Before being informed that Mackey identifies as a Libertarian and (apparently) has not made any donations to Republican candidates and rather snittily walking it back just a little bit, Ben Wyskida at the HuffPo proclaims:

The bottom line for me, reading Mackey’s op-ed, is that by shopping at Whole Foods I’m supporting by proxy a donation to the RNC and to health-scare front groups like Patients First. I don’t give money to anyone who injects misleading right-wing talking points into the public debate, so I won’t be giving money to Whole Foods.

I don’t know how well walking it back but then saying it doesn’t matter works; that was the “bottom line,” after all.  But that’s not what I want to ramble on about.  Two things:

1) This is the logic I was referring to in my earlier post.  Mackey says, “We clearly need health care reform,” but disagrees with Wyskida on the manner of that reform, and the immediate conclusion he lights on is that Mackey is arguing in bad faith, and because they disagree on the means, Mackey is obviously a large donor to Republican candidates and “health-scare front groups.”  Never mind that he doesn’t have a shred of supporting evidence on hand (and don’t you dare think he’ll be happy to be called out on those claims!) — we’re fighting The Man, man!

1a) The reason it doesn’t work for him to claim that his “bottom line” still holds regardless of lack of evidence for his claims about Mackey is that the meaning, in context, of that last sentence was not: “My money –> Whole Foods –> Mackey –> (money into Mackey’s bank account) –> Mackey speaking out against health care reform I approve of because”; it was rather: “My money –> Whole Foods –> Mackey –> (via donations/campaign contributions) –> GOP candidates and ‘health-scare front groups.’”

2) In order to have any semblance of consistency in undue political outrage, Wyskida must also be/intend to immediately commence boycotting all companies, stores, corporations, service providers, etc. owned by Republicans — and, apparently, Libertarians.

Enacting health care reform isn’t going to be accomplished by throwing temper tantrums when the guy who founded your grocery disagrees with you.  Yeah — throwing temper tantrums might be able to prevent the enactment health care reform, and I know that’s not fair.  But as anyone who’s ever had a younger sibling can tell you, when it comes to winning like that, fair don’t have a damn thing to do with it.

So they’re not quite as ridiculous as the town-hall crashers and Sarah Palin, but what we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a failure of logic:

“I’m boycotting [Whole Foods] because all Americans need health care,” said Lent, 33, who used to visit his local Whole Foods “several times a week.”

“While Mackey is worried about health care and stimulus spending, he doesn’t seem too worried about expensive wars and tax breaks for the wealthy and big businesses such as his own that contribute to the deficit,” said Lent.

I’m beginning to believe that, for the purposes of the health care debate, we should use the “Athenian” version of free speech: Yeah, you can say what you want, but don’t expect us to not heckle you out of the Assembly once you make a fool of yourself.  (This does, of course, entail not lambasting those who attempt to engage in good-faith dialogue and debate for things they didn’t say.)

What bothers me most is the assumption that because he disagrees with their views, Mackey is obviously doing nothing more than promoting the status quo — which, by extension, means he is actively trying to harm Americans by writing an op-ed.  I think we’ve been seeing this mindset for some time now, on more issues than just health care: that a disagreement about means entails a disagreement about ends,* and that therefore anyone who disagrees with you cannot be acting in good faith.  Because their arguments and alternatives are proposed in bad faith, one need not engage with or listen to them or their proposals.  (In fact, there’s no need for discussion or consideration at all!  What’s up with this whole “legislative branch” and “deliberative body”** crap, anyway?)

*For the purposes of the above, I’m defining “ends” as broadly as possible.  For example: “We should try to avoid economic collapse”; “The present health care and health insurance system is not functioning properly and should be altered so that it does”; “Our foreign policy should be one that ensures America’s security”; etc.

**This is not to imply that I actually believe Congress behaves like a deliberative body.  Just that, in theory, it should.

I, too, have been somewhat remiss in my bloggerly duties as of late — it seems that my weekly internet breaks have grown from Saturdays to include Sundays, Mondays, and occasionally Fridays and Tuesdays — unfortunately, all other productivity is usually shot on those days, also, so I’m getting nothing out of it.  Which makes me wonder what I’m doing with my time.

In the meantime, Nathan Origer put together a lengthy but worthwhile manifesto of sorts on localism, capitalism, trade, and the sort.  You should read it, but in case you don’t/haven’t, the conundrum, in short: “Can we reconcile free-trade economics to our quaint, but truly conservative, localism? If so, how? Or is ‘protectionism’ the answer?”

E.D. Kain has responded (again, choose the original over my summary, if you would), and concludes:

In the end, though, there are simply no palatable alternatives to free trade, to organic markets.  All that means, in the end, is that people are allowed to trade freely with one another without the long arm of the state getting in the way.  The supply is not kept from those who demand it.  The demand is not artificially created.  People go about their lives at liberty to do so.  Protection is the state, and it acts in ways that seek not to protect us but to protect big corporations or labor unions at our expense and without our consent.  Government intervention more often than not helps subsidize our shallow, consumerist culture, and there is very little to suggest the government can return us to any place of virtue – of “place, limits or liberty” as it were.  We are better left to our own better or worse natures, and to do as we see fit to shape our own way in the world.  Hopefully left alone, and diverted from the culture of entitlement and consumerism we’ve drawn about ourselves, we can build something better.

That’s a start.  Government certainly isn’t going to be able to induce the values of place and limits necessary to the establishment and survival of that late lamented “local(ist)” virtue.  Virtue and community, if they are truly virtue and community, are organic.  But it’s only a start, even though it’s usually the point at which I stop.  If there’s a broad vision of where things need to be — government withdrawing precisely enough to ensure that “[t]he demand is not artificially created” so that “left alone … we can build something better” — then the next step is to figure out how we get there.

Any “new localism” or “return to community” won’t — can’t — look like any previous incarnation of local values of place and community.  Certain things — like the interstate highway system, as a commenter at the League has pointed out — are here and not going anywhere.  Not only has national government power grown over the course of my life and yours, but the momentum seems to continue swinging in that direction: one major party clamoring for the federal government to assume its right to the power to provide massive new entitlement programs while the other demands that we all accept the government’s rightful assumption of its long-latent authority to torture and indefinite detention.

If government is to be limited along with appetite, then active policy prescriptions that recognize and engage the present situation are needed.  If (terribile dictu!) the magnetism of centralized power is not to be stopped or reversed anytime soon, then there needs to be a strategy designed to mitigate the damage to place and community, and even with that centralization, to strengthen them.  I’m all for nostalgia, and my romantic attraction to Lost Causes is going to bite me one of these days, but if the best policy offered by those who long for stronger local community and the restoration of place and limits is to be dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century, then that is precisely what will happen — and at the end of the day, those so inclined will sit wistfully mourning the better days of the past while the rest of the nation continues to move farther and farther away.

This isn’t my strong-suit — I’m no policy-wonk or would-be wonk, have exceptionally limited knowledge of formal economics, and prefer the abstract a little too strongly to the practical — so I certainly include myself in that critique.  But if the localist and anti-(or even post-)modern critiques of society are going to move beyond lament — or simply beyond being easily caricatured as nothing more than lament — there needs to be debate about where we go and — more importantly — how we get there.  Nathan touched on it briefly in his original post and then in some more detail in the comments to E.D.’s by bringing up differential and land-value taxation.  But, like E.D.’s concluding paragraph and much of my daily read, it’s only a beginning.

The real story, of course, is exactly the opposite of the one Weisberg is telling, as the effect of the Bush administration’s wake on Obama’s approach to foreign affairs has been to make the latter more irresponsible and hawkish than it might otherwise have been, since any genuine break with the past would immediately be tagged by the chattering class as “weak” or – to use terms suggested by Weisberg – alarming and accommodationist. In a more perfect world, the disasters of the previous eight years would have led to exactly the sort of massive compensation whose imagined existence Weisberg laments, but in the world we’re in what we get instead is foot-dragging on negotiations and the very same sort of do-what-we-say-or-else posturing that realist observers of the Bush administration came to know and hate. Having a punditry that reacts to the Obama administration’s moments of realist sanity by complaining that they aren’t more like the errors of its predecessors is unfortunately unlikely to make the sane moments any more frequent.

Earlier: Jacob Weisberg couldn’t have gotten it more wrong on libertarianism, either.

Update: Daniel beat me to it.

"Something called health-reform legislation will pass," a prominent Democrat told me. "The political consequences of not passing anything would be too great." A bare-bones bill that reforms the health-insurance industry — insurers would have to accept all comers, including those with pre-existing conditions, at the same rates — is a distinct possibility. Expanded coverage, perhaps including the parents of children eligible for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), is also probable. Most important for long-term reform, a system of health-care superstores — the wonks call them "exchanges" or "co-ops" — where individuals and small businesses can go to buy a plan, could be included.

I feel like I’ve heard this one a few times before, so it seems a likely scenario. And while I can think of worse possibilities, the fact is that I can think of better ones, too: for if the Democrats get the chance to claim success without doing something more substantial, then one possible outcome is that the current momentum behind the “reform” cause dies out before achieving the sorts of changes that are necessary, and so resulting in a reform that truly deserves the title. But as things stand the Republicans have no incentive whatsoever to compromise, as any bill that passes will forever be credited to the majority party; hence the most politically attractive strategy for the minority is simply to resist such passage at every juncture possible. How likely is it, though, that in the unlikely event that such a strategy pays off the GOP of the future will get its legislative act together, and put the work into developing and promoting reform proposals of their own? Signs point to “Not Very”.

UPDATE: Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh thinks Surowiecki is full of it.

⇒ Include health care coverage for all people from conception until natural death;
⇒ Continue the federal ban on funding for abortions and reject any mandate for abortion coverage or access to abortion;
⇒ Include access for all with a special concern for the poor and vulnerable and support inclusion for legal immigrants;
⇒ Preserve pluralism, including freedom of conscience for providers, health care workers and patients; and
⇒ Restrain costs and apply costs equitably among payers.

Predictably, the Vox Nova commenters take this as an indication that the bishops are “backing the President” on this issue, but of course that isn’t true at all: the plan currently moving through the House of Representatives fails to meet the second criterion and seems likely to be a middling success at best on the first conjunct of the final one; and these criteria could in principle be met by any of a range of reform options, from single-payer or mandates or the public plan on one end to something like the Wyden-Bennett bill in the middle to Arnold Kling’s libertarian dream on the other. Obviously there are questions to be answered as to which sort of plan would best, say, restrain costs or ensure universal access to health care, but the fact that reform is necessary does not mean that the Democrats’ plan du jour needs to be passed simply because it’s reform.

It’s certainly true, though, that most folks on the right have been doing a piss-poor job of making themselves seem like anything more than apologists for the status quo. As Reihan recently put it, the fact that a disciplined and devoted minority party can invigorate itself and defeat the agenda of a popular President isn’t the only or even the most important lesson to take from 1994: the consequent failure of conservatives to stand behind a genuine alternative has left progressives solidly occupying the moral high ground on this issue, and while fretting about budget deficits and the threat of federal rationing is certain an effective strategy for opposition, it’s essential not to overlook the fact that people do want reform. Hence until the GOP starts coming forward with serious and far-reaching reform proposals of its own – and note that there is a wide range of policy options that voters seem quite receptive to – the “r” word is going to remain the sole property of the Democrats, and it seems likely that they’re going to get something passed simply by force of inertia. Knee-jerk opposition may be a beneficial stance to take in the short term, but the long-term future of American political conservatism is going to require more than that. Dropping the language of budget deficits and “socialism” in favor of the morally weighty terms drawn on by the bishops might be a good place to start, and an effective way to show people that conservatism does have something to offer to voters who are understandably looking to Washington to fix our broken health-care system.