Here I Go Talking About Health Care Again...

Of course, the president is talking about it right now too. Nor is he the only one. It has been in a lot of news and blogs this month. In the New Republic, Johnathan Cohn writes what essentially amounts to a puff piece about President Obama keeping health care firmly in the public eye. From the other side of the political fence, Jenn Q Public (whose awesomeness I may have to concede despite our philosophical disagreements, judging from the excellent way she replies to intelligent arguments intelligently) criticizes the president for excluding the opposition from the discussion. She accuses him of a left wing bent on the topic which I cannot say I am confident he truly possesses. On Huffington Post, Steven Hill exorts the president to move further to the left and embrace European health care reform models... but he wiggles to the right a little in advancing a shared responsibility system of universal insurance on the model of France or Germany rather than true universal health care on the Swedish model. Meanwhile, a trifle more left-ward on HuffPo, Robert Creamer makes a solid point of the need for a public plan to compete with the private insurance system. Back to the right, the Cato Institute published an article by University of Chicago economist John Cochrane which was summarized excellently in Reason. This the same plan Jenn Q Public uses in her criticism of the exclusion of the right from the discussion, noting the author was not invited.

Since I already said it on her blog, I want to say it on my own blog too: I think that plans like that of Professor Cochrane (or the one offered by Suzanne Somers' plastic surgeon) should be represented in our discussion of public health and given their due consideration. I am not saying the solution will come from the right, or even that the free market plans offered by libertarians and conservatives are on the right track. In fact, I believe both Professor Cochrane and Dr. Hanson's plans contain great potential to make the situation far worse. That does not mean they should not be part of the conversation. Clearly, on this topic, there are ideas on the right. They may not come from the political wing of conservatism right now, but the ideas are there. They need to be represented to the policy-makers.

I am a committed supporter of a single-payer system and I believe that single-payer is not being given the consideration it deserves. I believe that President Obama, by removing single-payer from the table in the manner in which many liberals believe he is doing, is cutting off what could be a source of ideas and examples. In this particular area, as I have written before, socialism could be very good for capitalism. Yet it is being dismissed, at this point, with the same cavalier disregard as the ideas from the right.

We are in danger of a politically correct centrism derailing meaningful and lasting reform of the health care system by excluding the radical ideas from both sides. Despite my skepticism of a private sector solution, I want to see a program that addresses all my concerns and if it does then I don't care whose idea it is. The possibility always exists that the best system might be a hybrid in which a government plan competes on an even playing field with private policies, all making each other better (as President Obama originally described in his campaign) and such a hybrid would require ideas from both sides to perfect.

Perhaps most central, however, is the importance of debate in this process. We need radical health care change, on a systemic level, and it needs to be a quantitative and qualitative improvement over the current system to justify the effort and expense. Regardless of the plan that is ultimately adopted, we need the input and critical thinking of both sides. A socialized plan must address libertarian concerns and a free market plan must address the concerns of social liberals. Both sets of concerns are real and valid, when one dismisses all the political polemic attached to them. Quality and patient choice of doctors and facilities are both terribly important, but so are access, accountability, and affordability.

I have spoken derisively of bi-partisanship before and I am not advocating that health policy be tailored to receive broad Republican support in the House and Senate. It will not. In my opinion, even the most conservative policy compromise will ultimately pass on party lines in the House and with the support of only a small handful of moderate Republicans in the Senate. I do not believe the Republican Party believes that health care is a national priority. Michelle Bachmann and Richard Shelby will care more about whether the bill requires health care providers (or, God forbid, the government!) to pay for birth control pills or abortions than they will about whether or not it improves our badly damaged health care system. This is simply to be expected. Even a harshly conservative proposal like the McCain Plan would pass, in its final form, on Democratic votes and the support of its GOP sponsor and a few moderates.

That does not mean, however, that we should exclude those with ideas from the process. Everyone who wants to participate and has something to offer should be invited. Every idea should be heard. Each side should criticize the other and each side should use the other's criticism to address the issues about which all Americans are concerned.

This issue is simply too important to be left to those who wish to pursue politically correct avenues of thought.

A Radical Foreign Policy Change, Pt. 3: Collective Security or National Security?

In the post that began this series, I attempted to define the goals of foreign policy. I concluded they were two-fold: the furtherance of the nation's economic needs, or trade, and the defense of the nation's security. The latter is particularly complicated. Just what is national security and how is it achieved? The two simple words are used to describe quite a few competing meanings.

Prior to the World Wars (and during the interlude between them), national security meant the defense of the country's borders and the protection of its sphere of influence in the Americas and the Pacific Ocean. Beginning not long after the end of the Second World War, it came to mean victory in the Cold War. During WWI and in the aftermath of the Cold War, at least to a significant portion of the national leadership, it meant pursuing an agenda of universal democratic empire. Whether the words 'democratic' or 'empire' are encapsulated in sarcastic quotation marks depends on whether one is describing the ambitions of Woodrow Wilson or today's neoconservatives and there are significant degrees of shading on both words between the two. Regardless of which variation of the phrase one chooses to embrace, the goal was a democratic world order under the benevolent messianic leadership of the United States. Nor has this goal entirely disappeared. It is difficult to absolve even the current administration of such a vision, the foreign policy differences between Democrats and Republicans have largely been differences of tactics rather than differences of strategy.

The Cold War is over, it has been won. The world is no longer endangered by international Communism, and whether such danger was ever legitimate is open to question. The World Wars have also been won, and the aftermath of the First should have taught us all a lesson about the practicability of universalist dreams. We are no longer an isolated 'island' between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, the world has shrunk so that such distances mean relatively little. So all of the theories of national security with which our nation is familiar are, if not obsolete, obsolescing rapidly. We need a new strategy for the modern world.

Such a strategy already exists. It has been tried before, with both great success and disastrous failure.

In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, with the great messianic empire builder of his era weighing his options as emperor of a tiny Mediterranean island even smaller than the not-very-big one on which he was born, the leaders of the nations of Europe met at what is today called the Congress of Vienna. During its sessions, Napoleon returned from Elba for his last hurrah and the great European summit had ended before his final bolt was entirely shot. The purpose was simple: Napoleon, for good or ill, had changed the world and Europe must now decide how to react to the changes. The goal of the Congress was the drawing of the European map, which had been entirely thrown into disarray and now needed to be reordered. This was accomplished by the diplomats and made concrete by the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo.

The architechts of the Congress of Vienna were two men with different personalities and similar goals: Prince Klemens Menzel von Metternich and Tsar Alexander I of Russia. The former was primarily concerned with protecting the Great Power status of Austria, the remaining rump of the once vast Hapsburg Empire. The latter was greatly concerned with establishing Russia, once and for all, as a European power. It was impossible to ignore the ideas of the British Empire, as the British had been fighting France consistently for the entire duration of the Napoleonic Wars (broken by brief ceasefires that were merely preparations for renewed conflict) and every other country represented had at some point allied itself with Napoleon. The paramount concern of the British, for admittedly selfish reasons, was the balance of power among the other Great Powers. The visionary Alexander, the practical Metternich, and the various representatives (Lord Castlereagh, then Wellington himself, and finally Lord Clancarty) of victorious Britain together devised a system of political alliances to secure what a latter day Russian 'tsar' would call 'collective security.' It is perhaps ironic that a system envisioned by a Russian and which ultimately favored British interests was named after the representative of the least powerful of its devisors.

For nearly one hundred years, from 1815 to 1914, the Metternich System kept the peace in Europe. There were conflicts, revolutions, and wars... but the system held together so well that none of these flare-ups were prolonged or wide-spread. Wars were signals for the diplomats to redouble their efforts, and the diplomats frequently resolved these disputes in such an even-handed fashion that one wonders precisely why anyone bothered to fight. The worst wars of this period, the Crimean War and the Balkan Wars, occurred out of the reach of this system in or on the borders of the Ottoman Empire. This, of course, was the flaw: the system had finite limits, and once those finite limits were passed it was difficult to confine the grievances outside of those limits. In 1914, as a direct outgrowth of the Balkan Wars and the indirect result of the coalescence of a unified German state to counterbalance Austria and rival Russia and France, the system broke down and horror ensued.

After each World War, attempts were made to return to a system of collective security. They were less than successful. Wilson's Fourteen Points were brushed cheerfully aside by the victors in favor of divvying up the plunder and his League of Nations was emasculated by the voters of his own country. The Soviet Union was excluded from the comity of Europe in favor of pursuing futile alliances with the former Russian ruling class that prolonged the Russian Civil War but never really had any hope of deciding it. It should not be surprising that when the civil war was over, Russia was not terribly trusting of Europe and Europe was faintly afraid of Russia. Never the less, it was only after failed attempts to renew an alliance with the Western democracies for the purpose of what was called 'collective security' for the first time that the USSR signed its pact with the Nazis. When that happened, the Second World War was guaranteed.

During the later phases of the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union made new plans for real collective security in the form of the United Nations. The American assumption was that the UN would be the means by which universal democratic empire would be achieved while the Russian beleif was that it was a forum for the diplomats to maintain collective international security. No one really expected any other votes to matter. Differing conceptions of the UN, and the Cold War that arose from those differing conceptions, did to it as WWII did to the League of Nations. Now the United States (and most other nations powerful enough to do so) scoffs at the UN and its 'violations of national sovreignty' and does as it pleases while the UN has become the plaything of the disenfranchised Third World. Collective security was stillborn yet again.

The United States needs to recognize that Russia has not ceased to be a Great Power and resents its treatment as a potential vassal or ungrateful stepchild. The United States needs to understand that Europe is coalescing into one of the superpowers of the future and will not remain content to simply follow the American lead for much longer. The United States needs to fully face the potential threats and challenges offered by China instead of merely seeing it as a potential shopping mall. The United States needs to recognize the vast potential of India, which inches closer to fulfilment every year. More simply: the United States needs to understand that victory in the Cold War has not made it the sole superpower in the world, it has simply restored the pre-Cold War, multi-power status quo. Triumphalism and universalism have to go out the window.

They have to be replaced by collective security. We live in a dangerous world in which all of the nations on the above list are armed with powerful nuclear weapons. So are at least two states not on that list: Israel and Pakistan. The latter is currently in disturbing disarray. That is largely the fault of the United States and its ambivalence toward Pakistani democracy when that interfered with its acitivities in Afghanistan.

The United States needs to commit itself to a policy of seeking a modus vivendi with its fellow nations on equal, honest terms. It must strive to work in a community of superpowers for the goal of collective world security. It may have to accept that sometimes it will not be able to be the leader of those pursuits. We must seek partners, not satellites.

There are real international issues that must be faced: peace in the Middle East, the threat of Islamic fundamentalism to regimes throughout Africa and Asia, the problems of terrorism, narcotics, and organized crime, the environmental question, global human rights, world poverty, and many more. Someone, at some point, has criticized the United States for 'not leading' on every one of these issues. The real problem is that these are not issues one nation can solve, they are issues the world must work to solve. The 'leadership' of the United States has frequently done as much harm in many of these areas as it has good.

A strategy of collective security is the only viable strategy for the world in which we now live. National security can no longer be guaranteed (if it ever could) by a policy of invading our enemies and rewarding our friends. We must engage Europe, Russia, China, and India in search of our common interests and common concerns and to settle our points of contention. '

'Democracy', which has always been a heavily loaded and highly subjective term, cannot be established by brute force in the face of a hostile world. If we people our world with enemies, democracy will not protect us when they all vote against us. Contrary to idealistic belief among neoconservatives and the politically naive, democratic nations are not automatically naturally friendly to one another. Rome and Carthage, who fought three genocidal wars which ended in the total destruction of the latter, were both republics. Hitler and Mussolini were elected democratically. Japan had three peaceful changes of government prior to and during WWII, with each government being more vocally devoted to war with the United States than the last. The United States, the world's poster boy for democracy, has overthrown democratically elected regimes in Guatemala, Chile, and Iran, helped to brutally suppress democratic revolution against a fascist junta in El Salvador, and deliberately took action to prevent democratic elections in South Korea and South Vietnam.

So let's start talking a lot more about collective security than national security and start teaching democratic values by example instead of by propaganda.

A Radical Foreign Policy Change, Pt. 2: A Story About England and Portugal

In my first posting of March I asked the following question: What is the purpose of foreign policy?

My answer was two-fold: The purpose of foreign policy is to secure the economic interest of a nation and to defend its larger national security as a whole.

So today, we are going to talk a little economics. I am not a professional economist, but the gentleman upon whose work I will be drawing upon was one of the two or three men (with Adam Smith and possibly Thomas Malthus, your mileage may vary) who defined the science of economics as we know it today: David Ricardo. Capitalism owes at least as much to him as it does to Adam Smith, possibly more. Most importantly, he was one of the first modern thinkers to seriously expound the idea of international trade in any kind of systematic, scientific manner. He also deeply explored the ways the economics actually plays out in the real world, as opposed to on the pages of a book. Perhaps unique among the economists of his day, Mr. Ricardo was an extremely successful capitalist: his ideas were solid enough that by applying them to his investment practices, he made money. How many economics professors can say that today?

Ricardo was responsible for two fundamental theories of economic canon that figure prominently into his work on trade: the Law of Diminishing Returns (which, though sadly misrepresented by modern capitalists, says that an increase in wages does not raise prices but merely lowers profits; that is, no, Ford is not forced to raise their prices because of union agreements) and the Labor Theory of Value. The latter is particularly important because it says that a commodity's value is based on the work it takes to produce that product and bring it to market.

Background information shared, this leads us into the economic definition of foreign policy: a nation's foreign policy should include securing and protecting necessary foreign trade. Here, however, we come into a large grey area. Free traders and protectionists agree on how foreign trade is best 'secured and protected' and on the definition of 'necessary.' The free trader's argument is that we must, for the good of our economy, have a healthy export market shipping every product we make into every possible market around the world and thus, to achieve that goal, we must allow other nations free and equal access to our market. If we do not, they will deny us access to theirs. Protectionists say that it is economically necessary to secure a balance of trade in our favor, that we must export more than we important for the security of our economy and that we must limit imports while securing exports. Both experiments have been tried to various degrees, with extreme protectionist policies and extreme free market policies enjoying equal records of miserable failure.

Let me make notes of that here by itself, so it is not missed: both extreme protectionism and absolute free markets have failed the United States. The U.S. economy was built on protectionism, but foreign imports were always a part of it and protectionism was kept from rising to punitive levels. Prohibitive tariffs like Smoot-Hawley, during the Great Depression, and the 1990s steel tariff have always done more damage than good. Increased automotive tariffs have certainly not saved the US auto-makers, even if they have encouraged many foreign companies to build American plants.

This is because modern theories of trade completely forget the real purpose of trade, in much the same way modern supply-side economics entirely forget the purpose of supply. Economies are driven by demand. One cannot sell something that the market does not want. One might be able to convince the market that it wants something by sheer weight of advertising capital, as the supply-side gurus of the United States have been doing for many years now, but such artificial bubbles eventually burst and the economic damage is terrible. Supply must meet demand, or eventually the people in the supply business fail.

Trade follows the same principle. This was illustrated by Ricardo before any of us were even born, and the facts continue to slap world economies in the face again and again.

Let's say that England and Portugal both produce wine and wool. For objective economic reasons, England is able to produce wool at a more efficient ratio of labor to total production than Portugal. It makes sense, then, for England to produce wool and sell the surplus to Portugal. It makes no sense at all for England to buy wool from Portugal when it can produce wool at home more efficiently and for a cheaper final cost. Likewise, it makes excellent economic sense for Portugal to buy wool from England to supplement domestic supply but none at all to try to export wool to England: they need all they can get and England can produce it more efficiently for themselves anyway.

The same is true, in reverse, for wine. Portugal is able to produce more wine, for less work, than England. It can meet domestic demand and sell the surplus to England quite easily. England, on the other hand, is best served by producing for domestic consumption and supplementing its demands with imports from Portugal. Attempting to export wine to Portugal would be silly and counterproductive.

This is a simple example, but it clearly illustrates many of the problems with our modern national trade policies. We do not gear our trade to meet foreign demand and domestic capabilities, but rather oscillate wildly between attempting to trade free access to foreign markets for free access to our own and attempting to deny all access to our market while trying to flood foreign markets. Neither strategy is rational or pragmatic.

The solution is to survey our domestic domand and production capabilities, then to produce based on domestic demand while exporting products of which we produce a surplus to countries with a demand for same. Because we have a primarily capitalist economic structure (though the 'free market' hard-liners have done everything they could to try to change that, with more success than is good for the country), and I don't wish to fundamentally change that (if anything, I want to restore capitalist underpinnings), it is important for the government to confine domestic action to appropriate regulation of business practices. However, our trade agreements can take demand into account and they should. In the long run, pragmatic and fundamentally sound trade policies will do far more good than any 'free trade agreement' or tariff ever could.

Perhaps this sounds like a moderate position, but if you consider how the US has done business for the last twenty years or more, nothing could be more radical.

Recommended Reading: Just A Suggestion

Some of you may have noticed an addition to the gadgets on the left side of the screen over the past week.

If you read my stuff and are a bit impatient with the fact that I mostly only post new material once a week, definitely check out 'The Snarking Lot' and 'Liberal Values.' They are updated a touch more frequently, and both are well worth the time it takes to read them. Jeffrey's stuff on 'The Snarking Lot' is funny as heck when he has something vicious to say, and genuinely gracious when he has something good today. Ron, who writes 'Liberal Values', is a smart guy whose stuff has rapidly earned my respect in the relatively short time I've been reading it and there is a lively little band of folks of all political views making comments.

So check them both out, you'll be glad you did.

A Radical Foreign Policy Change

Let's face it. The drawing down of forces in Iraq is good news. The fact that we have a specific date and a specific number is also good. We also have to face the fact, as much as we don't like it, that involvement in Iraq is not over and will not be for several more years. The worst thing about wars is that they are much easier to start than to end, much easier to escalate than to deescalate, and nations are much easier to break than they are to build. This is a lesson we should have learned from Korea and Vietnam: officially, North and South Korea are still at war and the United States is still the major peacekeeper on the border. We have been in South Korea for more than fifty years. In Vietnam we learned two hard lessons: trying to fight a conventional war against a guerilla force while occupying a hostile populace is impossible (a lesson Napoleon learned in Spain and we should have studied) and that political settlement of a conflict is useless without the means to enforce our end of it.

We repeat our mistakes, and the mistakes of others. Iraq, despite all the good news for which we should be genuinely happy, threatens to become a second South Korea while Afghanistan looms ever larger as another South Vietnam. Our escalation in Afghanistan is not at all good news, yet there may be no political alternative for the administration. The bad news is that Afghanistan has the same potential to suck the heart out of President Obama's domestic agenda that Vietnam presented for President Johnson. If one wishes, one could call Afghanistan a 'second Afghanistan' based on the Soviet experience there or a 'fourth Spain' based on Napoleon's experiences in the Iberian Peninsula.

I am not trying to be un-American, to fail to support our troops (who will be the ones to suffer from any repetition of history, after all), or to undermine the success of President Obama. I am simply stating historical facts and lessons and the potential for terrible disaster they present in Afghanistan. Should this policy of nation building succeed against all odds (as I believe Iraq may, in the end, reluctantly) then I will admit I was wrong. I may have been wrong about the failure of the Iraq War.

I should note that does not mean I was wrong to oppose the Iraq War. It was all the things my fellow liberals have called it: President Bush did indeed 'take the eye off the ball', it was a cynical attempt to fight a winnable conventional war to detract attention from a difficult guerilla action, it was an unjust 'war of convenience', and it was a naked move closer to American empire. I believe, considering all those facts, if a viable Iraqi state develops out of all this mess it is a happy accident for which the imperial ambitions of the neoconservatives cannot take credit despite the fact that they will obviously do so. It was liberals of my parents' generation, after all, who took credit for the end of the Vietnam War despite the fact that Richard Nixon entered the White House with the specific goal of eventually getting us out and the anti-war movement's main contribution was to give Nixon the political cover to do so out of 'necessity.'

It is too late to prevent the mistakes of the past, and will be difficult to stop the mistake of the present in Afghanistan. Nor do I wish to write a political polemic about either war. My goal in this post is to begin the first of several intended to be constructive policy statements about the future of American foreign policy. My desire is to somehow prevent the mistakes of the future.

We can start by examining the questions of foreign policy in the same light as those of health care and the economy: what is the purpose of foreign policy and what should our foreign policy goals be?

The purpose of foreign policy is two-fold: the advancement of our economic interests and the advancement of our national security. It is necessary, in both arms of policy, to follow principles of enlightened self-interest. It is not enough to do what we want, because of its perceived benefits, but it is important to know what is really good for us and to act on that knowledge. As I discussed in my exploration of capitalism, these are not always the same thing at all.

So what is best for us? There are several models that have been followed, past and present, by other nations or imperial powers with varying degrees of success and failure. Russia has sometimes succeeded and sometimes failed by working with roughly the same foreign policy outline since the reign of the first tsar, and arguably longer. While the degree of success has varied, the current Russian state has existed in some form since Ivan the Terrible. Their strategy has been to seek peaceful relations on a basis of neutrality and increasing influence outside of their immediate borders while seeking to be the only police power projecting influence into the smaller powers along its borders. This strategy created the Russian Empire and sustained the Soviet Union through the Cold War. It also led to the disasters of the Crimean and Russo-Japanese Wars and contributed significantly to the horrors of WWI and the Russian Revolution. It was the justification for the Soviet failure in Afghanistan and the reason the Soviets were not willing to annhilate the world over Cuba. Clearly, this policy has had good and bad effects. It has the benefit, however, of being logical, consistent, and 'sane'.

I am not saying that we should simply copy this Russian policy, but I am saying that in the main it has been good for Russia more often than it has been bad for Russia. It also means that the Russians have always had a clear sense of what is good or bad for Russia and why it is thus. There is a benefit to such knowledge.

The United States, prior to WWII, largely followed a policy of armed, benign neutrality. The US used military force to protect its borders or advance its immediate interests and attempted to have as cordial a relationship as possible with the major powers of the world without becoming entangled in their alliances or conflicts. In the 1910s, based on a vision of universal democratic 'empire' (which I use very loosely, because Wilson's vision was not imperialist at all in the traditional sense), President Woodrow Wilson intervened in WWI (essentially a European conflict) with the goal of democratizing Europe. For intrinsically European reasons and the fact that most Americans had no such aspirations, Wilson's adventure failed ideologically despite military success. He could neither dictate terms to the allies whose victory he made possible, nor secure ratification of his own treaty at home.

In the intervening years, however, diplomatic conflicts with Japan over space and resources in the Pacific began to change the perception of America's 'borders' and 'interests' overseas. By the time WWII began, the idea of universal democratic empire had begun to take shape again in the minds of President Roosevelt and some of his advisors and political allies. By the time the United States joined WWII, the country at large was increasingly ready for this objective as well. Victory in WWII and the beginnings of the Cold War made many believe this democratic universalism was necessary and just: the United States was the New Rome fighting for civilization against darkness. This view of American foreign policy certainly led to the United States' reconstruction of Western Europe and ultimate victory in the Cold War, but it should be important to remember that the USSR collapsed as much because of the failures of Communism to keep its promises as any American policy, and that it was detente that made the glasnost and perestroika policies that culminated in the Soviet collapse possible, not the wild 'cowboy' escalations of the Reagan years.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the achievement of universal democratic empire seemed to be assured. Russia would become a cheerful ally and supporter of US goals, so went the prevailing imperial wisdom, and would cooperate in the new world supremacy of the United States. Democratic nations would naturally look to the United States, the 'leader of the free world', as a model and benevolent patron.

This has simply not been the case, and careful consideration makes the idea that it would have been the case laughable. Russia is still Russia, for all the change of the form of government and the attraction to aspects of American culture (it should be remembered that the United States and Russia are both pluralistic, multi-ethnic societies with certain shared egalitarian social values) does not change the fact that the Russian ethos is fundamentally different from the Western value system. Not so completely different as to be totally alien, it is true, but there is certainly enough of a difference to matter. Russia will never be another nation's happy satellite.

Perhaps more importantly, it should be noted that the whole attraction of democracy is freedom. Democratic nations want to enjoy that freedom, not become de facto client states to a greater power. Wilson's romantic ideals aside, universal democratic empire is impossible: democracy is pluralist and not autocratic. No one nation can seek to dominate a democratic empire, a genuine universal democratic empire must be entirely democratic throughout. No American, despite the lack of compunction at the idea of telling Israel or Great Britain what their policy should be or the willingness to judge Iran and Syria, is willing to allow Europe to dictate policy to America or be judged by Venezuela and Russia. Clearly, the policy of American empire that has been pursued up to this point and is still being pursued as I type has failed.

This does not, necessarily, mean we should allow France and Germany to dictate our policy or accept Russia and Venezuela's moral judgements. It does, however, mean that perhaps we should recognize that we cannot dictate the policy of every friendly nation or expect the world to unequivocally share our judgement of unfriendly nations.

The substitution of a nation building campaign in Afghanistan for one in Iraq is not a sufficient departure from the policies of the past. We do not need to simply review the policies of the Bush Administration or the Reagan Administration, but rather we need to acknowledge that the world is a different place than it was during or after WWII and that the United States needs a different global strategy to operate in that different world. Isolationism failed and universalism is no longer possible. Personally, I find pragmatic nationalism to be extremely unpalatable but it must be admitted that it would be an improvement over the current obsolete philosophy of universal empire.

That does not mean I am advocating such an approach. I believe alternatives can be found to pragmatic nationalism as well, if enlightened self interest is applied to the challenges that face us.

Therefore a radical change in foreign policy rests on some basic facts:

1.) We must admit and accept, as a nation, that a policy of universalism (at the very least, the policy of a universalism led by America as the imperial nation) has failed in the 21st century.

2.) We must also admit and accept that we are not playing a zero sum game in which our only choices are universal empire or total isolationism, as the politicians often cast the choice.

3.) We must determine whether we, as a nation, are willing to accept a policy of pragmatic nationalism or whether we have the ideals and courage to seek an alternative.

4.) Either way, we must accept that the United States is part of a pluralistic society of nations and that China, Russia, and Europe are great powers to which we cannot simply dictate and that India will certainly become so within the century. We have, to some extent (perhaps failing too much in the opposite direction) admitted this in regard to China, we must remember it when dealing with Russia and Europe.

I don't believe that the universalist ideal is totally dead. Nationalism has been greatly discredited, not only by the world wars but in the intervening years between and after them, as a viable system of human political interaction. I believe that some form of universalism is ultimately necessary, that some sort of global system of governance will ultimately prevail. I believe it must be democratic, both in its totality (as opposed to say, the United Nations) and in its composition (we are not going to achieve a global democracy as long as powerful ethnocentric police states like China and Iran remain as they are), but that it cannot be 'imperial.' Nor do I believe it is the responsibility of the United States to bring this universalist ideal to fruition. It will happen naturally or it will not happen, it cannot be forced. We, certainly, cannot force it on the rest of the world. To paraphrase a great t-shirt, 'Forcing democracy is like fighting for peace.'

We must practice democracy and we must puruse the best interests of our people, as a nation, in an enlightened and mature manner with a true knowledge of our capabilities and limitations.

That would be a radical change.

What exactly do I mean when I say I'm a capitalist?

As I have noted in several pieces, true capitalism (a truly free market) is governed not by omnipotent-but-invisible 'market forces' or the quasi-deistic being known as 'the Market' (or even the quasi-deistic being known as Milton Friedman, still far too popular with too many in Washington) but rather by all participants acting in enlightened self interest. Note that I said 'all participants': business, consumers, employees, government, and the human beings who compose the former and the latter. The word 'enlightened' is important too.

In theory, this is something we learn at a young age: what we want and what we need are not always the same thing and we don't always want what is best for us, so it is important to carefully consider the consequences of our actions, and deliberately hurting others to get what we want is wrong. We all need some form of what society calls 'love', which can take a wide variety of forms. Yet sex or the physical lust for sex are not love. If we act on our sexual desires without considering the consequences of our actions, we can hurt ourselves and others in a great many ways. We all need to eat, yet gluttony is more than simple hunger. We all, because of the facts of our economic system, need money to survive; but greed is not the simple need for the security of money.

'Enlightened' self interest is difficult. It requires that we know what is genuinely best for us, which can be a very difficult proposition. We have trouble, at times, knowing when to stop eating before we get a bellyache or gain too much weight to be healthy. If we eat too much, we get sick. Clearly, eating so much we get sick is not in our best interest no matter how good the food or how much of it we think we want. We find, in the end, we didn't really know what we wanted.

Consumers and employees are people, businesses and government are made up of people. So why do we expect all of these people to act in a way we know we ourselves do not always act, and assume such a process will be entirely self-regulating with no need for interference of any kind? For all the talk of hard-nosed common sense bandied about by today's champions of the 'free market', the very assumption on which they base their economic science is entirely against what they know of human nature. It is dependent on everyone knowing exactly what is best for themselves, always acting in that way, and not allowing any degree of persuasion to convince them that what is bad for them is good for them. If you really think about all of this long enough, it makes a lot less sense than socialized medicine or ending the war on drugs.

There is also a trick in the concept of freedom: if everyone is free, then what is to stop people from using their freedom to deprive others of theirs? This is why the federal system of checks and balances was designed in government: to ensure a government able to administer a nation in order to preserve the freedoms of its citizens while preventing that government from itself depriving its citizens of their freedoms. So why do we not use the same logical reasoning and apply it to economics, instead of applying a monetarist economic standard based entirely on faith that 'it is thus'?

So then, what is a genuine free market?

Let's start with what we mean by freedom.

English has so many words and concepts for freedom that it is sometimes difficult to define all of them. 'License' is used in more than one way, as are 'liberty' and 'freedom', and 'independence' is not something entirely possible in an economic sense. Nothing in an economy is 'independent', every economic facet (business, consumers, employees, government) depends on the others.

So I am going to abandon English entirely in defining the free market, ironic since the first capitalist thinkers wrote in English, and use the language of Communism, Russian, to double the irony.

Russian has two different words that both carry very different concepts of freedom. 'Volia' is total freedom from all outside authority: the license to do what you please, when you please, if you have the capacity to do so. You may do anything that you can do, anytime you wish to do it. It is freedom without any limitation whatsoever. The problem with volia is that its exercise may deprive others of their own freedom, and those with the greatest capacity to do as they wish have all the freedom. Those without the capacity to stop them have none. When a political conservative uses the word 'free market' the concept he means is equivalent to volia.

Svoboda is the concept of civil and social liberties and responsibilities shared among the members of a society. The Western concept of democratic political freedom is analogous to svoboda. It is not without limit, proper exercise of svoboda means that one respects the rights and priveleges of others while excercising their own. Individuals do not have individual svoboda, everyone shares in it. In the ideal Western democratic setting, svoboda is shared equally by all in society. We all have the same basic rights, the opportunity to earn or lose the same priveleges based on our merits, and the same responsibilities to respect the rights and priveleges of others.

I believe in a truly free market system in which business, consumers, employees, government, and the people who make up the former and latter of those institutions share svoboda within the complete economy. Business owners and corporate management understand their responsibilities to their employees and customers and their priveleges and responsibilities under the law and act accordingly. Employees' rights are respected and they understand their responsibilities to their employer and under the law. Consumers are aware of their rights and recourses if wronged, while aware of their own responsibilities within the economy. Government acts as an honest broker between employer and employee and business and consumer, regulating against abuses.

That is capitalism, because it is the only free market in which 'free' is anything other than a word. Modern institutions such as immensely powerful corporations, monolithic commercial advertising at all levels of culture, corporate tax incentives and subsidies, monopolies and cartels that circumvent fair competition, and the increasing shift away from raising capital to produce wealth to making a profit off the raising of capital are not institutions of capitalism. While some of these trends are impossible to reverse, government regulation can reverse others and moderate the rest. Under such circumstances, such regulation is not contrary to the spirit of capitalism but defending it from the unrestained excess enjoyed by those whose volia is currently secured by their money and power.

Many of the world's economies are increasingly seeking to follow the Western example of the free market. Let's get to work to make it something that is, once again, worth following, shall we?

Health Care Reform: What Do We Want to Accomplish?

I am going to turn my attention away from 'negative' writing about Republicans or corporations and focus back on 'positive' issue-related material this week.

The health care debate is raging again. Howard Dean and Kathleen Reardon are writing busily about the subject of national health policy on HuffPo and one gets the idea they are targetting each other: especially when the latter singles the former out by name. I see that as sort of a dead give away. Both make highly valid points, and it is a shame that they are spending time beating on each other over tactics instead of writing more of actual substance on the subject. I understand why Governor Dean feels that Professor Reardon is mistaken to give credence to congressional Republican posturing about the stimulus bill's medical content and agree with his characterization of the representatives in question and his defense of government studies into the cost and efficacity of medical treatment. Yet I also understand Professor Reardon's reaction to the governor's column.

So I am not going to write about the health care elements of the stimulus bill, or again mention either of the two authors for whom I have an equal and healthy respect. Nor, despite my strong temptation, am I going to write about one of the most well-meaning but wrong-headed ideas I have ever seen from a purported expert. Said expert linked their idea in reply to Governor Dean's posting, and I will simply say I am slightly aghast at the cold-blooded utiliatarianism implicit in the notion.

Instead I am going to be practical and ask a straight-forward question.

What do we want health care reform to accomplish?

This is not a simple question. There are many ideas from various people on the right (yes, ideas from the right, it's true) about how to widen 'health coverage.' Some of them, when examined on face value, sound very practical. However, all 'coverage' is not equal and 'coverage' does not guarantee 'care'. If one spends half the year arguing with one's carrier about whether one's flexible spending expenditures are legitimate and is expected to provide documentation of those expenditures not explicitly required in the paperwork received with the program, while one's flexible spending account is frozen and one is still required to pay for it while frozen, clearly 'coverage' isn't good enough in that instance. So simply covering everyone, as Governor Mitt Romney did in Massachusetts, is not enough.

At the very base minimum, then, health care reform should provide more people currently being sued by hospitals for expensive procedures that rich people get for far lower fees because of their insurance with health care and legal protection from such lawsuit. Medicaid could be extended to cover everyone who does not receive health insurance from their employers, period, while private health insurance could be required to meet minimum standards based on Medicaid or Medicare. Neither of these programs is perfect, but compared to some HMOs they are a dream come true. This is roughly along the lines of the program President Obama described in his election campaign.

I believe we can do better. I favor a national, single payer medical program. I believe the HMOs can be nationalized quickly and efficiently and incorporated into and expanded Medicaid/Medicare system subsidized by payroll taxes. Everyone who works pays their payroll taxes, everyone who does not receives traditional Medicaid until they are working again. This is superior to the existing, separate systems of shared costs used by the HMOs because everyone would be sharing costs on a national level. Essentially, this would be a national HMO. It would have government oversight and be accountable to elected representatives, who would be accountable to their constituents. Oversight power should be strictly defined and limited: the oversight committee should not have the power to gut the system or to dictate policy, only to audit and review performance and police corruption. Bureaucracy should be vastly trimmed over its present level in private HMOs: qualified doctors and informed patients should make medical decisions together without the interference of a man in a suit with a friendly smile, a plastic name tage, and a roll of red tape and a black marker in his pocket.

In many cases, single-payer health care would be preferable to even the best private health insurance. It would eliminate a major financial strain on corporations struggling to survive difficult economic times. Freed of the responsibility to pay for their employee's health care, they would also lose one of the powerful levers that allows them to feel a sense of ownership of their employees. In that sense, single-payer would be good for employer and employee.

I see only one true objection to nationalization and that is the issue of liability. HMOs, with Republican support, have sought to eliminate their accountability for the damage their decisions to provide or not provide health care cause and have frequently been successful. It can be argued that with nationalization, the government will have even more incentive to limit the patient's right to hold health care professionals and provider's liable. However, I believe that the genuine difference between legitimate and 'frivolous' complaints is much clearer than conservatives like to pretend. Ultimately, the strength of any claim is proven in court. If someone wins a lawsuit, then a judge and jury clearly did not find it frivolous. A single payer system could formulate a uniform system of compensation and accountability for malpractice, something lacking in our private system. This too could actually be an improvement. Most importantly, with no bureaucrat empowered to deny care based on cost, the issue of HMO negligence would cease to exist. The course of care recommended by the doctor and agreed to by the patient would always be followed.

The losers in this system are the various health insurance corporations in the medical business and trial lawyers who represent or sue them. However, the management of the corporations in question are hardly paupers. They have their golden parachutes ready, whatever happens. Trial lawyers will never lack for cases.

If one really looks at the big picture, socialized medicine isn't radical at all.