Last night I put up a post titled Where are the compassionate conservatives? based on the column of the same title by Pulitzer Prize winner Eugene Robinson. He was especially offended by Ron Paul's response to a hypothetical question about a person without health care insurance.
So is Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman. In this New York Times column, titled the same as this post, he responds to precisely the same incident.
Krugman begins with noting that Milton Friedman offered a point of view best expressed by the words "Free to Choose," which were the title of a TV show by that previous Nobel Economics Laureate, somewhat based on his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom. Krugman notes how Ronald Reagan took and amplified Friedman's approach, and then notes laconically
But that was then. Today, “free to choose” has become “free to die.”
Krugman tells us
The incident highlighted something that I don’t think most political commentators have fully absorbed: at this point, American politics is fundamentally about different moral visions.
And after telling us that Paul tried to evade the question, ignoring the fact that people without insurance often fail to get necessary medical care and thus die, he offers a second point about the exchange, that
very few of those who die from lack of medical care look like Mr. Blitzer’s hypothetical individual who could and should have bought insurance. In reality, most uninsured Americans either have low incomes and cannot afford insurance, or are rejected by insurers because they have chronic conditions.
And he is just getting started.
You should read - and widely distribute - Krugman's column. I acknowledge that I felt similarly about Robinson's when I read it last night.
Krugman goes through the data, including the impact upon children, especially important in light of recent data on poverty from the Census Bureau. He tells us that one in 6 children in Texas, home of George Bush who mouthed the words "compassionate conservative" and of Rick Perry who demonstrates his own lack of compassion in his pride in the most executions under any governor, lacks health insurance.
We then read
So the freedom to die extends, in practice, to children and the unlucky as well as the improvident. And the right’s embrace of that notion signals an important shift in the nature of American politics.
. And lest you think this does not represent a shift, Krugman turns to the words of Hayek, the economist other than Friedman to whom conservatives most often turn, who supported
“a comprehensive system of social insurance” to protect citizens against “the common hazards of life,” and singled out health in particular.
Perhaps the key words in the piece are these:
Now, however, compassion is out of fashion — indeed, lack of compassion has become a matter of principle, at least among the G.O.P.’s base.
Here let me note two points:
1. I think Krugman's analysis, including about Republican "base," is on target.
2. I cannot imagine that such lack of compassion can be justified with Christianity historically, even in this country.
Krugman rightly calls the modern conservative movement deeply radical,
one that is hostile to the kind of society we’ve had for the past three generations
. We have had, at least since the New Deal, a general national consensus about our obligations to one another.
Krugman closes wondering if the voters are ready to reject the received consensus, noting that we will find out in next year's elections.
Here I want to add that the flirting of this administration with scaling back the social safety net in the name of financial responsibility may have done as much to damage that received consensus as the deliberate efforts of those on the right who have, since the onset of the New Deal, fought tooth and nail against the various features of the Social Safety Net.
If we are going to save this society, if we are not going to continue the deterioration we saw pick up momentum with Reagan's references to things like welfare queens, which accelerated under the younger Bush despite his self description as a 'compassionate conservative" while he sought to dismantle Social Security, and while he did more to undermine the economic security of the vast majority of Americans than the sum of every President since 1900, we have to not only recognize how radical the current crop of Republican candidates are, we must do all we can to ensure that the American people understand what is at risk.
If the frame remains fighting the deficit, we will not only lose the current argument. We will lose the Republic. And then the only freedom we - and the vast majority of Americans - will have left, will be that of the title of both Krugman's column and this post.
We will be Free to Die.
Somehow I do not feel any Peace as I write these words.