I've written several times here about how I have never been a Hillary Clinton advocate, and how I really didn't want to have to vote for her (but I absolutely will, if she's the nominee.) I also have written about being captivated by Obama the first time I heard him speak, as so many others were, at the convention in 2004, and that I remember saying out loud, to no one in particular, "I am watching the first black President of the United States." So why am I not yet an avid Obama supporter, like so many around here? Well, I'm hesitant because I'm not really sure he's actually what many seem to think he is - and I'm hesitant because I think it's possible Obama is receptive to ideas that are personally repugnant to me and that I think are not at all progressive. Why? See below.
I've always been a bit concerned about Obama's economic policy views, partly because one of his chief advisors is Austin Goolsbee, from the University of Chicago. Now, Goolsbee has written some good stuff on 401(k) accounts and their problems, research I've used myself in my own work. But there seems to be no doubt that Goolsbee is an ardent free marketer, and downplays the constructive use of active government programs to solve problems.
My concerns are sort of crystallized by this post I came across, in trying to determine what Goolsbee has really said recently about Social Security, the issue most important to me personally. It's from a conservative libertarian blog (at least from what I can tell), and someone has posted to the blogger about why Obama should be supported by libertarians - here's the link - http://www.ivanjanssens.be/... - you have to scroll down to the Feb 4th entry on Obama.
Here are some excerpts that trouble me:
Daniel Koffler - who has written for the libertarian magazine Reason and the left-wing magazine Dissent - says that I should re-think my rather negative views of Barack Obama. There is substance and a lot to like:
Obama’s preference for reducing healthcare costs while preserving the freedom to choose whether or not to participate in the healthcare system, as against Clinton’s (and Edwards’s) insistence on mandating participation, is not a one-off discrepancy without broader implications. Rather, Obama’s language of personal choice and incentive is a reflection of the ideas of his lead economic advisor, Austin Goolsbee, a behavioural economist at the University of Chicago, who agrees with the liberal consensus on the need to address concerns such as income inequality, disparate educational opportunities and, of course, disparate access to healthcare, but breaks sharply from liberal orthodoxy on both the causes of these social ills and the optimal strategy for ameliorating them.
Instead of recommending traditional welfare-state liberalism as a solvent for socioeconomic inequalities and dislocations, Goolsbee promotes programmes to essentially democratise the market, protecting and where possible expanding freedom of choice, while simultaneously creating rational, self-interested incentives for individuals to participate in solving collective problems. No wonder, then, that Obama’s healthcare plan is specifically designed to give people good reason to buy in, without coercing them.
At the moment, Obama’s and Clinton’s positions on trade are roughly equivalent - both deserve credit for taking initial steps toward dismantling the obscene US government-supported agricultural cartels - but the present dynamic is Obama moving more and more in the direction of economic freedom, competition and individual choice, and Clinton wavering if not moving away from it. Obama proposes to address the "actuarial gap" in entitlement programs - actuarial gap being a term congenial to if not lifted straight from Niall Ferguson’s analysis of generational accounting - in part by raising the cap on payroll taxes, but in part by creating incentives for personal retirement accounts, fostering, if you’ll pardon the term, an ownership society. The idea, as with his approach to healthcare, is to bring individual self-interest and collective needs into harmony, and let rationality do the work from there. (Hillary Clinton, in case you’re wondering, disagrees.)
Now, I know many here think libertarianism is not incompatible with Democratic progressivism - I could not disagree more, but I suppose some people here won't be uncomfortable with this guy calling Obama a "Left-Libertarian". I am, though, and while I'm not taking this guy's views, or those of his buddy who posted this on his blog, as completely accurate, I think they have got Goolsbee about right, even though I don't think raising the payroll tax cap has much to do with generational equity. I think all this stuff about "letting rationality do the work" is simply an extension of the same free market religion we've been suffering under since at least Reagan. What fucking free market?!! It's only free for those with enough money and power to play the game.
I'm firmly in the camp of those who believe government should be a weapon for good, and should be used to address the many, many ills created by the market system. I don't think the market just needs to be made "more free" - I think it's inherently rigged, and government has to step in to redress inequities. So all this libertarian stuff is antithetical, in my view, to the progressive values of the Democrats I associate myself with.
What I want to know from Obama supporters here is whether the description I've excerpted above seems accurate, or whether it's distorted. If this is the stuff about Obama that's being circulated and believed in conservative and libertarian circles, I can well believe in a cross-over appeal for him in the general election. And if it's distorted, OK - perhaps it works as a tactical matter. But if it does at all represent his views, it makes me very nervous about voting for him (although, again, if he's the nominee, I will, and hope to rely on a Democratic Congress to rein in any attacks on Social Security, should they emerge.)