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Red-biating Rises Again

Red-biating Rises Again

Piketty himself is a social democrat who abjures the Marxist label. But as his title suggests, he is out to rehabilitate and recast one of Marx’s key ideas: that so-called “free markets,” by their nature, tend to enrich the owners of capital at the expense of people who own less of it.

On the right, being insufficiently worshipful of capitalism as they define it is now the same as being a Marxist. It doesn’t matter how you reach your conclusions, it doesn’t matter if you disagree with 90% of Marx. If you do not follow the right-wing party line on capital, it’s the same as being a devoted Marxist.

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We’re All Rationers

Certainly telling seniors to buy all their own health care is a complete political (and ethical) non-starter. But telling seniors to pay for more of their own health care — well, it’s hard to see how else we can hope to reduce Medicare’s fiscal burden. Maybe the premium support/voucher model that the Ryan budget proposes isn’t the optimal way to do it. But every other mechanism for serious cost containment leads inexorably to a similar place.

This is obvious when you think seriously about the main Obama administration proposal for Medicare reform — the famous IPAB plan, which would put a board of experts in charge of deciding which treatments Medicare will and won’t cover. If it had any deficit-cutting teeth at all, such a board would constantly end up asking seniors to pay for their own health care (or else go without it), by refusing to pay for treatments that doctors would otherwise prescribe.

From We’re All Rationers

Mr Douthat is right here. There is no form of cost control that is not also a form of rationing. Anyone that is pro-cost-control but anti-rationing doesn’t understand the problem.

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Op-Ed Columnist – The Marriage Ideal – NYTimes.com

What we think of as “traditional marriage” is not universal. The default family arrangement in many cultures, modern as well as ancient, has been polygamy, not monogamy. The default mode of child-rearing is often communal, rather than two parents nurturing their biological children.

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The point of this ideal is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it’s that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.

From Op-Ed Columnist – The Marriage Ideal – NYTimes.com

So this is a conservative case against marriage rights is to recognize traditional marriage as social engineering and is worthy of support because of the pretty genealogy diagrams? Huh? I wonder if Mr. Douthat would support asexual reproduction because you can use Venn Diagrams for genealogy. I generally like Mr. Douthat’s column but this is really an awful argument in what is his worst column of the year.

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The Principles of Rand Paul

No ideology survives the collision with real-world politics perfectly intact. General principles have to bend to accommodate the complexities of history, and justice is sometimes better served by compromise than by zealous intellectual consistency.

This was all that Rand Paul needed to admit, after his victory in Kentucky’s Republican Senate primary, when NPR and Rachel Maddow asked about his views of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

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Like many outside-the-box thinkers, they’re good at applying their principles more consistently than your average partisan, but lousy at knowing when to stop. (Hence the tendency to see civil rights legislation as just another unjustified expansion of federal power.)

From Op-Ed Columnist – The Principles of Rand Paul – NYTimes.com

Ross Douthat dissects Rand Pauls gaffe and demonstrates why libertarian ideologues do a disservice both to their cause and to open honest policy debate in general.