Why Is Economics More Important Than Morality?

Doug, a guy I work out with at the Y every morning and a past president of the Aurora teacher association, came up to me outside the weight room and whispered (There are lots of republicans at the Y so we have learned to be discreet) that someone had commented that universal health care should not be an economic issue, but a moral one. I think you will agree Doug's discovery is not a new one. The remarkable thing about Doug's comment is that he had to make it at all.

Why is it that everything the Obama phenomenon was predicated on was about doing the right thing, doing the moral thing, changing the atmosphere, and now everything is about what is practical, what is efficient, what will help the economy? When did this shift happen? The huge post war government programs both here and abroad were not responses to the question of what would be the most efficient and profitable thing to do, but what would be the moral thing to do.

If I approached the health care debate from an economic angle, I would be as passionately and irrationally against it as Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck. I've got mine! It is a great plan. I don't want anything messing it up. As far as those people who don't have a plan as good as mine, or who have no plan at all, fuck 'em. I mean this is America (I'm resisting an impulse to spell that with a K). If you don't have health care it is likely to be your own fault. In any event it is not my problem. "Have we no poor houses?"

When I approach the debate from a moral perspective, my argument is embarassingly short. It is the right thing to do. The thought that it might raise my taxes, or alter the scope of my current benefits isn't even a factor in my considerations.

The problem with this position is that it seems laughable. People who heard the argument would all resist urges to pat me on the head before walking scornfully away. And yet, being the hopeless liberal I am, I am pretty convinced moral questions should take precedence over economic ones.

That is why I was so taken by Tondy Judt's "What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?" ("The New York Review of Books, December 17, 2009). His masterful essay starts with the question (much more eloquently and coherently stated) that I asked above. He doesn't go on to answer it so much as amplify it. I have to get this down so I can remember his arguments in case I want to lay waste some conservative friend.

He makes the point that we are the only democracy in the modern world that is not a social democracy. In fact, our traditional distrust of central government makes any other approach nearly impossible to visualize. Judt does allow for the fact that the USA is considerably larger and more diverse than other democracies and that diversity mitigates against a social element. In other words, if we all lived in a country the size of Montana and had a similar population base, we would have no problem establishing social institutions that would help out rancher Ben down in the valley when he hit on hard times because we know Ben would do the same for us. We trust him.

But the thing (one of the things) that has happened to dilute this social contract is privatization. The New Deal ushered in the idea that government had certain responsibilities to preserve the general good (postal delivery, regulation of public services, establishing roads, providing for defense, etc.). Even though many of my conservative friends would point out therein lies the source of all our current problems, Judt maintains that this governmental role helps serve as a buffer between the individual and the larger demands of a society. When you privatize many of these governmental roles, you end up with gated communities, both literally and figuratively. If you and your fellow community members put up your own fence (or pay for it through your homeowners) and hire your own security guards, are you still invested in society as a whole? Is there even such a thing as society any more? And if there is no longer a society as such, why in heaven's name should you feel the need to brunt the costs of someone else's healthcare, or unemployment,or foodstamps?

Now back to the question. Is it possible to make morally efficient or efficiently moral decisions? The question not only seems absurd, but beside the point. Judt gives a great example. He wants us to imagine the best way to run a railroad. If we simply ran express routes between big population centers with no stops in between, we would make a profit and the railroad would be efficient, but it would provide horrible service to those who live in one horse towns. If, on the other hand, we based the railroad on what is best for the customer, we would have local trains in addition to the express trains and those local trains would lose money. What to do? Don't ask Congress to decide!

Trains, mail, schools, health care are SOCIAL services. They can't be left to the vagaries of the market place. THEY WILL PROBABLY NEVER BE EFFICIENT OR PROFITABLE. That is just the nature of the beast.

But Judt does give us an uplifting end to his polemic. Maybe we should change the way we figure value? Maybe we should look at things that can't be so easily quantified as profit and loss? For instance, it is more efficient to simply give donations (food stamps, religious charities, etc.) to the poor than it is to fix the infrastructure in such a way as to ease the social humiliation of poverty and the huge disparity between rich and poor in this country (I read the other day in The Daily Beast that the disparity between rich and poor in the USA is greater than that of China. Startling information!) What is the COST of the humiliation that is indicative of the current system? The fact that we can't measure it doesn't take away from its importance. Maybe, as Judt says, if we considered the cost of the humiliation and despair of poverty, we might just discover that things like universal health care, subsidized transportion, and the guarantee of higher education might just be worth the investment. But there I go confusing economy with morality again.