Tax farming, that is. Those of you with an interest in European history will remember that it was the public's grievances against the excesses of the Ferme generale -- the tax farmers -- that in part fueled the Revolution. You'd think that even Joe Lieberman would want to avoid reinventing it.
But I fear you'd be wrong, because what the individual mandate to buy health insurance from private for-profit insurers effectively does is to reinvent tax farming (which was a dreadfully inefficient revenue system, as well as an unpopular one). Or at least, the case for it seems unpleasantly compelling to me -- though I welcome attempts to convince me otherwise.
First, a quick (and by necessity overbroad) outline of how tax farming works. The Crown (or, of course, whoever else holds the authority to raise revenue via taxation) is entitled to be paid taxes -- it hardly matters by whom, or what the taxes are based on, but let's say they're a sales tax on salt, featuring a Crown monopoly on salt sales and a bunch of capricious exemptions to the liability to pay the tax. Collecting the tax is burdensome and labor-intensive. Enter the Farmers: private contractors who agree to pay the Crown a sum certain in exchange for the right to collect the tax on the Crown's behalf. That right is valuable to the Farmers for the obvious reason that they expect to collect more -- perhaps a great deal more -- than they have promised the Crown. And the deal allows them to keep anything beyond that sum that they can collect.
What this means, of course, is that the Crown winds up with less revenue than it would have had if it had collected the tax itself, even if you figure in the expense of the trained staff that would be needed to do the collecting: after all, the Farmers have to make a profit. It also means that there is a certain amount of abuse, since the Farm's enforcers have incentives to be much more interested in bringing in money than in upholding public confidence in the state's integrity. Plus, the more the Crown relies on the Farm for its operating funds, the more incentive it has to look the other way if abuses are brought to its attention (is this beginning to sound familiar?).
But it works for the Farmers, who become fabulously, scandalously wealthy. Or at least, it works for them until the Jacobins start cutting off their heads.
-- Now, let's think for a moment about that individual mandate. The mandate to buy health insurance is not, despite the talking point, all that much like the mandate to buy car insurance if you're going to own a car. It's not the same because while it's true that in many parts of the country life can be difficult if you don't have a car, you do in fact have alternatives to owning one. You can live in a place with good public transit; you can live with a vast amount of difficulty in a place with bad public transit; you can go off the grid; you can rely on the kindness of friends who do have cars. The insurance is a cost society imposes on you in exchange for your exercising the option of owning a useful but dangerous machine, because of the risk that other individuals will be injured as a result of your doing so.
By contrast, a health insurance mandate isn't a cost imposed in order to mitigate the social costs of your optional activity. Rather, it is a cost imposed as a condition of membership in society. You are expected to buy this insurance, if you can, because you are a human being living in this country, and not as a result of any activity or choice of activities on your part.
The contrast is crucial, because in general, it is the expenses that we are expected to bear simply because we're human beings, and members of this society, that we pay for via taxes. We can decide we don't want to pay for things society deems optional. But the things society decides are mandatory, from basic education through the military? Those are where just being here means you have to buy them whether you want them or not. Via taxes, whether we call them the Federal income tax or FICA or something else.
If we look at it this way, it becomes apparent that the instant there's a mandate on individuals to buy health insurance -- because it's a social good, because the government is insisting -- what we have in substance, even if not in name, is a government-imposed intended-to-be-universal health insurance system, one paid for via a new tax on every individual now required to buy health insurance. (And it's a new tax even on those of us who've been buying health insurance voluntarily; before the mandate, after all, we had the right to change our minds and stop buying if we wanted or needed to.)
The difference between this and other taxes is, of course, that instead of revenues being collected by the relevant taxing authority, the revenues will be collected by influential plutocrats, who intend to make enormous profits by collecting more from us -- far more, we have every reason to expect -- than the services we're paying for would cost if they were run by, and the revenue collection were done by, the government that's deemed the services to be a necessary part of the public weal, something to be used by all of us and for which all of us should be picking up part of the tab.
In other words, the difference is that instead of relatively open and publicly-reviewable tax collection by the Treasury, in a system where the goal at least is to spend all of the funds collected on actual public purposes, we're getting almost unreviewable tax collection by a new Farmers General, who take on the job with the admitted and blessed-by-Congress goal of skimming off a profit from the collections.
Everything old is new again. And just as rotten an idea as it was the first time.
-- Want to tell me I'm wrong? Really, I'd welcome it. I'd much rather be wrong than right on this one.