Bad Marriages
As I’ve been thinking through a number of different issues, I keep arriving at the utter stupidity of two contingent, harmful linkages in our social system. Both linkages should be dissolved immediately.
(1) The house-school linkage.
(2) The work-health care linkage.
Both of these connections are an accident of history, make almost no sense whatsoever, and make it very very difficult for people to create unique modes of living that suit their individual situation. If I could push a button and divorce houses from schools and work from health care, I would do it. I would prefer generous federal-level education vouchers, and generous federal-level universal insurance coverage over the status-quo. And I don’t like either of those ideas very much.
(I will die in the last ditch, however, to prevent further government involvement in the provision, as opposed to the financing, of education and health care. Whether you can get redistributive taxpayer financing without terrible government provision and control is a question for the ages. Other things equal, you should be opposed to a policy roughly in proportion to the degree that it interferes with price signals.)
Are there any other bad policy marriages that need to be annulled?
March 7th, 2006 14:19
Intellectual property compensation and distribution? People who invent good drugs or write good songs should get paid, but I’m not sure if artificially high prices are the best way to do that.
Somewhere in the huge mess that is the legacy airline industry there must be a policy marriage, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
March 7th, 2006 16:11
Amen. I’ve been bitching about this for a while now, and have come to believe that no matter how badly you implemented this change, and no matter how many negative externalities you introduced, you’d still have a net benefit.
The freedom to choose your neighborhood without regard to its public school and the freedom to choose your work without regard for its health care plan are the two biggest political prizes that might actually be in reach of our generation.
March 7th, 2006 16:24
Speaking of bad marriages, how about the linkage between:
(1) pair bond for household making, child raising, etc.
(2) pair bond for sex having
??
Not that this linkage doesn’t work for some, it does. But a person in my circles would have to be blind to ignore that there are lots of successful relationships that sever this linkage. And I think everyone can think of cases where the linkage has produced manifestly bad results. Of course their are downsides of severing the linkage too, but that is also probably true of any linkage you could think to criticize.
March 7th, 2006 17:58
Bill: Those aren’t policy linkages (at least not primarily).
It’s all well and good to tell people that maybe they shouldn’t want to pair-bond with the same person for sexual activity and housemaking, but in practice they’re still generally going to want that.
The problems there are more or less inherent, not created by policy - and to the extent they’re merely social convention, they’re still not amenable to change.
March 7th, 2006 20:02
Bad policy marriages:
how about, er, marriage and the state?
March 7th, 2006 21:19
Sigivald: Sure its not primarily a policy issue. And I wouldn’t presume to tell people what they should want, just what might be worth considering.
I think that those norms are quite amenable to change through reflection and discussion, as well as resulting from changes in circumstances of which policy is a part. For example, policy has played and/or could have played some role in determinning the extent to which a certain standard of living is attainable on one income. The norms under discussion are effected by the labor market and costs of living, as well as by such things as the women’s movement, norms regarding consumption, and the myriad factors that have led to increases in divorce.
I don’t think that the distinction between what is influenced by policy and what not is simple or straightforward at all.
March 8th, 2006 01:13
Place of birth and country of citizenship.
March 8th, 2006 02:23
The means of raising funds for the federal treasury and…
Social policy w/r/t home ownership
Social policy w/r/t provision of health care
Social policy w/r/t religious institutions
Social policy w/r/t charitable giving
Social policy w/r/t savings and investment patterns
Social policy w/r/t family size
Social policy w/r/t smoking, alcohol, and other vices
Social policy w/r/t (insert favorite tax code loophole here)
March 8th, 2006 09:53
The work/healthcare link is just miserable. Like you say, it worked a lot better when people had 50 year careers at the same company. Not so good nowadays.
The location/school one also seems incredibly poor. It seems like a recipe for inequality, resentment and no incentives to improve the quality at said schools.
March 8th, 2006 17:04
Maybe I’m missing the point (I often do) but it seems to me that the link between health care and work is less a marriage and more a conjoined twin.
While on the surface it looks like a weird combo, I think they’re as inseparable as work and vacation. Health care costs money and good health care costs a lot of money. Other than the lottery (and perhaps Anna Nicole Smith’s methods) work is the only way I know of to get money.
We can either pay for care, have our company pay for care, or pay more taxes to the gov’t for care. So, one way or another, our income pays for our health care.
The way I see it, all marriages are bad if there is no compromise in the relationship.
March 9th, 2006 13:51
Health care costs money and good health care costs a lot of money….
We can either pay for care, have our company pay for care, or pay more taxes to the gov’t for care. So, one way or another, our income pays for our health care.
Houses cost money and nice houses cost a lot of money. We can either pay for a house, have our company provide us with a house, or pay more taxes to the gov’t for our house. So, one way or another, our income pays for our houses.
Now, if you lose your job, are you homeless? No you are not. You can hopefully keep paying your rent or mortgage with your cash reserves. Or you can appeal to someone else to help you make those payments. Or you can sell something.
But if you lose your job, you are immediately uninsured. And that’s the bad marriage.
March 9th, 2006 20:03
[...] In an excellent post on bad “policy marriages” Cato’s Will Wilkinson says: If I could push a button and divorce houses from schools and work from health care, I would do it. I would prefer generous federal-level education vouchers, and generous federal-level universal insurance coverage over the status-quo. And I don’t like either of those ideas very much. [...]
March 12th, 2006 00:21
But if you lose your job, you are immediately uninsured.
Well, that’s not exactly true. You can continue to pay your premiums into the same group policy for up to a year under COBR coverage. And if you don’t want that policy, you can always purchase another. It isn’t that individual health insurance doesn’t EXIST — it’s that it’s granted a tax preference in the employer group setting that isn’t extended to the direct individual setting.