The Politics of Tradeoffs

In politics there is an overwhelming desire on the part of many people to help everybody and make them all happy. Wouldn't it be great if you could? Well you can't. Sometimes the idealistic impulse gets the best of us and we think we can do good for everybody without tradeoffs, or at the very least we can get it stuck in our head that our policies are helping some people while forgetting about those that they hurt. There are also some places where some priorities need to be put ahead of others, or where two competing values conflict and you need to choose which is more important.

For instance, I think of our healthcare policies in this country. We don't have universal healthcare like they have in Canada and the UK, and many people want to change that. They won't because we simply don't have the money, and it is politically unfeasible right now because of that, and by the time we do have the money Democrats won't have a clear majority. However, assuming that the old arguments remain the same, universal healthcare would be great for poor people who want to have routine care. However, if you have a debilitating disease, particularly a rare one, universal healthcare might mean your death. In the end, if it were purely utilitarian, we would need to ask ourselves who we put first; poor people or very sick people. In the end you want to help them both, but there do have to be some tradeoffs.

I also think about our attitudes toward taxation and regulation. On one hand more taxes can mean more programs to help people; on the other hand it can hurt the economy as a whole or destroy businesses. Once again I go back to the healthcare debate. I believe that as we stand we have three options; not impliment universal healthcare and millions will continue not to have health insurance, impliment it by raising taxes and making America fall behind the rest of the world competitively and wreck the economy, impliment it by borrowing and wreck the economy when the debt overloads and China refuses to carry any more, or impliment it by printing more money and wreck the economy with hyperinflation. In this case I think we have to go with the economy as a whole, but it is not an easy decision to make public policy-wise because more short-sighted people will be calling for your head. Thank God I'm not a public official. I also think of small business regulations like raising the minimum wage. It can help low income workers but it can also shut down businesses. The same is with every regulation. Help workers, hurt businesses. In the end it truthfully ends up helping people who work at places like Wal-Mart the most, because Wal-Mart can afford all these regulations, but hardworking small business owners get the shaft. However, who do you prioritize, hardworking people who do the lowest end jobs for big corporations or hardworking people who struggle to keep small businesses afloat? In the end you sometimes have to say, "Screw these, I'm going with those."

I also begin to think about non-economic policies. I've always maintained that the death penalty itself is not a deterrent, however, I believe that executions would be. People on death row sit there for years, if they were executed right away, perhaps in a more painful and public method, it would actually deter crime. If we really got serious and cracked down harshly on crime, it might have the same effect. However, innocent people could get caught in the dragnet and even executed, which is the problem. In the same way I imagine people have died due to easy access to guns, however, I imagine that people have died because they couldn't carry a gun and would die if we restricted access to guns. People on both sides of the gun control issue like to claim that the other side's plans will result in innocent people getting killed; the reality is that both of them will which is the great irony.

Foreign policy has trade-offs. I hear about the human rights abuses in Darfur and Burma and am appalled. Other hear and call for something to be done. However, these people need to ask themselves if we want to risk war in the name of human rights. As much as you can deny that a confrontation over these sorts of things will lead to war, it is something that needs to be considered. Do we want Americans bogged down in the jungles of Burma like they were in Vietnam? Do we want them quagmired in the deserts of Sudan like in Iraq? It could happen and it is sad. I always think of that when I hear about a genocide. It may seem callous to refrain from going in, but at the same time the cost may just be too high no matter how noble the cause. These are all real issues that must be dealt with.

As for values, they conflict too. Sometimes people want to ban something or restrict something in the name of "family values" or "the children" all while talking about "freedom." However, you can't ban everything that bothers you and still talk about freedom. In the end sometimes you need to ask yourself, freedom or something else? It can be a hard choice but it is simply a choice that has to be made. However, thankfully I have the non-aggression principle to fall back on as a libertarian. However, sometimes I feel a bit callous myself. Standing by the non-aggression principle sometimes means saying, "Screw those people over there," because truthfully government is sometimes the only way something can be done. However, principles always have their costs and sometimes sticking by something good may make you look evil elsewhere... and others will see it the opposite.