A common cliche is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The rollout of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, is the latest episode in a long-running epic in which good intentions are pitted against harsh reality. A bill designed to increase the number of insured Americans has resulted in thousands of people having their health insurance policies canceled — so many that President Obama gave a speech apologizing to them.
From the perspective of someone not affected by a given policy, it is very easy for something like mandating specific types of health care coverage to sound like a good idea. The perspective of people affected by the policies — the 99.99 percent of people who aren’t writing legislation, who have 99 percent of the real world knowledge about their own situation and suffer 99 percent of the consequences — is crucial to making good policy decisions. Trusting an elite-dominated Congress with such decision-making authority is ill-advised.
As an alternative to proposing great ideas that we think we will work, we could stop implementing bad ideas that we know don’t work. There are countless government boondoggles that have not really improved the quality of life for Americans, and many of them have made things objectively worse. Attempting to solve these problems by introducing even more new programs may exacerbate existing problems or cause new ones. But getting rid of problematic programs and disastrous policies, which we know to be useless, ineffective or counterproductive, is a simple and straightforward way of making progress in America.
An example par excellence of ineffective boondoggles is the federal agricultural subsidies program, which costs taxpayers between $10 and $30 billion per year. We know that farming families made 29 percent more than the average American family in 2011, and the majority of farm subsidies go to the richest portion of this already fairly well off group. We know that there are also federal programs that pay farmers not to grow crops. And we know that millions of people are struggling to buy food and rely heavily on food stamps to get by every day. Why can’t we just get rid of this nonsense?
Perhaps more prominent in the minds of our generation is the war on drugs, yet another ill-conceived government program meant to fix things, but which has made them objectively worse. Again, from the perspective of somebody who is looking to appease the public by making some sort of attempt to fix a problem, drug prohibition and mass incarceration seems like a fine idea. In practice, nonviolent offenders now comprise 60 percent of the prison population and 55 percent of inmates in federal prison are serving for drug-related offenses. We’re turning people who’ve done nothing except smoke marijuana into hardened criminals by putting them through the prison system. Why are we doing this again?
This sort of logic doesn’t only apply to domestic policy — in foreign policy, we keep doing things that don’t work. Instead of having clear goals in interventions, in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve had vague objectives like “national security” dominating our discourse. Studies show that clear objectives, multilateral cooperation, willingness to negotiate and a strong commitment to the goal are required for successful interventions. Contrary to this, we’ve consistently pursued a unilateral foreign policy that refuses to negotiate with our enemies, or we’ve attempted to defeat enemies that refuse to negotiate. It’s cost us enormously in blood and treasure.
I’m aware that the situation involving programs like these and others is highly complicated. There are an awful lot of special interests looking to defend the status quo, and resolving to commit to reform is much harder than kicking the can down the road. But clearly there was enough resolve to push an enormously important and contentious piece of legislation like the Affordable Care Act through intense political opposition — why can’t that same effort be channeled into getting rid of things we know don’t work? This seems like the path of least resistance toward progress and change in America, and I think it’s one worth trying.
