Joke Line wants his country back. He looks around at the Tea Party on one side and socialists on the other, and he’s concerned. To be sure, he gets a couple of things right. The dictionary definition of socialism says that it’s “a social system or theory in which the government owns and controls the means of production,” but that’s not what Bernie Sanders is proposing except in a very narrow sense in his proposal for single-payer health care. It’s doubtful that the 43% of likely Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa who describe themselves as socialists want to turn the economy over to the government, either. So, yeah, there are degrees of socialism, and it’s kind of important that we have a vocabulary for describing the differences between Soviet Russia, Norway, France, Canada, and Bernie Sanders.
Joke Line is also correct that many of the things that Sanders is proposing are very good, or at least highly defensible ideas. Klein doesn’t have a problem with taxing highly speculative Wall Street activities, and he openly supports a massive infrastructure spending program.
In fact, it’s kind of hard to see precisely what he finds so troubling about Sanders’s brand of socialism. The best hint he gives is his belief that “redistributionism…dampens incentives, which dampens creativity, which leads to poverty.” It’s not clear, though, if he’s talking about the kind of poverty we see in Norway or Canada or France, because we experience quite a lot more poverty here in America than you’ll find in those “socialist” countries.
America is the wealthiest nation in the world, yet it has higher levels of poverty than any other western democracy. Its poverty rates compare more with a country like Romania than with countries like Canada, France or Germany.
It seems to me that Klein either doesn’t know his facts or he places a higher value on America being the wealthiest nation than he does on figuring out how we can cease being the western democracy with the highest level of poverty. He also assumes that these two features of America are so intertwined that we can’t remain the wealthiest country unless we avoid redistributionism.
There’s really a moral question and a policy question here. Morally, we might decide that being the wealthiest nation isn’t worth it if the price is that we do the worst on poverty. So, even if it is true that redistribution and regulation will destroy incentives and take away some of America’s economic advantages, maybe that’s worth the price.
But, set that aside. What if it simply isn’t true that America is the wealthiest most dynamic economy in the world because we let the rich do pretty much whatever they want to do? Where’s the evidence for this hypothesis?
When it comes time for Klein to summarize, his argument becomes ad hoc and reflexive:
It is still far more likely that Clinton wins the Democratic nomination than Sanders–but even Bernie should worry about his party strolling into the general election unwilling to distinguish itself from socialism. Indeed, the Democrats should worry about their attachment to big government, which, in America, has come to mean more unaccountable bureaucracy, like the Department of Veterans Affairs; more inefficiency, like the weird tangle of federal job-training programs, each more irrelevant than the last; and more perverse incentives, like welfare programs that ask for nothing–no personal responsibility–in return from their recipients. Big government is the way I was treated at the post office this afternoon.
Going after the Department of Veterans Affairs is such a dumb cheap shot. As my brother never tires of pointing out, the VHA provides the best health care in the country. And, as Phil argued, that fact alone ought to make people like Joke Line stop and reconsider their assumptions:
If this gives you cognitive dissonance, it should. The story of how and why the VHA became the benchmark for quality medicine in the United States suggests that much of what we think we know about health care and medical economics is just wrong. It’s natural to believe that more competition and consumer choice in health care would lead to greater quality and lower costs, because in almost every other realm, it does…
…But when it comes to health care, it’s a government bureaucracy that’s setting the standard for maintaining best practices while reducing costs, and it’s the private sector that’s lagging in quality. That unexpected reality needs examining if we’re to have any hope of understanding what’s wrong with America’s health-care system and how to fix it.
But this is how it goes. Folks like Joke Line get a narrative in their head and facts have little ability to alter that narrative.
The biggest problem with Joe Klein’s thesis in this piece is that he’s saying that socialism is a very dirty word and that the Democrats should disassociate themselves from it, but he’s also arguing that no one is really proposing socialism. And, insofar as Sanders and Clinton are advocating more regulation and redistribution, Klein makes a stale and unsupportable case against those proposals on the merits.
