Judt on social democracy
Tony Judt has a very worthwhile reflection on the current state of social democracy in the New York Review of Books. (Hat tip to commenter Todd Crawford.) A friend of social democracy, he argues that seeing social programs as a right as opposed to a scornful necessity for society’s worst off is the root of opening the discourse in America towards the possibility of social democracy. Judt argues:
But what if we treated humiliation itself as a cost, a charge to society? What if we decided to “quantify” the harm done when people are shamed by their fellow citizens before receiving the mere necessities of life? In other words, what if we factored into our estimates of productivity, efficiency, or well-being the difference between a humiliating handout and a benefit as of right? We might conclude that the provision of universal social services, public health insurance, or subsidized public transportation was actually a cost-effective way to achieve our common objectives.
This provides an intriguing alternative to a strict cost/benefit analysis of social programs like universal health care, a perspective that, Judt argues, takes us back to a time when political decisions were more likely to have moral/ethical dimensions and less likely to be based in cost and expediency.
-John
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- Do the right thing
- Compromise
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Another thing I like about this article is the fact that Judt is not advocating a completely socialized economy, but only those things that have broad reaching social utility. In other words, we don’t need the state to make sure we are all getting similar Blu-Ray technology or all our hamburger stands have some sort of uniformity in availability and quality. For a lot of economic markets a more capitalistic system is “fine” (I say “fine” because of the recent financial debacle). As above, Judt makes a special point for all these services/markets because (on the whole) I don’t think we realize how vitally important these markets are to increasing “societal wealth” (wealth not money). We are treating this health care debate as a proportionally equal slice of the pie, compared to the rest of the market. But it seems clear, having reached this point, taking this same attitude is only going to land us right back (in 20, 30, 40 years etc) where we are right now.