The (Old) Mickey Kaus Argument In Favor of Universal Healthcare

By Scott Galupo • June 29, 2012, 11:24 AM

The always entertaining self-hating Democrat Mickey Kaus has supported Obamacare (“mess that it is”) all along.

But it’s his older argument in favor of universal healthcare more generally, as found in his influential 1992 book The End of Equality (find a New Republic magazine adaptation here), that has me feeling … let’s say equable … about the long national nightmare of Obamacare.

Kaus’s End of Equality argument, in short, was this: You can’t just have the good parts of globally competitive meritocracy. Inequality is/was going to increase. Old-school, Mondale-style reactionary liberalism, which tries to mitigate inequality through redistribution, won’t help, because you can’t create more social mobility simply by throwing more cash around. The then-novel “Skills Solution” liberalism — a la Bill Clinton and, more recently, Barack Obama — is of limited use, too. More job training programs, Pell Grants, apprenticeships, “ladders of opportunity” — try these all you want, Kaus argued, but the cream is still going to rise to the top, and the hereditarily disadvantaged are consequently going to end up feeling even more like losers.

If only for its predictive power, Kaus’s thesis, 20 years later, seems spot-on.

Kaus’s prescription was to accept the brave new world and to try to revitalize a “civic sphere” of equality. Programmatically, Kaus favored things like reinstituting the draft or AmeriCorps-style national service. In retrospect, this sounds a lot like the dodgy sort of National Greatness conservatism that was popular at the Weekly Standard in those all-too-leisurely Clinton years. (Two ugly foreign wars later, we hear a lot less of this today.)

More practically, Kaus also embraced universal healthcare.

It remains compelling to me how the welfare-reform-supporting Kaus framed this choice: Universal healthcare is not a limit on capitalism so much as it’s a tradeoff for more capitalism. The process of deregulation and global economic connectivity that began in the late 1970s, which historian Edward Luttwak later dubbed “Turbo-capitalism,” exposed workers to the vicissitudes of market capitalism more than they’d ever been throughout the 20th century.

For Kaus, universal healthcare is the tribute the new cosmopolitan elite must pay to fellow citizens who have become radically less secure.

You may not buy this idea, dear readers. But I thought I’d at least share it with you so you know where I’m coming from.

Posted in Books, Economics, Healthcare, Politics. Tagged Edward Luttwak, End of Equality, Mickey Kaus, Turbo-capitalism.

10 Responses to The (Old) Mickey Kaus Argument In Favor of Universal Healthcare

Benjamin Nagle says:

June 29, 2012 at 12:17 pm

But why not push back against the negative effects of corporate state capitalism on both the economic and political fronts? Economic centralization contributes to our current atomized, high unemployment, overly competitive, efficiency centric, socially bankrupt political settlement. As Marx recognized, unchecked creative destruction undermines traditional commitments to kin, community, and church.

Shouldn’t we be trying to embed economic and political relationships in face to face bonds of trust, rather than policy centric bureaucracies? The ACA centralizes more power in the corporate state and continues to put more power in the hands of the managerial class, while undermining whatever hopes we have of returning communities and states to anything that resembles participatory governance. Instead of instituting robust anti-trust laws that would breakup the insurance oligarchy, instead of repealing a whole lot of flawed HMO laws, instead of focusing on preventative education, instead of decentralizing health care regulations and allowing for experimentation, instead of pushing toward more doctor cooperatives and a smaller bureaucratic structure–the ACA institutes more economic and more political centralization. It represents a pincer like convergence of corporate and state interests, and it contributes to the homogenization of our allegedly pluralistic political structure.

Wouldn’t a better strategy be, if we really want to enable communities to push back against the devastating effects of globalism and corporate state capitalism, a movement toward the decentralizing policies that I have mentioned, rather than the arms race that you propose. With your strategy, government must centralize power in order to compensate for the negative consequences of corporation centralizing power. In the end, communities not only lose control of their economic fate—they also lose the ability to craft their own legislation regarding such communal good as caring for the health of their citizens.
matt says:

June 29, 2012 at 12:48 pm

Like, duh.
Rousseau says:

June 29, 2012 at 1:02 pm

I buy the idea. I’m not in favor of equality in any way but I think everyone should at least get something. The great mass of formerly middle class people who are moving to poverty should at least be able to see a doctor and get some generic pills at some crowded clinic. It’s better than people using the emergency rooms as their primary source of health care.
Scott Galupo says:

June 29, 2012 at 2:30 pm

Benjamin,

I’ll be honest with you: there are days when I’m in perfect sympathy with your argument, and there are days when I feel like Rousseau does in the temperamentally conservative comment below yours: this is the state we have, so we might as well play the ball where it lies.

I wish I could say my guns are ablaze like yours, but the truth is I’m ambivalent
Dyspeptic says:

June 29, 2012 at 2:48 pm

“You may not buy this idea, dear readers. But I thought I’d at least share it with you so you know where I’m coming from.” You’re right, this dear (and soon to be former) reader doesn’t buy it at all. Once again I ask plaintively, is this what has become of Paleo-Conservatism? I have read exactly two articles on this website and both have featured income/social inequality themes along with grand schemes for national social engineering to reduce poverty and increase equality. Both articles have also featured warm and fuzzy noises about Barrack Obushma and the detestable Mickey Kaus. Since when did conservatives prefer state mandated equality to liberty?

It becomes very difficult to take seriously a website which purports to be paleo conservative but seems to display a curious tolerance for massive social engineering schemes via the Welfare/Warfare State. So are you really simpatico with Mickey Kaus’s self congratulatory blather about the so called Welfare Reform of the Clinton years? It’s nice to know that dystopian tyranny can be “reformed”. Do you also want to reinstitute indentured servitude via a military draft or America Corpse type programs a la the despicable chicken hawk Neo-Cons and Paleo-Dems.?

Using a moderate Welfare Statist like Mickey Kaus as an exemplar of conservatism brings it all into focus for me. Mickey Kaus for God’s sake! Really! As someone who is reasonably familiar with the great New Deal hating Old Right thinkers like John T. Flynn, Garet Garrett and Robert Taft I am mystified by your apparent position. The Internet is full of stuff more coherent and less ridiculous than this. I think I’ll take a dip in someone else’s pool, the water here is yellowish, too warm and smells of urea.
Scott Galupo says:

June 29, 2012 at 3:04 pm

Dyspeptic,

I’m not sure where you get the idea the Kaus or I are supporting efforts to “increase social equality.” The argument I presented here is that social equality is impossible and shouldn’t be sought. Access to medical care will continue to be unequal under Obamacare, and it isn’t even universal.

More generally, I’d urge you not to quit this website because of me. Mine is the minority opinion. We’re trying to argue ideas here, not toe a party line.
Benjamin Nagle says:

June 29, 2012 at 5:39 pm

Dyspeptic, As far as I can tell, TAC does not hold to any particular ideological creed. They do not, moreover, seem to share your interest in fostering an only Paleos allowed sort of echo chamber. Unifying all the disparate voices on the site, keep in mind that I am relatively new around here, seems to be a rejection of our expansionist foreign policy. The editors lay out their hopes and dreams and aspirations in this piece they ran with the website relaunch a couple months ago
(http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/back-to-burke/).

Scott, hopefully my reckless gunfire didn’t blow out any ear drums or scare away too many readers from your thoughtful post. Have you taken a look at the reform proposals John Medaile started passing around a couple years back (http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2009/09/localizing-health-care/). Do any of the distributist or agrarian responses to health care catch your attention, or do they strike you as too unrealistic to induce anything but yawns?
Lester the Nightfly says:

June 29, 2012 at 6:56 pm

Dyspeptic: I’ve said this before, if you’re looking for knee-jerk, unreconstructed Republicanism, where yes, the solution to every problem fits into a tidy bumper sticker slogan, i.e,’let the private sector take care of it!’ or ‘every man, woman, child, disabled person and elderly invalid for himself!’ and my personal favorite, the classic anti-liberty, “if you aren’t doing anything wrong you’ve nothing to hide!” then there are plenty of online/print publications that can assist you. There is a reason they are called “echo chambers.”

At least the orbit of writers and commenters here are willing to talk openly and open-mindedly (and yes, sometimes seemingly counterintuitively) about the very complicated issues vexing America today. They don’t all agree with each other, or walk in lock-step. They don’t have it all figured out. They welcome debate.

Some folks may find that refreshing. Perhaps you might reconsider leaving TAC off of your reading list and maybe join that debate?
TomB says:

June 29, 2012 at 9:32 pm

Scott Galupo wrote:

“It remains compelling to me how the welfare-reform-supporting Kaus framed this choice: Universal healthcare is not a limit on capitalism so much as it’s a tradeoff for *more* capitalism.”

And that *is* compelling too. My perception is that one very large reason for the seemingly ever-shrinking but purer “conservative” base is the very understandable but nevertheless regrettable retreat by purist types to some fallacy-laden fantasy land. (With no real disrespect intended, like Dyspeptic above.)

Sort of characterized, to me, by a simply refusal to accept that to a significant degree, and over and over again with their voting, enough people of this country—and more than enough on lots—have just simply but definitively rejected certain classic conservative tenets.

And then there’s the utter lack of understanding that the are being totally taken advantage of in this by cynical “conservative” politicians.

This brouhaha over Obamacare is a good illustration in any number of ways via getting people wildly upset over things cynically structured, and not all that upsetting, either legally or politically.

For instance:

Do all those who are hyperventilating against this mandate-penalty tax realize that instead of the Feds trying to force you to buy health insurance via that penalty tax they said instead “okay, we are just going to *directly* tax you and then buy it for you” that … nobody but nobody would say that’s unconstitutional? That a Supreme Court vote on this would be 9-0? (Because the *entire* Commerce Clause question that’s led to this recent decision would have been *completely* avoided.)

And yet look at the hysteria over just doing the same thing a bit differently.

And do they realize that this whole Commerce Clause issue was essentially set up *by* their Republican heroes? It was *them,* after all, who forced the Democrats away from a one-payer system so as to preserve private insurance companies. And in conjunction with blocking a one-payer system it was *them* who originally acknowledged that if you were going to have a system using private insurers that financially you would just *need* a mandate for everyone to buy to make it work, and thus it was *them* who first came up with a mandate idea?

And yet now, it’s these same Republican politicians who are seizing on what was originally their *own* mandate idea to whoop people up into believing that upholding it equals some constitutional Armageddon?

Is there even a *trace* of understanding of this?

And what about *politically* (as well as legally too)?: What do all those hyperventilating against Obamacare in toto say to the obvious reality is that *tons* of people just simply want it? And a majority elected Mr. Obama who ran on it? And the utter hopelessness of trying to convince the American people to go back to some old conception of the constitution outlawing Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and on and on?

And do they realize that nobody but nobody would deny that under the Federal Constitution if their *State* rather than the Fed gov’t wanted to establish totally socialized medicine the States could do it without *any* real constitutional doubt whatsoever? That … the Framers of the Constitution would have seen *no* problem whatsoever with incredibly intrusive, powerful states? That, indeed, they well imagined States even establishing their own official religions, for God’s sake, and having every “police power” imaginable. (With the original Bill of Rights not restraining the States one iota.)

So does this health-care decision and/or Obamacare in toto *really* represent an Armageddon? As folks like Limbaugh and self-interested Republican politicians want them to believe?

Of course not.

Like Galupo I don’t want to see good people like Dyspeptic retreat to some small core of purist absolutists, especially because they are just simply wasting their time there. That core is going *nowhere* politically. The people of this country aren’t going to stop wanting the government to do *something* about the health-care situation, just as they aren’t going to suddenly renounce Social Security or Medicaid or Medicare or etc.

If conservatism has any hope at all it lies in trying to get the Dyspeptics out there to stop listening to those out there with a self-interest in getting them hyperventilating. Like … a Rush Limbaugh, or a George Bush who rightly inveighs one day against the stupidity and wrongness of us going “nation building,” and on the next tells us we’ve gotta expend untold future amounts of blood and treasure on trying to re-build the entire Middle East and Islamic sensibilities and values.

The gotta start listening for themselves.
Jim Dooley says:

June 30, 2012 at 12:56 pm

To paraphrase a little that great champion of the nation’s working men and women, Nancy Pelosi, whatever one wants to call oneself, one could be forgiven for feeling indigestion at how John Roberts a)mangled the law that was passed in Congress, b) abused the plain meaning of the english language in order to do it, and c)poisoned the well springs of the law for years to come; and all of it done to vindicate an incoherent mess that aims to serve the sentimental aspirations of some – Universal health care – and that is deeply offensive to the equally sentimental understanding of the opposition – that America isn’t just a tax farm providing fodder for Washington’s big ideas. Whatever. The certain result now is a vast expansion of federal power that will be rooted forever in the cement of the federal bureaucracy.
When it comes to the warfare state, this magazine in my opinion gets things right most of the time; when it comes to the welfare state, the record is not so stellar. The pivotal recognition that chasing after the big ideas abroad ended well only for the bureaucracies because it was all pie in the sky from the start doesn’t appear to obtain when it is one’s own big idea hanging in the balance.
Again, whatever. As the poet said, Humankind can only bear so much reality. Even so, it is a little disappointing to see people who can rightfully ridicule George W Bush for saying that we don’t do torture (we waterboard) give the Chief Justice a pass for saying that we tax (we don’t penalize)merely because they are talking about a dream they can get behind.