Your Teacher Said What?! (30 page)

Yup. Blake's school—a public one, as of this writing, anyway—isn't any cheaper to operate than a private one. But it is “free,” which is another way of saying it is paid for by taxes. It doesn't, in any real sense, compete with private schools on price, and the existence of public schools doesn't get them to keep their prices down nearly as much as the existence of other
private
schools. This aspect of the “public option” in education, however, was lost on the editorial board of the
Times
:

Or maybe not. Here's the
Journal
:

In the end, the Affordable Care Act—don't you love the way these laws get their names?—didn't include a public option. The Progressive impulse, however, was still alive and kicking. Deprived of the carrot of what they believed would be low-cost health care paid for by taxes (which are always charged to the most productive members of society), they resorted to a stick: a requirement that every American buy insurance.

Even for Progressives, this was groundbreaking. There had never been a law that required anyone to buy anything at all, just for the privilege of breathing; even their favorite example—the requirement that drivers purchase auto insurance—was still a matter of choice: If you want to drive on public roads, you have to have insurance; if you don't want to, you don't have to.

The
New York Times
saw this as a “fundamental question”:

Could it be? Did the
Times
actually recognize some limit on the legitimacy of the federal government in demanding such a requirement? Uh, no:

No, the “fundamental question” is not affordability; it's
legality
. Here's the
Journal
:

In the end, the debate over Obamacare—a debate that is still going on—is about the most basic principles of the free market: scarcity and choice. Scarcity is what gives things value; choosing one option over another is how we express our own values.
⁴⁶
In a free market, the way we allocate scarce goods (which is pretty much everything) is by price. When people choose to buy something at one price and not at another, they are (as we free-market types say) “voting with their wallets.” Any argument over the way we buy health care—pills, doctor visits, surgery, wheelchairs, and those inedible meals they serve in hospitals—that forgets that all of these things are scarce isn't just anti–free market; it's antireality.

However, that actually describes not only the Affordable Care Act but the entire health-care industry. Because most of the prices charged by doctors, pharmacies, and hospitals is paid by someone other than the person who actually uses their services, price signals don't really communicate very much. When you need an appendectomy—as I did only a few months ago—you don't shop around for the best price, partly because, well, you
need
an appendectomy, and partly because you don't pay for it: your insurance does.

What this means is that a whole bunch of very scarce health-care goods are allocated by something other than price, which is by definition inefficient. There are a lot of arguments about how much people should be using price to make health-care decisions, since the alternative to rationing by price is rationing by . . . someone else. You can either recognize this or you can be the
New York Times
:

On the other hand (I'm tempted to say the “right” hand), there's the
Wall Street Journal
:

And so it goes. It's hard, if not impossible, to tell whether the positions taken by the
New York Times
are so consistently wrong out of ignorance, denial, or a deliberate attempt to gloss over problems that get in the way of the newspaper's Progressive agenda (this is actually a problem with most Progressives). But whether it's electoral results, climate change, financial regulation, or health-care reform, the last two pages of the paper's first section—where the
Times
makes its editorial positions plain—are one constant in a changing world. If the compass is supposed to point north, you can rely on the
Times
to direct you south.

In testing a statistical hypothesis, scientists—really, everyone—should be on the lookout for two kinds of error: Type I errors, or false positives, are essentially seeing something that isn't there; false negatives, or type II errors, happen when you fail to see something that is there.

When both occur at exactly the same time, there's a good chance you're reading an editorial in the
New York Times.

Writing this book (okay,
thinking
about writing this book) started in early 2009 with the inauguration of President Obama. It ended—sort of—with the midterm elections that “refudiated ” (I
love
that word), more than anything else, his economic philosophy.

This whole thing began with one nervous father: nervous about the widespread acceptance of Progressive ideas and especially the uncritical way they were being presented to my children. If you've gotten this far in the book, you know that I recognize that Progressivism has been around, in the United States anyway, for a century, so it's not that I blame everything about its popularity on the current administration. However, from early 2009 to the middle of 2010, it looked a lot like we had arrived at some sort of Progressive nirvana: a government takeover of health care; management of virtually the entire financial industry;
ownership
of more than half of the domestic automobile business; and, of course, close to a trillion dollars in “stimulus” spending that mostly amounted to a gigantic subsidy of the country's public employee unions while
increasing
the nation's unemployment rate

The second half of 2010, however, was a different story: the rise of the Tea Party movement, huge declines in the president's approval ratings, and, of course, the midterm elections, which turned a seventy-six-vote Democratic advantage in the House of Representatives into a fifty-nine-vote Republican majority . . . the biggest change in more than sixty years.

So I should be less nervous now than when I started, right?

Wrong.

As 2010 turned into 2011, our representatives in Washington were attempting to deal with a couple of, shall we say, urgent bits of business. The first was the expiration, at year's end, of the tax cuts originally passed during the administration of George W. Bush. On December 6, congressional Republicans and the president agreed to extend both the Bush tax cuts and federal unemployment benefits, while reducing the taxes that just about everyone would pay into Social Security and Medicare for 2011. It was an expensive gesture: nearly $900 billion in taxes foregone. Almost all of the money—eight dollars in ten, by some estimates—was aimed at people earning less than $250,000 a year. For Progressives, it was Christmas.

Sure it was.

Calling the Progressive response to the compromise—which it was; no one got exactly what they wanted—hysterical is an understatement. Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) called the Republicans a “bunch of gangsters.” Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, called it an “unconscionable giveaway.” Bernie Sanders, the Senate's only (admitted) socialist, gave an eight-and-a-half-hour speech in which the nicest thing he called the deal was a “moral outrage.” Michael Capuano (D-MA) was so peeved that he said that President Obama “may or may not be” the Democrats' best candidate for 2012, a tantrum that was endorsed by such Progressive icons as Keith Olbermann and Ralph Nader.

Why the over-the-top rhetoric? Because in addition to preserving the tax cuts for “ordinary” Americans, the deal did the same for the rich—you know, the people and small businesses that report income in excess of $250,000 a year. The most productive members of society. The ones who do all the hiring and investment. Yup, them.

Or that's how it was reported, anyway, even by reporters who should have known better. The actual compromise didn't tax
people
at different rates; it taxed
income
. Which means that even the richest Americans pay the same tax on their first $250,000 of income that everyone else. But never mind; it's not exactly news that Progressives can't understand tax incentives.

So Progressives, who had been screaming for a second stimulus for months, responded to a deal that would have been—in the words of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, the “largest stimulus in galactic history”—by stamping their Progressive feet and threatening to take their Progressive ball home. The reason was that Progressives don't just stand for a reflexive mistrust of the free market; they stand
at attention
when it comes to redistributing income—and that means that anything that didn't punish the wealthy just had to be evil.

Here's how bad it got: I found myself defending the president on
Squawk Box
.

The second, and probably more significant, policy controversy of the end of 2010 was kicked off by the publication of several different plans for reducing the staggering difference between the amount of money that the federal government was obliging itself to spend and the amount of money that the American taxpayer was willing to pay for those obligations. The deficit-reduction plan, first floated by a bipartisan presidential commission, actually showed how it was possible not only to eliminate the ongoing deficit but also to put Social Security back in the black.

The Progressive response? Nancy Pelosi called it “simply unacceptable.” It “told working Americans to drop dead,” according to Richard Trumka. Paul Krugman said that the commission had been “hijacked.”

Yeesh.

Near as I can tell, the reason for such hostility to the Bowles-Simpson plan (named for the commission's chairmen, one a Democrat, the other a Republican) was the way it “gutted” Social Security. It did this—I swear—by increasing the age at which Americans could receive their full retirement benefits from sixty-five to sixty-seven—
seventy-five years from now
.

Progressivism may be hysterical, but it isn't in retreat; it's on the attack. And it retains a powerful set of channels for communicating its philosophy, including television, newspapers, and the Internet.

Oh, and the schools.

Toward the end of the 2010 school year, and therefore the writing of this book, Blake brought home a writing project for her fifth-grade class entitled “Understanding Environmental Concerns.” Here's a sample: