One of my favorite left-leaning blogs is Firedoglake for one reason, and one reason only:  Unlike a lot of progressive-leaning blogs that try to be semi-moderate, Firedoglake is more than willing to be completely and totally up front about what their ideology is all about.  In fact, I kind of think of Firedoglake as the Michael Savage of the liberal blogosphere - he’s just a bit farther out there than most of his competition.  As I’m sure you can imagine, I don’t agree with him much.  There was one thing he said, though, that I did agree with…

At the EPI talk, Bernstein made a scary prediction:  The first thing McCain would do after taking office is to go after Social Security and Medicare.  Privatizing either or both would be a disaster for working people in this nation.

(Note:  Yes, I know the link is bad.  I don’t know what’s going on over there.  It does show up in my RSS reader, though.)

Now, I know what some of you are thinking - why on the FSM’s Green Earth am I suggesting that privatization is bad?  What the heck am I thinking?  Well… the title of this blog entry should give it away:

It’s not a free market if you’re not allowed to leave.

The reason free markets work is because you have the option to participate or not.  If you don’t want to buy a car, you don’t have to - you can find an alternative (ride a bike, buy a truck, etc.).  Similarly, car manufacturers have an option to participate or not - will they sell you the car you want at the price you’re asking for?  What kind of support will they give you after the purchase?  There is some risk in all of this - you may not be able to pay, the car might not be all it’s cracked up to be, the manufacturer may go out of business and no longer be able to support your car - but there’s also plenty of reward for everyone involved, too.  Even so, if you can’t afford the risk, you don’t have to participate in the market.

Simple enough, right?

Herein lies the problem with privatizing government programs while still requiring people to pay into them - the people that are being supported by government programs are, hopefully, the people least capable of affording risk.  If something goes wrong (market failure in Social Security accounts, a set of piss-poor medical providers in Medicaid), the people who will bear the brunt of the risk will be the people least capable of assuming the risk.  Worse yet, since it’s a government program, we’re demanding that everyone assume the risk whether they would receive any reward from it or not.

That’s not right.

So, what’s the solution?  From where I’m sitting, there are two possibilities:

1. If the government must provide something (and I have my doubts on this), the government should focus on minimizing risk while providing the desired benefit.  The end result won’t be a lot of fun, mind you, but it beats relying on a program that goes insolvent due to a set of bad risks (or, for that matter, paying into an insolvent program).
2. The government should not provide that service and should not require its citizens to pay for that service by legislative mandate.  Period.

Since it’s almost 11:30 at night, and since my vision is starting to blur, I’m going to stop here… but I’ll be back.  Oh yes, I’ll be back…

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