claim that it will lead to government rationing of various types of medical treatment.

That’s actually a lie, and Somin knows it’s a lie. If the government rations something, it means that it restricts how much you can have. If the government rations, say, petrol to 20 gallons a month, that’s all you’re allowed to buy. If you want more petrol, you have to buy it on the black market, which is by definition illegal.
But that won’t happen in health care.
What will happen is that the government will decide how much of which types of health care it is going to pay for. If you want more, you’ll have to pay for it yourself. This isn’t rationing, any more than the state school system imposes rationing. Your kids may not get, say, piano lessons from their state school, but there’s nothing to stop you from paying a piano teacher to teach them on Saturday mornings – any more than there is to stop you paying for additional private health care if you aren’t getting it from the public health care scheme.

Between comments 1 and 10, Ilya is very severely p@wned (pardon my bad l33tspeak).

The best description of the Volokh guys was this, by Jim Henley (http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2004/06/30/3505):
“It’s not like Eugene Volokh thinks much of me, either, but I’ve always considered his specialty to be showy moral handwringing on the way to siding with Power anyway. The further you get from standard Republican issues like guns and university speech codes, the more likely he is to arrive, with exquisite regret, at the conclusion that the State, particularly when helmed by George W. Bush, must have its way. ”

The reason I say this is that Eugene is the best of a bad lot – all the rest of the posters there are object lessons about why the Federalist Society is evil, and why ‘right-wing libertarianism’ is an oxymoron.

And the posters are head and shoulders above 90% of the commenters.

In the literal two-tins-of-spam-a-week sense it’s hard to think of anything that is, or might conceivably be, rationed today. That’s not just because, as Ajay says, you’re allowed to top-up what the state provides (but note that this isn’t everywhere the case with bealth care, eg. in Canada) but also because few goods are distributed on the principle of every citizen receiving exactly X micro-widgets per time-interval.

So it’s clear that they mean rationing in a looser, metaphorical sense but I have never seen them spell out what it is. In the loosest sense, of course, where ‘rationing’ just means there are limits imposed on what you can have, this is true in a market system just as much as in a state one.

I suspect that the word is just being used rhetorically, because it evokes government involvement, but then of course this makes the argument circular. Why shouldn’t we have state run health care? Because the state would be involved!

So to be honest I think the whole ‘rationing’ argument is pretty stupid and confused. It’s just rhetoric and not an attempt to make a serious argument. And the fact that ‘intelligent’ libertarians like Ilya Somin buy it into just proves–again–why libertarianism is, or ought to be, regarded as something of a joke.

The government will not buy ponies for people on foodstamps. This is rationing.

In the literal two-tins-of-spam-a-week sense it’s hard to think of anything that is, or might conceivably be, rationed today.

Votes are rationed at one per person per election… :)

Well, surely they must be authorized by the government, one way or another.

Rationing leads to death without deliberately causing deaths. Death panels deliberately cause death.

George W Bush’s negligence led to the 9/11 attacks being successful without deliberately causing it and the deaths that came from it. The Truthers believe that he deliberately caused the deaths.

How is this not parallel, Ilya?

Henri, whatever ‘rationing’ does mean, it doesn’t mean ‘authorised by the government, one way of the other’, does it? If you really believe that (I have my doubts) you’d also have to say that the state rations marriages, foreign travel, new businesses, …

Ajay, since you ask, I got the idea from a Canadian guy hwo commented here a couple of times. It looks like I was wrong about that (parenthetical) point. My bad. According to this article, though, I was perhaps not as shockingly, inexplicably wrong as your comment might suggest —

B.C. gov’t gets tough with private clinic

A showdown over the future of medicare is expected to unfold in Vancouver today as the B.C. government threatens to shut down a private clinic that may start charging patients for services that should be free under the health care system.

In 2006, a Canadian court threatened to shut down one private clinic because it was planning to start accepting private payments from patients.

The emergence of private clinics and queue jumping has become a major issue in Canada.

There are many private clinics operating in the country, but they have mostly found ways to avoid openly confronting Canada’s medicare laws.

However, a Supreme Court of Canada decision last year which ruled that the Quebec government couldn’t stop patients from purchasing private insurance for health-care procedures provided under medicare, given that the public system often fails to provide service in a timely manner has emboldened private clinic proponents, who believe the decision gives them legal support.

In British Columbia, the health care budget is ballooning and the provincial government is under fire for bed shortages and long waits in emergency rooms.

In recent months, the B.C. New Democratic Party has attacked the provincial Liberal government for not cracking down on doctors it says have allowed patients to pay for access to private clinics.

In some cases, patients have been able to use their access to the private clinics to get to the front of the line for diagnostic tests, saving months or even years of waiting.

”I think this is the tip of the iceberg,” said the NDP’s health critic Adrian Dix. ”The government’s position on private health care has been ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’. It’s been a failure.”

38: dsquared – unfortunately the lie extends to trying to convince people (by elision) that state healthcare will be go along with banning private healthcare, or be funded by taxing it into the ground or something.

So would it be fair to say that medically necessary hospital care is (or is supposed to be) rationed? (I can’t claim to know anything about Canada apart from Leonard Cohen and Avril Lavigne…)

47: no, because there isn’t any upper limit to the amount you can consume set by the state. As far as I can tell, the private clinics in question weren’t providing hospital care that the patients would not have received through the state, they were just providing it faster. They weren’t topping up so much as queue-jumping.

Which is interesting, because it’s way more draconian than the dreaded NHS; in the UK, anyone can buy medical treatments of any kind, cash down, at a wide variety of private institutions.

Not sure what that proves, other than that a stopped libertarian clock might sometimes be pointing vaguely near the right time.

Sorry, this is a long post and perhaps a bit off topic, but I couldn’t let the exchange between ajay and engels stand.

Ajay wasn’t wrong in anything he said about the Canadian health system, but he may have left some room for misunderstanding. The Canadian system is quite complicated and hard to explain in a few lines, and some things get misunderstood by Americans because their system is so different. And I’m no expert, except for being an occasional participant.

First of all, the guidelines for how the health system is supposed to work (what’s covered and what isn’t) are set by the Federal Governernment and a portion of the money is supplied from Federal taxes, but the actual running of the system is a provinicial reponsibility, and each province pays for it out of its share of the federal taxes and provincial taxes and some user fees (many provinces charge a monthly fee which is usually around $80 to $100–but I’m out of touch with this as mine is paid by my employer as a benefit; I believe it is waived in most provinces for low or no income people). As long as the Federal guidelines are met, the provinces are (somewhat) able to run the system as they see fit (this is the first subject of controversy). Thus slightly different stories from people in different provinces. If the guidelines are not met the Federal government can threaten to withhold the provincial portion of the Federal taxes. I’m assuming this is the reason for the dispute in BC that engels quoted. The government in BC is actually a bit “right-wing” for Canada (although it is called the “Liberal” party it is really what is left over of an older party that was a little more right wing than the Canadian Conseratives) and probably wouldn’t mind having private clinics, but until the Federal government changes the guidelines there is a danger BC would not receive its Federal share. I don’t currently live in BC so I’m not as up on this as I might have been when I did live there.

In general as ajay said there are no limits, and there is no “rationing” of care, for life-threatening illnesses. In my personal experience (father, father-in-law, wife’s uncle) things like brain tumors and cancer are dealt with promptly and well. I’m not saying that mistakes never happen and there are no misdiagnoses, but never have I heard of a “faceless bureaucrat” denying any care that a doctor or surgeon decided was necessary.

With non-life threatening medical care it’s a bit different and here is where there are (probably) more differences between provinces. There are non-life threatening procedures that are covered (fairly extensive) and some that are deemed cosmetic. Cosmetic procedures have to be paid for by the person wanting the procedure. I gather insurance is available for these things, but few people buy it as it is apparently quite expensive. As you can imagine, there is huge room for vituperative arguments here, especially when one province decides that something previously covered is now to be deemed cosmetic. So, take joint replacements. As far as I know, these are covered in all provinces. But the recipient may have to wait a while (sometimes a long while depending on where they live) before they get the procedure done. Again, AFAIK no one is ever refused the procedure because of age (although no doubt some Canadian will immediately post calling me a liar) but might be turned down because of some other issue (such as less than a year to live, for instance). Again, AFAIK these are medical decisions, not “faceless bureaucrat” decisions.

You can get all sorts of medical insurance in Canada and there are no restrictions that I know of from the government. I believe you can get insurance that covers a private room instead of a ward and things like that.

By the way, the recent story about a Canadian woman who “lost her health insurance” because she was vacationing in Florida and put pictures on her Facebook page was a disability insurance thing, which is entirely in the hands of private insurance in Canada. She was on disability for depression and was caught partying it up on vacation because she very kindly posted the pictures on Facebook, so the insurance company very rightly pointed out that she could probably go back to work. It had nothing to do with government health insurance.

Yeag, jrb, isn’t there an ice hockey game you should watching?

Accidentally included the same link twice. Here is part 2 of the Beck show on FEMA camps (this comment is a correction to an earlier one, and if this one shows up before that, it is because that one is in moderation. I don’t know why).

Sorry, I’d forgotten a bit of the details. 24% was the claimed figure for the general population; one third for Democrats. At this point, Malhotra seems prepared to stand behind neither number.

(sorry meant to change ‘senior’ partner, to ‘silent’. I’m pretty sure I had the idea he was senior in one sense or another, but I seem to have mislaid my warrant for the assertion if I ever had it.)

“Malhotra Jews Democrats” is 48,600. Your results are artificially low because most of the entries don’t seem to mention the silent partner.

Somin is correct, the lunatic fringe are making simplified versions of standrad liberatarian policy proposals. The problem is that those proposals themselves are completely driven by ideology and so we are getting out on the street are gun-toting, simplified versions of utopian (in the perjorative sense) faith in markets and decentralization.

And, of course, Somin also has spent much of his intellectual career proclaiming that representative democracy is problematic because the citizenry is none-too-bright or incompetent or something. So perhpas he is right; that is why the lunatic fringe is buying liberatarin economic policy. They are none-too-bright.

I looked at every tenth Google page on my version, and got about 15-20% relevance after 100 hits. So, good point, and good news, actually, as I was afraid this had gotten more blog play than it had.

Thank you very much.

##66,67: Mine looked more relevant than that from a cursory look. But this kind of consideration underlies the points @64 about using ratios rather than absolutes. Doing so is likely to cancel the irrelevance effect – i.e. the (squints) six-ish-fold propagation since 2 Jun probably stands.

The matter of how to interpret the raw absolute numbers is open-ended. You can get finer and finer in analysing this stuff, and even if you go through and check each hit for relevance, you presumably want to weight for some sort of importance measure, for example readership, influence of readers.

But there’s also a different question of the ‘valence’ of the report, which throws all the numbers into question – the Jewish Week piece is included in the hits, but depending on what is being measured should perhaps count as -1 hit. Perhaps there are a lot more that are similarly critical on balance. For those, wider dissemination is actually a good thing not just for its corrective effect on those who have read uncritical reports, but for its general cautionary effect (unless that itself leads to underestimating the level of real anti-semitism, in which case it is pro tanto bad) and, I have to say, in drawing attention to those (ir)responsible.

And BTW if sodding Google would actually run the search I specified instead of ‘helpfully’ deriving what are supposed to be similar terms (in this case ‘Jewish’), then the number of irrelevant hits would have been reduced. I wouldn’t mind, if only this overweening helpfulness were made explicit and I could turn it off.

Thanks to Martin B. and Tim W. for not letting the Malhotra paper go. Frustrating as it is that the authors seem likely to walk away from it with unblemished reputations, the fact that those “findings” aren’t going to further poison the public discourse seems like a small but real win for the universal fact-checking that blogs were supposedly going to provide.

I should add, though, that I imagine Somin is still following this thread, and I do think a retraction is in order, given that Margalit (I accidentally said Malhotra above) has disavowed the figure Somin cites.

Tim, I don’t see how criticism of exaggerated or skewed measures of antisemitism would increase antisemitism. I could come up with strained arguments that it would either tend to increase or decrease it, but I actually doubt it would have any effect. The roots of prejudice have to lie deeper or it wouldn’t have its emotional force.

I would *definitely* leave Israel out of it. Nothing in the study (as far as we know) or article mentioned Israel, so it has no direct relelvance. Imputing motives is always inferential, and the inference drawn here seems highly tenuous. I think it illogical and unfair when people equate opposition to Israeli policies with antisemitism, and this inference reinforces that association. Malhotra and Margalit attempted to link antisemtism to Democrats and to opposition to tax cuts for Wall Street. Neither of those things has any link to opposition to Israeli policies.

Although practices vary, I think the usual standard is that senior authors are listed first in academic publications. That is why I assumed Malhotra was the lead author, though possibly both are equal.

. Nothing in the study (as far as we know) or article mentioned Israel, so it has no direct relevance.

Right. There are plenty of examples of linking criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, but this seems to be doing something less common, linking support for financial regulation with anti-semitism.

If we are going to talk about undeclared interests, Malhotra’s former employment at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup seems like a better place to start.

There are some political science folks around CT, no? Would be interesting if someone could ask Mahlotra or Margalit in a professional setting if they planned to publish anything on this, or to release the survey.

Tim, the article mentioning Margalit you link to identifies him as a graduate student. Malhotra is an Assistant Professor.