I recently recommended this quiz in response to William Randolph’s post on political labels, and the scores I got when I retook it just now were essentially the same as the ones I ended up with a few months back: I’m a social moderate (6/10 on that scale) / capitalist purist (1/10) / libertarian (0/10) / pacifist (1/10), and a “hardcore libertarian” overall, which seems pretty accurate though is naturally a less than perfect picture in a bunch of ways. Below the fold I’m going to list my answers and give a brief explanation of each – before you look, though, why not take the quiz yourself and report on how you scored? I’d be interested to see where my readers lie along the spectrum.
My answers, together with a brief explanation of each, are below:
1. Are our gun control laws too strict? Yes. In at least some places, I’m sure that they are, especially given what I take to be the scarcity of evidence showing that strict gun laws do much for public safety.
2. Should gay marriage be legalized? Maybe/Don’t care. I’ve laid out my stance on gay marriage here and will be revisiting that argument soon at C11; the basic moral is that while I think that there are good reasons to want to restrict the title of “marriage” to heterosexual couples, I’m not at all sure that the harmful consequences of such restrictions don’t outweigh the principled considerations that support them. In a different political climate, or a culture where there were ways to refer to committed homosexual couples without trading on hollow legalisms like “civil unions”, I’d feel differently.
3. Should we consider invading Iran? No. I mean, if they bomb us then we should consider doing something about it, but short of that we should leave them alone. Diplomacy!
4. Should intelligent design be taught in public schools alongside evolution? No. Though that doesn’t mean I think that state or federal governments should muck around with local school boards’ autonomy. I’m actually mildly sympathetic to including stuff like ID if philosophy courses were taught in public schools, but it isn’t science and doesn’t deserve to be treated as such.
5. Does the US need a system of universal health care? No. We certainly don’t need it, though that doesn’t mean it’s not the best feasible option. This is one of those issues where I have trouble getting all that excited.
6. Should marijuana be legalized? Yes. That one’s easy.
7. Should we repeal [or substantially change] the Patriot Act? Yes. See #6, above.
8. Does the US have a right to stop countries we don’t like from getting weapons? No. Of course not, especially given that one of the primary reasons they might want weapons is their awareness that we don’t like them. Diplomacy!
9. Should we end (or reduce the use of) the death penalty? Yes. Absolutely. Even if it’s justifiable in some circumstances, our criminal justice (or “justice”) system has far too many holes in it for us to be executing people.
10. Should there be a higher minimum wage? No. Should there be any minimum wage? No.
11. Does affirmative action do more harm than good? Yes. Or at least, it very well may, and the fact that there are serious empirical disputes over its consequences suggests to me that the arguments against it on principle should carry the day.
12. Is the United States spending too much on defense? Yes. See #’s 6 and 7, above.
13. Should stem cell research be funded by the government? No. I take it the survey means to pick out embryonic stem cell research, in which case I don’t think the government has the right to spend taxpayer dollars on something that so many people (myself included) find so morally troubling.
14. Should flag burning be legal? Yes. Is there really a controversy about this?
15. Should all people (rich and poor) pay fewer taxes? Yes. Though I do think that cutting spending (for a start, see #12 above) should be a prerequisite for reducing taxes. I’d support a mild, across-the-board consumption tax that was offset for poorer individuals by a negative income tax, an elimination of the payroll tax, and a cap on the highest tax rate at 33%. (I think that everyone should be able to keep at least twice as much as the government takes.) Oh, and I really don’t like the estate tax.
16. Should the US begin withdrawing from Iraq? Yes. Like, now.
17. Is it sometimes justified to wiretap US citizens without a warrant? No. See #’s 6, 7, and 12, above.
18. Should the government be involved in reducing the amount of violence/pornography in tv/movies/games/etc? No. Not just because of free speech issues, but also because I don’t trust them to do a halfway decent job of it.
19. Should the United States only start a war if there is an immanent imminent threat of being attacked ourselves? Yes. And by “immanent imminent threat” I mean immanent imminent threat, not “immanent” “imminent” “threat”.
20. Should stopping illegal immigration be one of our top priorities? Maybe/Don’t care. Together with trade, immigration is one of the issues where I feel the most conflicted. I do think that there are good reasons for immigration in general, and illegal immigration in particular, to be restricted – the problem is that in so many cases the only way to enforce these laws is by way of practices that are very often cruel and unjust. Mass deportation? A border wall? Not for me, thanks.
21. Is outsourcing of American jobs justified if it allows for cheaper goods? Yes. Of course it’s “justified” – the bigger question is whether tariffs and other trade restrictions are justified as well, and here I see the force of arguments on both sides and don’t have a settled view. My default, though, is to get the government out of the business of determining trade policies, since I simply don’t trust them to do a tolerable job of it – in practice, though, I take it that lots of free trade agreements fall well short of this libertarian standard.
22. Are all abortions unethical? [with the exception of risk to mother's health] Yes. And by “risk to health” I mean serious risk. I don’t think that the federal government would have the Constitutional authority to regulate abortion unless an amendment were passed, but I do believe that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overturned, with authority passed back to the states.
23. Should social security be privatized? Maybe/Don’t care. There are arguments on both sides here, but I think that things like means-testing and other steps to make the Social Security system less regressive should be higher priorities than privatization.
24. Should the United States ever go to war even if the United Nations is against it? Maybe/Don’t care. This question isn’t especially helpful from my perspective, since I don’t think the UN is the final arbiter of what is and isn’t a just war. In practice, though, my standards for what constitutes a just war are strict enough that I imagine any potential conflict that would meet them would be okayed by the UN as well.
Anyone care to disagree? (Heh.)
Filed under: personal
I’m with you on most of these questions. I’m a secular libertarian and don’t have much problem with abortion. Is your objection to abortion basically the standard Catholic case?
Yes, my opposition to abortion is philosophically rooted in my Catholicism, though I think my more visceral discomfort with it is ultimately independent of that. Whether I’d still be in favor of banning it if I weren’t a Catholic is a tough counterfactual to figure out – the case against Roe and for returning things to the states, though, is fundamentally a Constitutional matter from my perspective, and not a moral/theological one.
Re number 19:
I don’t quite get it. I’d have expected you to copy and paste the questions, but I guess you retyped them from scratch? At any rate, I got a good chuckle out of “immanent” threat (particularly from a Catholic), since a [non-immanent] threat would have to be a transcendent threat. [g]
For a couple of more serious questions, I gree with you about 7, but re 12, I don’t think costs reasonably directly attributable to the Wet Our Pants Act are that big a budget item; as always I welcome correction.
Re your 15: I agree with your that all in all the best tax regime would primarily target comsumption (though lots of opportunities for hidden subsidies there too in terms of differential rates on different categories of good and services) with a steeply progressive income tax that only has any substantial bite at say $150K AGI or so. I’d also love to see payroll related taxes shifted to reduce the marginal load on low=cost/unskilled labor.
But, combining your 12, 15, and 16, you do know that if we eliminate everything budgeted as GWOT, and half the DoD appropriation, we’re still running a deficit at the present tax rates?
oops, rats, also re 15: why do you think the estate tax is particularly bad – in what way do you see it as particularly more distortionary, discriminatory, or deadweight loss inducing than other taxes?
Aso re taxes, assuming per your suggestion that we still have some income taxes, how about indexing capital gains and treating the indexed gain at ordinary rates?
(I don’t claim to be an economist, but in general I like how you think, so I’m interested to hear your take).
Bayesian:
“Wet our pants act” … I like that. I didn’t mean, though, to be implying that PATRIOT Act expenses were the problem with our defense budget – my point was just that the answers to those questions were similarly easy.
What you say about taxation seems right in the main, though an overly steep rise has its problems – I don’t see why we don’t eliminate “brackets” altogether and calculate tax rates as a straightforward (non-linear) function of income. (Yay, math!)
Defense spending – including Iraq, I think – comes to around $750 billion a year, and around 30% of our federal budget. Unfortunately I think that a lot of this is borrowed money, so even if it were cut by 75% (as it should be, at least) we’d likely still be a ways from breaking even. But it would help a lot … someone more skilled would have to crunch the numbers, though.
As to the estate tax: one part of the problem is that it requires taxing income twice. Another is that it discourages savings, especially in a person’s later years. (Perhaps people will disagree about whether this is a bad thing.) Another is that it often makes it unnecessarily difficult for homes, farms, and other things with sentimental value to be kept within a family – when the legal owner dies, you often have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep from selling the place. And finally, many estates get shared out over so many people that it’s actually not that much money in any given case, and in many case the recipients are quite worthy of it. (My wife’s family is a case in point – her 70-plus-year-old grandfather got a multimillion dollar settlement on a lawsuit a few years ago, but he has ten kids and dozens of grandchildren, most of whom are middle- or lower-middle-class.) If inheritance were taxed simply as income (and so progressively depending on the recipient rather than the size of the estate), I’d have much less of a problem with it.
Oh, and on #19 I just meant that the threat would have to be, you know, REALLY IMMANENT, and not just “immanent” (in Dick Cheney’s sense, perhaps).
In re:5, would you get excited if your child contracted a serious but treatable illness and you weren’t able to afford the medicine?
I am not trying to be combative. I am asking that question because it seems to me that your response indicates a healthy person’s obliviousness to what health care means to a sick person.
Now I am biased. I have chronic condition that is treatable with drugs–drugs that cost thousands of dollars a month. I am literally uninsurable due to my condition and because I lost my job (recession eh?) the only reason I have health insurance is because of Cobra.
I read about health insurance extensively and every single proposal I have seen from libertarians or conservatives would literally result in my inability to get the medicine I need. This in turn would result in my slow agonizing death.
Due to my biases, I understand that I may not be giving conservatives and libertarians a fair shake on this issue. And I know that cost control is a huge problem with no easy answers. I am trying to be open to the libertarian argument, but it seems like health care is this after thought that conservatives trot out because they know its a problem they need to address but would rather it just went away.
Joseph:
Obviously I understand where you’re coming from, and when I pegged myself as unexcited I didn’t mean that I don’t think this is a serious issue about which something needs to be done, but only that it’s not a case where I tend to go into libertarian freakout mode.
One class of things that libertarians (and some conservatives) have proposed that would make health care cheaper would be making it easier to develop and sell new drugs, removing the licensing requirements and other barriers that keep the various medical cartels from facing real competition, etc. It seems obvious to me that these things would make a difference.
I think we can also all agree that the employer-based system is terrible, and deeply regressive, and does more harm than good.
But look: as I said above and have said before, I have no huge problem with the notion of state-provided health insurance. I really do have trouble believing, though, that health care is some sort of weird case where the basic laws of economics don’t apply, and competition – REAL competition, I mean, and not just the stuff that Republicans call “competition” – helps rather than hurting. (This is something that I feel like I’ve seen many smart liberals say.) I also think that part of the problem lies in the fact that we use so much UNNECESSARY health care: in the case of childbirth, for example, medical intervention (which breeds more medical intervention, which breeds …) is very often thoroughly unneeded, and homebirths and midwifery are tons cheaper but every bit as safe as going to hospitals, but insurance companies simply won’t cover them. (I have a lot of trouble wrapping my mind around how this can be so, since it would seem to be common sense for someone to step in and start offering plans for homebirthers, but I have a sinking feeling that this has more to do with the government (i.e., with regulatory barriers) than with the market.) And so a key question for me is whether a state-sponsored system would mean using taxpayer dollars to pay for loads of unnecessary stuff – I suspect that it almost certainly would, especially given that any program we put in place will have been designed with a lot of *cough* input from the various corporate lobbies.
So am I opposed in principle to a state-sponsored health care system? No, and certainly not for individuals whom the “traditional” insurance companies can’t help – though I’d insist that things like copays (which lots of liberals go nuts over) are ESSENTIAL, since they give people a reason to think twice before trucking off to the doctor. But am I convinced that it’s the very best solution we can find, and that all of the alternatives have been looked at with sufficient seriousness? Absolutely not. This is an issue that’s well outside my expertise, and while I’ll happily admit that countries with socialized medicine may well have better health care systems than we do, that doesn’t mean that there’s not an option we can settle on that’s even better than theirs.
You make some good points. The medical cartels and using unnecessary health care are huge problems. In fact, its widely acknowledged though rarely discussed among progressives that if health care is going to be reformed then we have to break up the medical cartel. Unfortunately, that’s a political bomb that no one wants to set off.
However, I do think its fair to say that health care is not a normal market. Ezra Klein provides an excellent explanation of why health care is not a normal good.
In my personal experience, Klein’s description is dead on. I don’t take these really expensive drugs, which increase my risk for cancer and suck up 40% of my income. I take these drugs because my doctor told me that it would make feel better and ensure that I avoid an untimely death.
Le sigh. I wish there was a preview button to help me avoid embarrassing grammar mistakes. :)
I meant to say: I don’t take these really expensive drugs, which increase my risk for cancer and suck up 40% of my income, because I really taking these drugs. I take these drugs because my doctor told me that it would make feel better and ensure that I avoid an untimely death.
I think that point of Ezra’s is a good one, though it can be overstated. (I’d thought about writing a longer post on what follows.) There ARE cases where you can have a lot of influence on your own health care – childbirth being perhaps foremost among them, though we’ve already experienced other instances (modifying the insane immunization schedule, for one, as well as the way we responded to a few small health issues my son had as an infant) where either putting off the doctor’s advice or staying away from the doctor altogether worked out very well for us. Obviously my wife and I are in a unique position given our educational backgrounds and ability to do research on our own (and to call people in our families with medical degrees), but I can’t help thinking that there are lessons here that generalize a bit further.
In certain cases, though, Ezra’s analysis (and yours) is spot on: e.g. I have several family members with Parkinson’s, and they’re in no position to go in for homeopathy or something. But I still think that as a general matter it’s good for patients (and doctors!) to have a financial incentive to turn first to home remedies or cheaper options – as it stands, our health care system incentivizes exactly the opposite habits, and so an important question from my perspective is whether a state-run system could help to mitigate these tendencies.
bayesian:
Holy cow! I really did confuse “imminent” and “immanent”. I feel like a fool …
I unsurprisingly scored hardcore libertarian. The only category I was not a “10″ or a “0″ was on free market capitalism, where I scored a “1.” I assume this was because I answered “maybe/don’t care” on health care. I am coming around to the conclusion that health insurance is something where ordinary market principles don’t apply particularly well, but for different reasons than those expressed above.
First, there is little opportunity for an individual to buy the health insurance most suited for them, largely because of employer-based health insurance, and also because health insurance isn’t real “insurance,” in the sense of being a way of protecting yourself against disaster. This is particularly problematic when you consider that health insurance, as with regular insurance, is on average a losing proposition for the purchaser (i.e., you’re going to spend more for your insurance, on average, than you will receive in services). In other words, our current system on average effectively eliminates any consumer surplus from health care.
But even if we moved to an individual based health insurance where people were more readily willing and able to buy high-deductible insurance, there would still be some big market problems. This is because pre-existing conditions can be so difficult to get coverage for. Even if you have coverage before you discover your chronic condition, then you still have the problem of being effectively prevented from ever changing your coverage once your condition is discovered, leaving you to the whims of your insurance company which need not fear you ever becoming the customer of another company.
But completely socialized medicine has its own set of problems which will in the long run undermine the quality of care by removing the profit motive, thereby discouraging future doctors.
Ultimately, I suspect that any new health care system would have to strike a balance in which most medical expenses are left to the free market, but certain types of expenses are covered or insured by the government. Alas, such a balance is incredibly difficult, perhaps almost impossible, to strike. Whatever the balance, though, there needs to be a clear delineation of what is public and what is private.
Mark,
I think I’m largely on board with your take on health care. It’s always seemed to me that the problems with the market for individual insurance have got to go beyond the distortions introduced by the employer-based system (which, as I said above, pretty much all non-corrupt parties to the debate admit is a disaster), and likely include lots of outright collusion between insurance companies, government regulators, and the medical establishment. You’re right, though, that the challenges in getting coverage for preexisting conditions are one of the most fundamental parts of the problem, as is the fact that in a fully free market there would be loads of young and health people who’d buy minimal, high-deductible plans and so leave the old and sick to fend for themselves – a circumstance which everyone but the most hardened Randian will have to admit is unacceptable.
The problems with asking the state to step in and remedy these problems are at least threefold:
1. The state sucks at doing stuff, period.
2. Any decisions the state makes on, e.g., which sorts of coverage are required for everyone (which is really the biggest problem, as I understand it) will be hugely prone to regulatory capture, and as a consequence will likely include coverage of all sorts of unnecessary stuff and exclude coverage for lots of stuff that’s either necessary or very good.
3. The state sucks at doing stuff, period.
But if the “free” (LOL!) market is even worse, then the state may be the best option.
Addendum to your points 1 and 3: I can’t imagine anything where the calculation problem would be more relevant than health care. In other words, how do you place a social value on any individual human’s life, not to mention the use of any number of that individual’s faculties?
In addition to the usual concerns about the calculation problem, this makes regulatory capture even more likely and problematic because there’s no objective way of evaluating the claims of various interest groups to greater support for their pet procedure.
Yet despite all this, the uniqueness of health insurance largely undermines free market assumptions that apply in just about every other arena.
The only solution is to separate those areas of health care that inherently cannot fit basic requirements of a free market from those majority of areas that do. But to minimize regulatory capture, and a whole host of other problems, this separation has to be clear and extraordinarily difficult to modify. In some respects making a clear dividing line is more important than where you draw that line.