More on classic American liberalism

In my posts below, I mention classic American liberalism. Note that classic FDR-style American liberalism has nothing to do with radical socialist or Communist agendas or whatever. Indeed, FDR's liberal solutions were intended to prevent radical socialists and Communists from coming to power in America. Rather, classic American liberalism has its basis on the study of reality, and the formulation of solutions to problems found in reality.

For example, when FDR became President, there was a lot of people unemployed. FDR did not look at those people and say, "My ideology says that if they can't find jobs on their own, they should starve to death." FDR did not look at those people and say, "My ideology says that I should nationalize all industry and farmland and put those people onto collective farms and state-owned factories". Rather, he said "They need jobs, and if they don't get jobs they're likely to go Communist or Socialist because no man will voluntarily starve to death just because my ideology says he should. Thus I will create jobs for them." And he did, via the WPA and CCC. Problem solved. Communism averted.

Similarly, when I look at health care today, I do not advocate Medicare For All because my ideology says that government should provide health care. Indeed, if that were my ideology, I would be advocating something like the Swedish system where all doctors are employees of the government and all hospitals and clinics are owned by the government. Rather, I advocate Medicare For All because, looking at the numbers of the current Medicare program vs. the current private health insurance industry, it is the most cost-effective way to fund health care. Medicare For All gets rid of a host of administrative overhead that the current system has, from advertising to enrollment, and eliminates entire bureaucracies (such as the entire billing bureaucracy for billing employers and citizens for their health insurance) that otherwise suck up health care dollars but provide no useful service to America. Medicare's administrative expenses are approximately 1/5th those of private insurers on a per-claim basis. If we eliminated the roughly 25% of current health care spending in America that disappears as administrative expenses or profits for health insurers, if we make all health insurance as efficient as Medicare already is by extending Medicare to all Americans, we can fund health insurance for all Americans without any increase in the amount of money that Americans currently spend on health insurance. In short, I go by what the numbers tell me, not what ideology tells me. And what the numbers tell me is that, by and large, Medicare has been a spectacularly successful health insurance program and that there's no reason to not extend it to all Americans rather than only allowing old prunes to enroll.

That is reality-based policy making. That is liberalism. Liberalism has to do with looking at reality, and formulating solutions to the problems you see when you examine reality. People don't have health insurance and the life expectancy of Americans is thereby declining? Provide it to them, sharing the costs amongst all Americans via the existing Medicare payroll tax. That's liberalism -- solving problems via the most effective and least intrusive means it takes to solve them. It's not as exciting as talking about the revolution where capitalism will be overthrown or other such radical left-wing garbage, or ranting about individual responsibility and how those poor people should just voluntarily starve to death or other such radical right-wing garbage, but so it goes. Reality has never been as clean and simple as ideology, it's always been messy and requiring much study and much number-crunching to understand the problem and devise a solution that will actually solve the problem while upsetting the current applecart as little as possible (thus while nationalizing industry and farms would have certainly solved FDR's unemployment problem, interference into the status quo beyond the minimum needed is not part of liberalism, thus he didn't do it). If you want all that ideological stuff you'll just have to go talk to some radical left-wing anarchists or right-wing glibertarians or such. Meanwhile, those of us who deal with reality have problems to solve, and we will continue to propose solutions to those problems that are based on reality, not ideology. It's the liberal thing to do, after all.

-- Badtux the Liberal Penguin