Bernie’s big dumb idea
One of the most important questions to ask about any political proposal is whether it encourages what economists call “moral hazard,” broadly interpreted to mean incentivizing behavior hazardous to society.
Moral hazard consequently came to mind when hearing of Bernie Sanders’ proposal that everyone should be guaranteed a well-paying lifetime job with the federal government, replete with generous health-care benefits.
That the idea was enthusiastically embraced in one variant or another by other prominent Democrats, including senators and likely presidential contenders Cory
Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand, tells us a great deal about just how far left the “resistance” has carried the
Democratic Party.
“Asymmetrical polarization” has been a term tossed about by political scientists for some time now, usually in reference to the alleged rightward radicalization of Republicans under Tea Party influence. In reality, the term now applies less to the GOP, which has been turned into an ideological muddle under a leader completely lacking any coherent ideology, and more to a Democratic Party wherein radical leftists like Sanders, Keith Ellison, and Elizabeth Warren have become “mainstream.”
The budgetary implications flowing from Sanders’ latest “free stuff” enthusiasm (on top of free health care and college) are probably the least of our worries here; after all, when your national debt exceeds the gross domestic product, it becomes little more than a mystifying abstraction, mere numbers on paper, even if those numbers contain a dire threat to our nation’s future.
No, the greater problem with Sanders’ proposal is that it so perfectly expresses the kind of thinking that has produced those massive deficits and debt over time; more precisely the inevitable tendency of democratic politics under welfare-state circumstances to degenerate into little more than pandering sweepstakes.
Perpetual deficits and mounting debt don’t occur by accident; they are the ultimate consequence of the misperception that government exists not to provide security and order but to give people things (paid for by others or, more recently, not at all).
As for the moral hazard contained in Sanders’ latest vote-buying gambit, David Harsanyi notes “You don’t possess the skills that enable you to find productive work? You don’t want to learn a new trade? You don’t want to obtain an education? … Don’t worry. The government’s got an incentive-destroying job opportunity just for you. And if you’ve been fired for poor work ethic, or for stealing, or for making women uncomfortable with your creepy behavior, fear not; Bernie’s got your back.”
“We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us” was the slogan for workers in the now (understandably) defunct Soviet Union; “we pretend to work and they pay us with real money taken from real workers” would become our slogan if Sanders scheme were actually implemented.
But as critics were quick to point out, putting such a zany idea into practice isn’t really the goal; rather it is the buying of votes with fairy-tale promises of things that you didn’t have to work to get, the waving of that magic wand to provide free stuff that others can be made to pay for, at least until you run out of their money, too.
It is, in other words, entirely for political effect, and cynically assumes people are too dumb, craven, and shortsighted to not know that Santa Claus doesn’t really exist; that their votes can be bought through an escalating, deceptively cost-free supply of goodies (in this case a swell-paying federal job).
“Moral hazard” has now become built into our thinking about politics in multiple, interlocking ways, not just in terms of incentives for politicians to pander for votes but also by encouraging voters to believe that they can get free stuff at other people’s expense and that everyone should get what they can before fiscal insolvency inevitably crashes the party.
Sanders’ loony “federal jobs at good wages for all” idea exquisitely wraps all of these perverse incentives together.
The greatest source of dysfunction in democratic political systems is the fiscally perilous incentive calculus introduced by welfare-state redistributionism, wherein politicians lay claim to the hard-earned fruits of some people’s labor and then, under the guise of compassion, redistribute those fruits to other people who didn’t earn them in return for their votes.
Once that calculus was established, there is no way to avoid ending up where we now find ourselves, with a monstrous national debt and governmental “mission creep” wherein the purpose becomes to provide able-bodied people with all the necessities of life (and then some) that they were previously expected to provide for themselves.
Socialist systems invariably collapsed because they produced inverted incentive systems, in the sense of few incentives for the talented and creative to use their talents and creativity, and lots of incentives for the lazy and deadbeat to sponge off the system in “free rider” fashion.
And now comes Bernie and fellow Democrats to suggest replicating the essential logic of such wonderful places in America.
The message sent to our citizenry couldn’t be clearer: Don’t be a sap; stop with all the hard work and striving and just hop on the gravy train when it rolls by. There’s plenty of room for everyone.