{"id":12680,"date":"2007-08-27T14:30:22","date_gmt":"2007-08-27T18:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/12680.html"},"modified":"2007-08-27T14:30:22","modified_gmt":"2007-08-27T18:30:22","slug":"krugman-underestimates-the-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/krugman-underestimates-the-right\/","title":{"rendered":"Krugman underestimates the right"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Krugman, hoping to make clear how ridiculous conservative opposition to S-CHIP expansion is, offers a helpful analogy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Suppose, for a moment, that the Heritage Foundation were to put out a press release attacking the liberal view that even children whose parents could afford to send them to private school should be entitled to free government-run education.<\/p>\n

They’d have a point: many American families with middle-class incomes do send their kids to school at public expense, so taxpayers without school-age children subsidize families that do. And the effect is to displace the private sector: if public schools weren’t available, many families would pay for private schools instead.<\/p>\n

So let’s end this un-American system and make education what it should be — a matter of individual responsibility and private enterprise. Oh, and we shouldn’t have any government mandates that force children to get educated, either. As a Republican presidential candidate might say, the future of America’s education system lies in free-market solutions, not socialist models.<\/p>\n

O.K., in case you’re wondering, I haven’t lost my mind, I’m drawing an analogy. The real Heritage press release, titled “The Middle-Class Welfare Kid Next Door,” is an attack on proposals to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Such an expansion, says Heritage, will “displace private insurance with government-sponsored health care coverage.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s a helpful analogy, and I think congressional Dems would be wise to use it in the policy debate. Bush and his allies are wrong on the facts — S-CHIP expansion would largely benefit children who would otherwise have no insurance, not middle-class who have insurnace — but they’re also missing the underlying point: the nation set up a national education system so that every child has a shot at success in life, so the nation should also establish guaranteed healthcare for kids for exact the same reason.<\/p>\n

That said, I can’t help but wonder if Krugman underestimates the modern-day Republican Party.
\n
\nThe premise of his comparison is that no one in their right mind would recommend privatizing America’s public schools, so there’s certainly no reason to leave children’s health to the whims of the free market.<\/p>\n

But what Krugman doesn’t mention is that many conservatives attack the notion of “free government-run education” all the time. Jonah Goldberg recently had an LAT column<\/a> calling on the elimination of the public school system. “[O]ne of the surest ways to leave a kid ‘behind’ is to hand him over to the government,” Goldberg said.<\/p>\n

Brian Beutler had a good post<\/a> explaining that the right’s fear of creeping socialism applies across the board.<\/p>\n

This is actually connected to a phenomenon Krugman has written about himself. Republicans want to block SCHIP expansion not just because such an expansion will cost insurance companies in the short term, but because they’re worried that the creeping growth of well-run government provided care will ultimately reveal to the public just how preferable a universal system would be. And that<\/i> would be deadly to the insurance industry.<\/p>\n

If America had evolved in such a way that we had tax-payer-financed universal healthcare and a major private education industry, then the rhetoric would be flipped, and Republicans would attack every Democratic effort to expand public pre-school by warning voters not to be tempted by the poison berries of socialist dystopia. Because that kind of rhetoric is much more effective at drowning a baby initiative than it is at drowning one that’s fully grown. As things are, it’s much more feasible for Republicans to block universal health care than it is for them to dismantle the public school system, but that doesn’t mean that Republicans wouldn’t love to end public schooling forever if they could.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Krugman asked, “So how can conservatives defend the indefensible, and oppose giving children the health care they need?” Alas, they find it surprisingly easy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Krugman, hoping to make clear how ridiculous conservative opposition to S-CHIP expansion is, offers a helpful analogy. Suppose, for a moment, that the Heritage Foundation were to put out a press release attacking the liberal view that even children whose parents could afford to send them to private school should be entitled to free […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12680\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}