Supreme Court says Romneycare is constitutional

It appears that almost all of the ACA is being upheld by the Court.  I'm surprised, to say the least, and I'm still not sure I agree with the decision, which I haven't read yet and probably will not understand when I shall have read it.  I find it hard to agree that the individual mandate is accurately described as a tax, even though I find the idea that it is a tax probably the most palatable of the possible arguments that might uphold the mandate.

However, as someone who supports the ACA, I am, of course, happy.  But I must temper my happiness with a few points:

• The law is still a gamble.  The devil is in the details of how the act is implemented.
• For all we know, there may be unseen and unforeseen loopholes in the price controls that, I understand, are written into the bill.
• The act is not safe.  It can be overturned and might be overturned.
• The act will come with real costs, and those costs won't be born only by the mythical 1%.  I hope that the costs are not so much that they will overburden those least able to pay or that they will result in a huge increase in costs or shortage of doctors.

Supporters, like me, should realize that it might have gone differently.  And in a different world and perhaps under a more consistent (and perhaps more honest) interpretation of the Constitution, it ought to have gone differently.  The act lives because the Supreme Court says it may, but the act is not therefore right.

Let's hope it works out.

Why I harp so much on libertarianism

If anyone reads this blog regularly, they know I write a lot about libertarianism, and in most of those posts, I usually hasten to say that I am not a libertarian and explain why.  Why, then, do I write so much about it, spending precious time that I could devote to writing my dissertation?  I can think of at least two reasons.

First, I have a certain vision of how I'd like the world to be, a certain vision of what laws I'd like to see passed and of how people should treat each other and of how the state should influence how people treat each other.  This vision is not particularly coherent, nor is it all that unusual.  For example, I support gay marriage, I support universal health care provision, I support a robust social welfare system, I support an alert, but cautious role for the US in international relations (i.e., I don't like military intervention but am not fully convinced its always wrong), I support some forms of what I understand to be affirmative action, I support in principle a tax system in which the more affluent pay a greater share of their income, I support the end or sharp curtailment of the "war" on drugs, I'm coming around to supporting an open-borders immigration policy, and I support robust government coordination of the free market system (I'm purposefully avoiding the term "centralized planning" because that's not what I support).

But to be realized much (not all) of my vision would demand a certain intervention by the state, or something similar to a state.  And libertarianism provides the best critique of this vision.  And if I want to justify this vision, I find that overcoming, or at least addressing, this critique is essential.  In other words libertarianism, with its emphasis on individual "liberty" (variously and, in my opinion, often poorly defined), is a check on the authoritarian implications of my vision.

On some issues (the "war" on drugs, gay marriage), my vision is more or less compatible from the get-go with the received libertarian position (acknowledging that there is no one "received libertarian position").  On other issues--immigration policy, for example--I have been drawn more or less to the libertarian position, even if I strongly object to some of the arguments that are advanced in favor of that position.  (I really do think an "open-borders" policy is the most humane, and I support such a policy on the basis of what is humane, but I reject the frequent and sloganeering trope of "people just don't want to do the jobs immigrants do," which to my mind is mostly a way of rejecting out of hand many good-faith (if ultimately faulty) objections to open immigration.)

On still other issues, libertarian critiques have informed the way and degree to which I support certain policies.  In principle, I have no problem with compelling the more affluent to pay a higher income tax rate.  In practice, I realize one has to worry about the effects of a robust system of progressive taxation.  It's partly an issue of how much revenue is actually increased and how a tax structure may create or dismantle incentives to invest in the economy.  It's also partly an issue of fairness.  To the libertarian critique that income inequality is not necessarily so unfair that it demands government intervention, I am compelled to claim that the more affluent simply owe something to society in which they have benefited so much, which is a good assertion as far as it goes, but only if one already accepts the existence of an abstraction called "society" to which one can owe obligations.

Second, I'm already a strong believer in "individual liberty," even if I don't know what exactly I mean by "individual liberty" and even if I probably means something different from what libertarians mean by it.  Therefore my "vision" is largely congruent with what libertarians claim to want, even if I get to very different conclusions.  It is for that reason, for example, that I support measures for universal health care provision:  I believe that having a dependable and affordable access to health care helps make people "freer" because the cost of health care is thereby one less thing to worry about.  In practice, there are plenty of caveats and qualifications.  To wit a few:  most libertarians would like everybody to have access to affordable health care, too, even if they would have a different way of ensuring that access; there will always be a cost to any system of health care that can't simply be legislated away; the particular health care reform I support now (the ACA), may very well make things worse if it's implemented poorly and is not improved upon (assuming, of course, that the Supreme Court doesn't strike it down), and the shaky constitutional grounds on which it's predicated might very well serve as a bad precedent.

In other words, in some ways I am already a libertarian and in other ways, libertarianism offers the best critique and best check against my own policy preferences.  It is, in this sense, a sort of ideological conscience that reminds me I may not have yet found the true and only heaven.

First, do no not strut

In one of the less believable episodes of the "West Wing," a candidate for Secretary of Education is pretty much disqualified because she had been a publicity hound in her former post as a board of education director in some district.  In the name of "separation of church and state," she as director apparently had several teenagers arrested for forming a prayer group on school grounds.  Not only did she have them arrested, she made sure news cameras were on the scene to photograph her coming in to bust a prayer group.

Now, it's entirely believable that a school board director would forbid a prayer group at a public school because that's one plausible way of interpreting the injunction against the state recognizing or endorsing religion (assuming we leave aside that no school director, to my knowledge, actually forbids prayer itself).  It's much less believable that a school board director would have such students arrested.  It's even less believable to imagine that the director would be so proud of the accomplishment as to ensure the widest possible publicity.  Most school directors who I am aware of, if they didn't find some sort of compromise to permit the prayer group, would state that banning them was something required by the constitution and would probably add the words "it is regrettable that I have to take this step...."   As the chief of staff on the show, Leo McGeary tells the candidate, "these laws need to be enforced and it's good that they're enforced.  But we do not strut ever..."

Leo sums up my feelings pretty well about the disgusting internet commercial the Obama administration has put online about his decision to order the killing of Osama bin-Laden.  A version of it is here, if you want to see it.  The gist of it is that Obama is a man of courage who made the tough call to kill somebody.  As Bill Clinton says in the video, if the Navy SEALsin the mission had been killed or captured, it would have been really bad for Obama.  The commercial also takes something presumptive Republican candidate Mitt Romney supposedly said in 2007 or so that implied the US was spending too much effort trying to capture bin-Laden.  The commercial implies from this statement that Romney is weak and wouldn't have made the "courageous decision" to order the killing of someone.

Some criticism has been leveled at this commercial for Clinton's statement that if something had happened to the SEALs, things would have been bad for Obama without really pointing out that it would have been worse for the SEALs.  One might in fact make the same criticism of Obama's recent state of the union address, where he discusses  how "we"--he and his administration and the military--worked together to kill the terrorist.

That criticism is just.  I won't focus on it other than to say that the stakes for Obama were much lesser than those for the SEALs.  At worst, his ratings would have gone down in the polls, been seen as ineffective or even reckless (Clinton in fact hints at this, albeit unwittingly, when he suggests that Obama made the decision on imperfect intelligence about the compound in which Osama bin-Laden was hiding).  I suspect that even this outcome would not have been bad for Obama:  for all we know Obama and his predecessor ordered similar attacks in Afghanistan that failed and came up fruitless, and the resulting casualties attributed to some military operation.  Obviously, a similar operation in Pakistan borders was perhaps more (politically) gutsy.  But a failure, I hazard, would have been written off, if reported at all, as an "attempt to protect the Pakistani people from a suspected terrorist compound."

But I want to focus instead on the commercial's unabashed celebration--its rejoicing--of killing someone.  The same man whose image looking out into the future in a message of hope is now the man who has taken the brave action and with the military is making us safer in our war against Eurasia or Eastasia I forget which.  They are both essentially the same image, one benevolent and one triumphant, our hero-in-chief to whom we owe loyalty.  Or maybe we owe loyalty to the state, or maybe he is the state, I'm not sure it matters.  His opponent--assuming he actually made the statement attributed to him and assuming the statement isn't taken out of context--wasn't speaking about the proper allocation of limited resources, but is weak because he would not have ordered the killing.

Democrats, or at least the leadership of the party, respond to criticisms about the ad with what is essentially a tu quoque:  the Republicans would do it, too, and they have done it.  Apparently, if one person does something, it's bad.  If two or more do it, it's less bad.  If at least one of the two is from an opposing political party, it's good. 

It's not only tu quoque's, however.  Look at Senator Dick Durbin's statement on the ad [click here, his statement is at around the 10 minute mark]:  "Do you know how many elections Democrats have been on the defensive when it comes to national security?....whether we're tough enough to keep America safe?"  It seems to me the Democrats are still on the defensive:  if you have to respond to criticisms with "we've been on the defensive" for too long, then you're still on the defensive.

The era of the polite Democrats is over:  they can now give tit-for-tat what the Republicans give:  no more a victim of FOX news and Karl Rove:  they can start wars and order killings like the best of them.  Not that they didn't do so before, but never mind.

A few months ago--I don't have the link--Jason Kuznicki at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen criticized Obama's use of militaristic language in the state of the union.  He said that the language was "the very essence of fascism."  I thought that was laying it on a bit thick.  That's what I thought then.

Look, Obama had limited options.  If I were president, I might very well have ordered the killing or regretted not doing so.  That's what presidents do.  It was the best to be done in a series of bad things that had to be done to address a chain of events caused by the person who had to be killed.  I get it.

But I would hope that I could keep enough of my humanity to say that it's regrettable that it has come to this, to say that given the circumstances, there was nothing else to do but take this human life. 

Ultimately irrelevant reasons I'm not a libertarian

One of these days I plan to explore some of the fundamental assumptions of what I understand libertarianism to be and, staying faithful to those assumptions, explain I am not a libertarian.  However, today is not one of those days.

Instead, I'm going to list some of the side reasons I'm not a libertarian.  By "side reasons," I mean things that libertarians tend to do or say, or things that people, some of whom are libertarians and some of whom are not, associate with libertarians and libertarianism.  Almost by definition, these second-order reasons are at least partially unfair to the many good-faith libertarians I've met online and on some occasions in person.  These reasons are unfair in at least two ways:  First, they involve foibles that are common probably to almost any people who try to adhere to a system of thought or who identify with a political orientation.  Second, they involve things that libertarians have little control over.

Yet I do offer these as items that make it difficult for me to sign on as a "libertarian," no matter how closely I buy into some of the assumptions of libertarianism, properly understood.

First, the "ism" of libertarianism bothers me.  I have in the past subscribed to certain ism's, or at least watered-down versions of those ism's.  There was a time, for example, when I identified closely with Marxism, or what I understood Marxism to be.  There was another time when I identified closely with what I now consider to be evangelical Christianity, with "New Right" social conservatism, and a neo-con quasi-messianic foreign policy of the sort that would later be so evident in the drumbeat for war in Iraq.  (I'll acknowledge that those three views were not logically consistent, but hey, I was pretty young at the time.)

I'm wary of making the same mistakes again, of embracing a way of seeing the world that organizes it so neatly on some fundamental,  a priori, principles.  I do not mean this as a jibe against the libertarians I have met, or at least not against most of them:  most of them adopt a spirit of charitable discussion with people who disagree with them or see things differently, and they often go more than halfway.  I also realize that libertarianism is not a well organized ism in the same way that Marxism can be.  But I'm wary of (re)becoming a zealous convert.

Second, some libertarians are overfond of using "liberty" in an almost question-begging way that strikes me as dishonest.  I really do mean "some" and not "all."  I'm referring specifically to invocations of the word "liberty" when there are competing notions of what liberty is.  If someone is for "liberty" and who in their right mind would be against "liberty"?  Now, perhaps a precise reckoning of "liberty" jives pretty well with a libertarian understanding of the word.  In fact, according to dictionary dot com, the first four definitions of "liberty" refer to freedom from some kind of (usually state-imposed) interference, which appears to me close to what most libertarians mean.  But it can't escape them that in everyday speech, we often use the word "liberty" more broadly to mean something like "freedom" in general, and people have different conceptions of "freedom."  Some examples:  doing whatever one wants; living according to one's reason independent of one's "passions"; living with the knowledge that society will provide a minimal amount of material support (healthcare, affordable housing, etc.).

To simply say "I support liberty" is to elide all those meanings and put one's interlocutor on the defensive.  Some examples of this use:

From libertarianism dot org [emphases in original]:

Liberty. It’s a simple idea, but it’s also the linchpin of a complex system of values and practices: justice, prosperity, responsibility, toleration, cooperation, and peace. Many people believe that liberty is the core political value of modern civilization itself, the one that gives substance and form to all the other values of social life. They’re called libertarians.

From Timothy Sandefur of the Pacific Legal Foundation [this quotation is from a series of posts he wrote fort he Volokh Conspiracy, the link is provided in the original, the emphasis in bold is my own]:

In Minnesota a few years ago, the Midwest Oil company charged customers less than cost at its four Minneapolis area gas stations. I don’t know why — seems like a foolish idea to me, but they have the right to sell their gas for whatever they want. (That’s called “liberty.”) Certainly there was no likelihood that this four-station chain would come to monopolize gasoline sales in Minneapolis, which is full of Shells and Mobils. Still, other gas stations (not consumers, of course) complained, and Midwest Oil was assessed a heavy fine.

Now, the point he is making is certainly a good one to consider, and it's one I'm particularly interested in because of my interest in the antitrust movement.  His conception of liberty is also serviceable.  But it's preachy.  The way he uses it here and in his other posts assumes that his notion of liberty is something that need not be proven, only asserted.

A few concessions and qualifications are in order.  My problem is when people use the freestanding word "liberty."  I have much less of a problem when people qualify it--for example, by saying "economic liberty."  I also acknowledge it is unfair for me to attack what is essentially a rhetorical style--take up a loaded word ("liberty") and use it in a larger argument that either stands or falls on its own merits--as the substance tout court of the argument.  I also acknowledge that many of the offenders do elsewhere make clear which notion of "liberty" they are invoking, and it's probably unfair for me to require them to redefine and remind me, the reader, each and every time they use the term.  Finally, not all libertarians are so clumsy with their use of the word.

Still, I'm dealing in "side reasons."  Invoking "liberty" so clumsily is a noise-making drive-by argument that turns off people who might otherwise be willing to listen.    It's naive pedantry for me to insist that people elucidate the assumptions behind a key word every single time they use it, but sometimes a word can become a crutch--in the event the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the health insurance law, I can hear even now some libertarians or people who claim to be libertarians say "This is a great advance for liberty."--and if libertarians wish to gain converts, they might wish to reconsider how they mark their key concept.


Third, libertarianism is too associated with conservatism, even the non-libertarian social conservatism and militaristic conservatism.  Probably at least since the New Deal, some movement closely allied with the Republican party and what one might call nascent conservatism used rhetoric of what we might today call libertarianism.  I'm thinking of the "Liberty League" that campaigned (and failed) against F.D.R. in the mid 1930s, particularly the 1936 presidential election.  Over the years, something that might be called "libertarianism" or a libertarian streak allied itself with the GOP, as instantiated in, for example, Barry Goldwater's "extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice" quip in 1964, Ronald Reagan's famous admonition that government is not the solution to our problems, but that government is the problem, and the various efforts by the GOP to claim the policies of Chicago school economists as their own.

Now, I have performed a sleight of hand here and elided some key concerns.  Just because the Liberty League called itself the "LIBERTY League," that doesn't mean that all or much of what it supported was properly libertarian, nor does it mean that there weren't good reasons to oppose at least parts of the New Deal.  If people are out of work and starving, for example, did we really need a policy aimed at increasing the price of food?  If people agree that a surfeit of competition is what bedevils the economy, a claim that is at least debatable, is it necessarily a good thing to have a cartel system, operating under rules set by the president with minimal Congressional oversight and enforced by criminal penalties?

Moreover,in the mid-twentieth century, someone who liked "liberty" in the way libertarians seem to define it would have a good case for allying with the GOP.  The Democratic Party was the haven of Jim Crow politicians.  Both parties were complicit in the formation of the national security state that has eroded civil liberties, but it was  Harry Truman, a Democrat, who presided over what were arguably the crucial first steps in that direction.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a case was to be made that some regulations were onerous and some policies were downright unjust, and the GOP under Reagan lent some moral support to this position even though the Democratic party also adopted it, even before the days of the Democratic Leadership Council.  (For example, Carter's deregulation of the airline industry (sometimes wrongly attributed to Reagan) set in motion a process that led to cheaper air fares (although some have raised concern about the implications for the safety of air travel).

It's probably true that the GOP / libertarian alliance was more equivocal than not.  The War on Drugs--variously attributed to Nixon and Reagan even if presidents of both parties have pursued it since the 1970s--led arguably to the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of citizens (and resulting social costs) whose primary crime was acting on the desire to get high and led (perhaps more arguably, but the causal chain seems at least reasonable) to extra-statist cartels ("gangs") that used violence to control their competitors.  Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative and his increases in military spending generally--again, the increased spending represented a process initiated by Carter, but Reagan appears to have pursued it more vigorously--may have helped hasten the demise of the Soviet Union (something libertarians might sign on to), but it was also a boon to rent-seeking weapons manufacturers, the National Administration for Space-scientists' Alms, and the national-security state generally.

These qualifications aside--and add to them those libertarians who have been vociferous critics of Republicans as well as Democrats--it is still probably the case that in 2012, to identify oneself as a "libertarian" is to identify oneself as someone who supports the GOP for more than strategic purposes.  (A strategic purpose in this case might be, for example, a wish for divided government, or a preference for a non-ideologue managerial president who was instrumental in coming up with the template for the current health insurance law over a more ideological president who signed a very similar law.)

My linking of libertarians with the GOP, despite some of the historical linkages and the ronpaulian racism and homophobia that a disturbing number of libertarians tolerate even if they disapprove, is unfair.  Many of the libertarians I have met online have been very careful to define the terms of their libertarianism.  It's not their fault that others adopt the term for partisan advantage, and it's probably not fair to ask them to conjure up another name any more than it would be fair to demand that I use another word for my liberalism (say, petrocornellianism?) which differs from what most people seem to call liberalism today.  Still, the linkage is there, and to aver libertarianism without the GOP baggage is hard; and it's something that turns me off.

Fourth:  I'm suspicious of whose interests are served by libertarianism.

Libertarians seem to believe, with much reason, that libertarianism benefits all and has special promise for the most oppressed and disfranchised among us.  That belief inspires such libertarian-inspired sites as the Moorfield Storey Blog, and Bleeding Heart Libertarians.  I buy this claim to a large degree.  Aggressive enforcement of civil rights by the federal government, for example, can be argued to be "libertarian" without much of a stretch, although I will leave aside the point that the 1964 Civil Rights Act outlaws some arguably private activity that a freedom of conscious loving libertarians would want to defend, not necessarily out of agreement but as a matter of principle, against state intervention.

I too think that some libertarian projects may benefit those who suffer most from state repression.  Curtailing the war on drugs would curtail a policy that functions as a way to target and incarcerate poor people, with an emphasis on persons of color.  Even something as simple (or apparently simple) as zoning requirements might hurt the least affluent people.  I suspect that one of the many factors that contribute to the food-desert phenomenon in the poorer neighborhoods of Chicago, for example, is the fact that a large retailer like Walmart has to go through special negotiations--that sometimes last years--with the city council and with dues-seeking unions to open one store.  All the while we hear the plaints of alderpersons who are concerned about the "small businesses" that, if they really exist, must charge high prices (because of tight margins and, probably, bribes to alderpersons) to those least capable of paying them.  Walmart, of course, is not the simple solution some claim it is.  But I would suggest a less restrictive, or at least more standardized, zoning or licensing practice might encourage competitors to Walmart; as it is, it appears one needs to have the resources of a Walmart to negotiate with the city for the privilege of going into business without the support of a local alderperson.  There are probably other advantages of libertarian-ish policies for the less affluent and otherwise less advantaged members of society aside:  one that comes to mind is less restrictive immigration policies, which would probably counteract some of the extortionate power that employers of undocumented labor now enjoy.

Leaving these (probably very real) benefits aside, however, it seems that those who stand most to benefit from a generalized libertarian program are, unsurprisingly, those most in a position to take advantage of them.  Some specific disadvantaged people might support one or two libertarian policies:  for example, an undocumented worker might support less restrictive immigration policies; or someone from a service-deficient neighborhood might want it to be easier for a Walmart to open shop.  But in general, the range of policies promoted by libertarians seems, as a generalized program, to benefit most those who have the most, or who have the types of marketable skills, or aptitudes for such skills, that would benefit them most in a very libertarian polity.

I am being deliberately vague (as opposed, I guess, to "being spuriously vague") about which policies I'm referring to.   I am mostly describing my sense of a lot of the policy preferences of libertarians.  A political-economy, for example, that arranges its incentives so as to permit  the right to pursue a lawful calling best benefits those whose lawful calling commands the higher wages.  This doesn't mean that others don't benefit.  It's probably a positive good all around; and rising tides lift even tugboats.

At basis, this particular "side reason" is a spiteful ad hominem.  Yet I confess it gives me pause.

Fifth, the Koch brothers vs. Cato imbroglio.

As some of my readers may know, the Koch brothers have initiated a lawsuit to try to gain more control over the Cato institute, which they either founded or played a strong role in funding.  That suit began a couple months ago, and I don't know its status.  One of the reasons why this is all a turnoff is the way some of my online libertarian acquaintances have reacted to it.

Before the lawsuit, at least some of them vigorously defended the Koch brothers, simply as people who promoted some libertarian policies and who were unfairly being vilified for participating in the public sphere.  Now, some of these same libertarians are (probably justly) denouncing the Kochs' lawsuit as an attempt to destroy or bring under a conservative (non-libertarian) fold, what is / was a bona fide libertarian think-tank.

I don't know all the in's and out's of the Cato-Koch suit, and I still know too little about Cato to speak intelligently on it as a think-tank (although what I've read of Jason Kuznicki's writings on marriage give me reason to think favorably of it as a serious, good-faith intellectual endeavor).  On some level, there's something that smells bad here:  as recently as a 18 months ago, the Kochs were all right with their conservative program as long as they were nominally libertarians, and now they're almost evil because they have declared war against real libertarians.

My charge here is rank ad hominemism.  Petty--or even not so petty--legal squabbles like the Koch-Cato suit mean nothing for the efficacy of libertarian policies or the rightness of libertarianism.  Similar squabbles can happen and have happened among any combination of interests, libertarian or not.  I should know better than to base my approval or disapproval on a dispute that could happen between any two interests.

In fact, I should know better than to base any objection to libertarianism on what I call the "side reasons" I mention above.  I recognize their irrelevance.  Still, I confess that they play a part in my reluctance to identify as a libertarian.

The constitution and me

The US Supreme Court seems poised to strike down the individual mandate, a key provision of Obama's Health Insurance Reform, or ACA.  I personally find implausible the argument that the other key provisions ought to stand if the mandate is struck down.  It's not only the absence of a severability clause, a clause which I understand the Court usually takes only as "advisory."  (I base this claim on Kevin Walsh's statement that "A legislature may try to control the severability determination with a severability or inseverability clause, but under current doctrine such clauses are neither necessary nor sufficient to control the judicial determination of severability."  Click here to see his article.)

Whether the other provisions are maintained or not, I find it very likely that they would be practically unenforceable:  it would not surprise me in the least that insurers could find some loophole where they would essentially practice as before, just not under the name of "insurer," or where they might be able to charge, say, an "insurance verification fee" to people with pre-existing conditions, so that, for instance, such people's premiums would be quite low, but they might have to pay a monthly fee of thousands of dollars.  I'm not saying this will happen, only that something like it is a distinct possibility.

I do not share, in other words, the optimism of other ACA supporters that striking down only the mandate would lead insurance companies to come begging for some sort of public option or would lead politicians from all sides of the aisle to come together to save universal health care.

Never before have I been so emotionally invested in what the Supreme Court decides.  In part, this investment comes from the fact that I know at least a few people who, if they lost their jobs and exhausted their COBRA insurance, would be uninsurable.  I've also had so many jobs that don't offer insurance that I find the platitude "well, they just need to work and be responsible" to be an unconvincing solution to the question of their access to health care.

It's not that I didn't care what the Court decides on other issues.  I did and do care what the Court said in Citizens United, Raich v. Gonzales, Heller, McDonald v. Chicago, Lopez v. US, Lawrence v. Texas, Boumedine, Bush v. Gore, Kelo, and Romer v. Evans, to name a few.  They simply seemed to me academic explorations, like reading a history textbook in real time, even though I know and care for people who are conceivably affected by some of these decisions, in particular Lawrence and Romer. 

I'd look at these decisions from on high and sometimes was at least inwardly critical of those who complained about them.  Bush v. Gore is illustrative here.  It may have been a crappy, poorly argued decision--I actually have not read it--but I had, and still have, a bit of sneering distaste for those whose main criticism seems to be that the Court made a decision at all, not that it made the wrong decision or that it justified its decision poorly.  "Don't they understand," I say to myself, "that in different circumstances and with a different outcome they would be cheering the Court's decision as the triumph of participatory democracy?"  Similar was my reaction to a baptist minister I knew--he was the father of a close friend of mine--who complained bitterly about Romer v. Evans but would have praised it highly if two justices had voted differently.

Now I have a better, that is, more empathetic, view of the frustrations.  In my more bitter moments I'm inclined to sneer, for example,  that Scalia--who acceded, if only reluctantly, to an expansive view of Congress's power to regulate growing medical marijuana for one's own use--should now be, so it appears, so insistent that Congress's power shall not be so expansive when it comes to ensuring access to medical care.

In my less bitter moments, however, I realize my sneer is poorly reasoned.  I see a distinction between the exercise of commerce clause power in Raich and that claimed in the ACA case.  The mandate, I believe, is truly unprecedented and is at least arguably unconstitutional by most good-faith readings of the Constitution.  I even so believed as early as December 2009, before the ACA had been passed and before a strong legal movement had begun to argue against the mandate's constitutionality.  (I'm not necessarily claiming I came up with this belief on my own....it's possible I had read others, say at the Volokh Conspiracy, who might have raised the objections that early.  I simply don't remember how I came to that conclusion.)  I also believe that supporting something which however just in other respects goes against a good-faith reading of the Constitution creates the precedent for less just seizures of power and violations of civil liberties and other rights.  It's no defense for me to say that the civil liberties have already eroded and that therefore we might as well enact something good.

Moreover, the ACA is not an unqualified good.  It's a gamble.  Even I can see that.  The mandate also strikes me, and has stricken me for quite a while, as a bit too much of an "x factor," by which I mean it represents some simplistic and probably specious reasoning:  just throw almost everybody into the insurance pool and that will somehow be enough to take care of costs, or at least premium prices.  I concede that the ACA, even if it works in a way that I would call "successful,"  will probably increase the price of premiums for at least a majority of Americans and not only the vilified 1 per centers.  In my view, if the increase is moderate and if thereby poorer people can have access to more affordable health care when they get sick, then the law will have been a success.

I supported and continue to support the ACA because I think it is the best option that is likely to be enacted.  It may be true that a single-payer system might work better or that a truly market-oriented insurance system, with due care taken to treat "uninsurable" people and the very poor might be better.  But I don't see the first as happening, and a single-payer system, or even a "robust public option," would have its own problems that cannot be legislated away simply by Congressional decree.

And whatever the virtues of the market approach, the version that would likely be passed would probably not end the employer tax exemptions for insurance, and the "market" reforms would be limited to a few additional tax breaks and some optional pilot programs that only a handful of states would try for a few years before abandoning.  The version would the status quo ante ACA that would entrench the prior system, albeit with a few gestures to subsidizing poorer people.  (I don't mean this as a jab against the market idea, only that I suspect it couldn't be enacted robustly enough to work.)

So here I am.  I continue to hope that the ACA will be sustained, but I realize that it would be folly to claim that sustaining it would be a cure-all or that invalidating it would be an unalloyed bad thing.

Abdicating the Ms./r.(s)

I've been an occasional commenter on others' blogs for at least 3 years or so, and until very recently, I have usually insisted on using "Mr." or "Ms." whenever I knew the last name.  I have, in the last month or two, started using first names almost all the time.  It's much less supercilious to use first names, and when I use last names, I think I usually come off as cloying and saccharine.  It also takes longer to write "Mr./Ms. so-and-so," especially because a large number of last names are either longer or the same length as the first names, and so adding the "Mr." or "Ms." simply requires more writing than I want to do. 

I think I used the last names because I thought it was a way of engaging people politely and respectfully.  I still use last names with people I don't know.  And I use them with some professors:  as a general rule, I like to call my professors "Mr." or "Ms." instead of "Dr." because as far as I'm concerned someone with a PHD in history is no doctor.  (Doctors are people who take care of your health and prescribe medication.  By that standard, I call my nurse practitioner "Dr." and I would call her that even if she didn't have a PHD in public health in addition to her nursing degree.)  I still relent when I talk to a professor who seems like he (usually it's a he who this applies to) might be exceptionally sensitive to being called anything other than "Dr."  Of course, there are a lot of professors I call by their first names, and most of these are those who are so known by their first name in the department that it seems ridiculous to call them "Mr." or "Ms."

I think I got my preference for using last names when I was a bank teller.  We were encouraged to call each of our customers by name.  I don't know if we were also encouraged to call them by their first name, too, but that was the standard practice.  Most of my customers were older than I (I was about 23 or 24 at the time), and I found it ridiculous to call people by their first names when I knew them only because I cashed their checks or accepted their deposits.  So that's when I developed a policy of calling people "Mr." or "Ms."

Anyway, it doesn't seem to work with blogging.  So I've been going back to first names.

At the borders of three social classes

Jason Kuzinicki, at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, links to a quiz [click here to read it, it's part of a sample of book by Charles Murray] that purports to show--or at least explore--how much the quiz-taker is in touch with "the common person."  The lower the score, the less "in touch" one is.  On a scale of 0 to 100, here are what the scores mean (hint:  the points overlap):

• 48-99 points:   A lifelong resident of a working-class neighborhood with average television and movie going habits
• 42-100 points:  A first- generation middle-class person with working-class parents and average television and movie going habits
• 11-80:  A first- generation upper-middle- class person with middle-class parents.
• 0-43:  A second- generation (or more) upper-middle-class person who has made a point of getting out a lot.

I scored a 33, which places me pretty solidly in the "middle class" and potentially in the "upper-middle class."  Now, since we live in a small-d democratic age, it's considered poor form not to have empathetic ties to something called the "middle class" or lower, and I could point out to certain assumptions inherent in that quiz that might serve more to stereotype working-class people than to illuminate affective class differences [I really do mean "affective" and not "effective"].  I won't dwell on those, except to say that I purposely biased my answers to make my score lower.  For example,

• I answered "no" to the question that asked whether I knew anyone in school who, no matter how hard they tried, couldn't get passing grades.  (First, note the assumption that working people not only don't get passing grades, but cannot get them.)  Now, one of my best friends in high school got very poor grades--I won't say he never got passing grades, but mostly they were very poor--and he ended up dropping out and joining the Navy (I think the navy at the time had a requirement that new recruits be at least high school graduates, but somehow he got around that).  I answered "no" to the question because my friend was (and is) quite intelligent, and probably could have gotten very good grades if he had known how, or had the will to, apply himself.  In fact, I hear that he has since gone to school and become a radiologist.
• I answered "no" to the question "do you have a close with whom you have strong and wide ranging political disagreements" even though I disagree profoundly with the kind of liberalism most of my friends espouse.  I answered "no" because I am probably coming from the same spectrum as they:  like them, I do not support the Republican party and probably will not unless the party makes some pretty radical changes in the constituency it tolerates.  (But unlike (a lot of) them, I don't think that party or Republicans in general are evil incarnate, it's just that the party is at a place that I cannot support it in good conscience.)
• When the quiz presented a list of movies and asked if I had ever seen them, I almost said "yes" because "True Grit" was on the list.  But then I realized the question was referring to the remake of the John Wayne classic and not the John Wayne classic itself, which my father watched, along with several other Wayne movies, almost whenever they were on television.
• I said "no" when the quiz asked if I had ever been to a union local meeting because I don't think the Graduate Employees Organization I belong to necessarily qualifies as a union local in the sense that Murray intended it.
• I said "no" when the quiz asked if I ever had a job where I hurt when I got off work.  Fortunately, my jobs have never really caused chronic pain, and aside from grease burns and small cuts and sometimes aching muscles , I've never been injured on any job.  Still, I have had jobs that were physically exhausting, but I didn't think that counted.

I biased my answers because it was as clear as day the point the quiz was aiming at, and I didn't want to claim an affinity to working-class or less-affluent-class culture that I didn't deserve.

Now, as for the score itself, which places me as a "first generation" upper-middle class person with "middle-class" parents or as a second generation or more upper-middle-class person:  it's counter-intuitive in one way but very accurate in another.

It's counter-intuitive because it's probably fair to say that my family is working class and to some degree my upbringing was working class.  My father was an electrician (a member of IBEW).  My mother has worked a variety of office jobs in what some analysts would call the "pink collar" sector, a term that I personally find condescending but that underscores and underlying truth about the way some jobs are coded as "women's work":  for example, she worked as some sort of information processer for an insurance company (this was before I was born), and while I was in school, she worked as a teachers aid for a local elementary school (although not the one I attended).  For a long time, if I understand correctly, she was also a homemaker without a waged job, and took care of my siblings when they were young.

Most of the rest of my family is probably at least arguably working class, too.  One of my brothers is also an electrician, although for a while he was a project manager for a company and for another while he tried to run his own electricians business (so maybe that history excludes him).  Another brother is a truck driver.  Another is in law enforcement (a profession that while perhaps not "working class" in terms of its members' relation to the "means of production" but which I think most people would identify as a "working-class" job).  Both of my sisters have had a variety of waged jobs in retail and other locations, although now one is running her own business (she finds furniture in the alley, refurbishes it, and sells it) while the other now has a job that might qualify to some people as "middle class."  I'm not sure I understand what she does, but as I understand it, it requires a lot of detailed oriented work and skill, and while some might consider it "middle class," I'd say it is working class at least in the sense that the job is waged labor and that its employees are subject to downsizing threats (she recently faced the prospect of a layoff, but fortunately has been kept on).


My siblings' spouses, too, tend to have working-class jobs.  One worked in a nursing home and had her own housecleaning business for a while (i.e., she cleaned people's houses for pay; she wasn't a labor-farmer who contracted out the work of others).  Another has worked various retail jobs and for while had a small cake-making business (it was of such a size that I'd say it was less entrepreneurial and more "working-class," but I can see how one might see it as "middle-class," at least in the petit bourgeois sense).  Another also works in law enforcement.  One, however, has a job in middle-management--and the upper-echelons of middle management, at that--of a very large, national corporation, so that her actual job is probably "middle class" by most standards, even though her own background is quite working class.


My working-class background therefore makes my low score seem counter-intuitive.  Yet, it's more than it might seem given only the background I just noted.  Before I go on, I should acknowledge a few things.  First, most people have a very broad definition of what counts as "middle class."  They seem to want it to mean something like "everyday people who are neither super-rich or super-poor."  (In my less charitable moments, I sometimes think certain people use it to mean "that huge, inchoate mass of people who are not part of the undeserving rich or the undeserving poor, with 'undeserving' being defined as 'someone whom I look down on for being poor or whom I dislike for having more than I have'.")  I personally would prefer a more precise definition, preferably one that stresses a combination of affluence, the ways one earns one's living, and the way one self-identifies as a "class."  It is probably a mistake, however, to impose my conception of class on others.  So, I'll just acknowledge that most people do not mean "middle class" and "working class" as mutually exclusive. 

The real point to Charles Murray's quiz--and, I presume, the book it's extracted from--is not to conjure up a new, theoretically fine schema of class distinctions.  Rather, he is trying to ask the reader to assess how he or she might fit in a spectrum between elite and non-elite.  And now, following what appears to be the spirit of his quiz, I'll explore how my relatively low score has some merit.


First, although I was raised "working class," my upbringing reflected a lot of affluence.  I imagine my parents had a lot less money when they raised my siblings, who are significantly older than I, and they probably had to scrimp and save.  But by the time I came around, I was pretty much the only one they had to take care of, so the proceeds of that scrimping and saving often went to me.  As I child, I was never concerned about whether I would have food or clothing or a place to live; and if my parents worried about such things, I never knew about it.  I may have worn hand-me-downs, but if I did, wearing them didn't bother me, and my clothes were always in good repair, and don't remember ever being self-conscious that I would be made fun of for the quality of my clothes.

Second, my parents were quite avid readers.  They didn't necessarily like much of what most people with a formal education might place onto the canon of what people must read to be educated, but I grew up with the habit of reading.  (And my father read quite complicated stuff, primers on metallurgy and whatnot, that boggled my mind.)  This propensity for reading in itself is not necessarily a marker of "elitism," but it did mean I grew up in an environment in which I would realize whatever aptitude I had for book learning.  My mother got an old set of "World Book" encyclopedias, and I used to just browse them, reading whatever articles seemed interesting to me.  There were counter-currents, too:  my parents were upset that I wasn't into playing  sports (for two years I played little league and hated it), and I think my father was disappointed that I was either unwilling to or lacked the knowledge to defend myself against bullies.  (To be fair, I should say I was not always the hapless victim, and I sometimes provoked the bullies more than my parents or school officials caught on, and in some cases, I was a bully too).  But overall, my scholastic aptitude was at least tolerated, and usually encouraged.

Third, I didn't have to work in high school and probably didn't have to work in college.  Now, I did have jobs.  With one major exception, my freshman year in College, from the end of my sophomore year in high school through the end of my senior year in college, I had a job at one of two fast food jobs.  (In college, I worked one job at school, in Fort Collins, during the school year, and another job in Denver during summer and Christmas breaks.)  Now, those jobs helped me in many ways:  I saved money, gained working experience that gave me an entree to other jobs after I got my BA, and I met people who I might never have otherwise met or socialized with.

But I didn't have to work.  In high school, my parents didn't expect me to contribute to rent or to my upbringing.  My tastes were pretty tame, and they might have outright given me an allowance if I had asked for one.  In college, working was necessary to offset having to take out loans, and I was fortunate to have scholarship that paid for most of my tuition, leaving me to cover only living expenses.  Yet, there were three points.  First, during Christmas and summer breaks, I stayed at my parents' house, rent free.  Second, I knew that if things got really bad, I could ask my parents for help and that I would probably get it.  Third, taking out student loans was always an option:  it was easy and partially subsidized credit that was available to me.  I'm not saying there aren't problems with the student loan system and that there is no exploitation in the way the system operates, but it is a resource provided at taxpayer expense, and it was open to me.

Fourth, I had the chance to go to graduate school.  And that process acquainted me with people whose tastes definitely put them on the elite side of Murray's spectrum.  I remember that in my MA program, I knew at least two people who had grown up with a maid in the house, and two people whose fathers were Harvard professors.  In both my MA and PHD programs, I encountered that strange creature I'll call the "PLACA," or the private liberal arts college alumnus/-a.  Almost all of these PLACA's, most of the time, have been almost nothing but nice to me and treated me almost as if I were one of their own and thereby gave me the social and cultural capital I might need to negotiate the rough waters of professionalism and middleclassness.

As my fourth example suggests (in what I hope is taken as a gentle, tongue-in-cheek nudge and not as a declaration of class war against my friends who graduated from private liberal arts colleges, not all of whom were from affluent backgrounds...I know one professor at such a college who said many of his students can't even buy books until their student loans come through), I think there are limits to my membership in the elite.  Among my friends in academia, I usually feel self-conscious....not necessarily "inferior," but very aware that I went to a state school and that neither of my parents went to college.  I of course knew and know other people in grad school who have more challenging backgrounds than mine ever was, so I risk claiming too much.

But I remember feeling a sense of alienation, jealousy, and envy when, as a MA student in Colorado who had never ridden an airplane, I heard people mention quite casually that they had friends in some part of the country (San Francisco, Georgetown, Chicago, New York City) and they might go visit them this weekend.  I remember a similar feeling when my classmates criticized Coloradans as provincial hicks (at least, that was my interpretation of a lot of what they said....I freely admit 1) that I placed a certain chip on my shoulder and purposely over-interpreted what were innocuous statements and, probably, expressions of homesickness for wherever it is my friends came from and 2) that I can be just as prone as the next guy to regional bigotries.)

Even now, when I ought to know better, I think to myself as a non-elite person in an elite sea.  For example, I find NPR annoyingly condescending, even to the point of getting angry when I hear someone listening to "All Things Considered" on the radio, even though I know I'm in the wrong there.  I take certain statements that were not intended as insulting or as slights and interpret them as a remark against the class I allegedly came from.  This may be one reason why I get very offended, very fast, when I hear people, especially professional, well-educated people, criticize evangelical Christians as if the latter were just some barbarous lumpen who can't be spoken at.  (I used to self-identify, kind of, as an evangelical Christian, even though I was raised Catholic and never formally disavowed Catholicism until I became an agnostic, but that's story for another day....)

I do feel then, rightly or wrongly, that I'm on the border of something called "working class" and something called "middle class."  I say this even as I realize the immense privileges I have enjoyed throughout my life, and they are more than I listed above, too.  I say this even as I realize that some people who I consider more solidly in the middle class and who I know personally had or have even fewer resources than I am accustomed to.

Yet my low score on the quiz suggests that not only am I in the "middle class," but I'm also at the cusp of the "upper class."  And in some ways I am.  I know a few people who qualify (in my book, at least):  the rentier capitalists who do worthwhile jobs and run their own charities, but who when push comes to shove would probably call in the army to protect their wealth.  I say this not as a judgment and not solely as a statement of envy:  these people seem unhappy, and if their wealth and status is not the cause of their unhappiness, it doesn't appear to help them.

I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from all this.  Perhaps "class" as a construct is clumsy, too clumsy to make valid generalizations from.  All I can really say is that I should be wary before I claim some sort of affective understanding or "authenticity" based on my background.