Publius (with his newly acuired surname “starbursts“) gives a pretty good overview of the big ideas behind the two candidates health care policies.  He ends with a much broader note about conservatives’ and liberals’ respective approaches to the economy:

But it’s more than health care policy. The failure to give much weight to bargaining power disparities is at the heart of many a conservative/liberal economic disputes. Take unions for instance, or federal labor protections more generally. The standard conservative argument is that if employers act bad, employees can leave. Or, if they don’t pay enough, employees can just bargain. After all, everyone loves bargaining! (“Bargain” was a semi-erotic word for my old law and econ professors). These romantic visions, however, assume that individual employees have a lot more information, resources, and bargaining power than they actually have.

More broadly, the debate helps reaffirm the larger theme that government can be good. Indeed, government regulation is the end-all, be-all in correcting asymmetries in bargaining power and information. It’s like a giant union in that respect. Even the employer-based system — for all its flaws — at least tries to address these problems. A real national health care reform would go even further.

A Republican administration, however, isn’t going to address these types of problems. That’s because, in their world, markets don’t generally create these sorts of problems.

One last point — remember that the argument here isn’t so much about whether markets are good or not. There is no true “Left” in America — everyone believes in markets, including yours truly. The argument, then, is over what types of markets work best in what contexts. McCain thinks health care is a context where individual markets work best. Obama doesn’t. These differences are profound — on both a practical and theoretical level.

Mark my words, market absolutism will fall far from grace in the next decade, and conservatives will be forced to take a much more practical approach to economic subjects (at least regarding regulation and market disparities).  Without the specter of communism, it becomes difficult to achieve a mandate from voters for such an extreme economic policy position.

Tags: economics, health care, politics

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 10:50 pm and is filed under Some Pulp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.