An interesting post at Hullabaloo. Digby links to a commentary arguing that the unfortunate number of glitches affecting the Obamacare website are proof of, rather than proof against, the superiority of classic twentieth century liberalism over the weird mix of federal government, state governments, and rent-seekers that it has become trendy to think deliver services more efficiently, and upon which Obamacare relies.
Mike Konczal has written a provocative post that is getting quite a bit of play today and is well worth reading. He posits that the rough Obamacare rollout is a direct consequence of misplaced faith in neo-liberal solutions, which he defines in this instance as a reliance on means testing, privatization, devolution to the states, all in the pursuit of “choice” and “competition” as the best ways to provide services at an affordable choice. He contrasts that with the New Deal style programs which are universal, federal government run programs:
Conservatives in particular think this website has broad implications for liberalism as a philosophical and political project. I think it does, but for the exact opposite reasons: it highlights the problems inherent in the move to a neoliberal form of a governance and social insurance, while demonstrating the superiorities in the older, New Deal form of liberalism. This point is floating out there, and it turns out to be a major problem for conservatives as well, so let's make it clear and explicit here.
She points out that there is a certain breed of “liberal”, Joe Klein being her Exhibit A, that feel that the New Deal approach of coming up with a simple and direct solution to a problem is really just too passé, because, …you know, computers and all.
She delivers up a particularly juicy quote from Klein, and observes:
He just asserts that people must need more choices about where their retirement money is held and where they get their health care because the world is now like a computer. I don't know why. And considering what we're currently going through with the Obamacare web-site rollout, that statement is more hilariously absurd than ever.
This is quite a common phenomenon among the punditminati. Positing causation when there is no relationship between the asserted cause and the alleged effect. Arguing from analogies that do not bear inspection. Employing metaphors that make no sense. Claiming that since some things have changed, all things, no matter how unrelated, must change. All, oddly enough, in service to the underlying proposition that we really must, for our own self evident good, redistribute from the masses to the upper classes.
The article to which she refers is well worth reading. I think it demonstrates rather compellingly that while Roosevelt didn't have a computer, he had the right idea about how to efficiently deliver essential services.
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