The Problem of Republican Policies: Demand of Free Lunches

I don't know about you, but I have always struggled with this enigma: individual Republicans almost always seem intelligent and nice, but they support almost incomprehensibly terrible (either stupid, cruel, ungrounded, or all three) policies. I mean, Paul Krugman complained, again, about how Very Serious People mistake the economic world. But those same people are often extremely smart, very accomplished and hard-working, and affable if not outright caring. The contradiction between their personalities and policy choices is, for the longest time, my biggest confusion about how the world operates.

Then I have this insight: those people ain't stupid with their choices. In fact, they are being smart, albeit in a twisted way. You see, their choices are, essentially, free lunches (meaning there is no cost, only benefits). Thus, when compared with pragmatic policies, the free lunches win every time. It's like insisting that Venus de Milo is a real woman, then having her compete in a beauty pageant. Since the statue is the idealized feminine form, no other women can even come close to winning. Of course, the statue and Republican policies differ in 1 critical point: nobody expects a woman at her caliber exists, but Republicans insist that their policies are possible (ergo, optimum). Therefore, like all rational and intelligent beings, our Republicans decide, time after time, on free-lunch policies (Hey, it's free! What else do you want?).

The free lunches

Let's look at the free lunches in more details.

First of (the most hotly debated one), budget. I mean, when I repeat to myself all of the promises of GOP ideas of budget, those ideas sound irresistible. They reduce the budget deficit, even the debt in the long run. They cut taxes for everyone (raise your hands if you like paying taxes, please). They create jobs. They preserve critical social program (Medicare, Social Security; remember, GOP needs each and every of those elder white voters). In fact, short of reviving Reagan, I am not sure what these budgets can't do. Nobody has to sacrifice anything. All people, rich, poor, middle, male, female, children, black, white, all get something. Perfect!

How about tort reform? Well, same story all over. It will cut healthcare spending (which quite literally goes through everyone's roof). It will punish the bad guys. It will promote job growth. In some lines, I even heard it will improve innovations (since healthcare providers don't fear law suits as much). I mean, only one group of people must pay: the dirty bastards who invent stupid law suits to extract money from honest companies (who, of course, extort money, with interest, from the rest of us). Who can argue against such beautiful and perfect policy?

Next up, regulations, or lack thereof. I mean, as an intelligent reader, you should guess out what I am about to write. Reduced government size, actually more effective, reduced governmental abuse, etc. All bow to the invisible hand of the market, please, for it is all-mighty. The only conceivable opponent of such might force is power hungry government agents, who should burn in hell for all eternity.

Even gold standard, when you think about it, is portrayed as more or less free lunches by its opponents these days. No dependency on big bad banks, no big government, no currency war, no inflation, only growth and stability reign. Only brain-dead, spend-thrift, power-hungry liberals can oppose such a beautiful and simple idea.

A few other policies are also presented as cost-free, but only to the majority of the population (the good side, of course). For example, cuts to social safety nets (such as food stamp and MedicAid) will punish those lazy bastards leeching on hard working people, and blessed the said people with everything short of revival of Washington himself. Those ain't truly free lunches (since there are still costs), but since the cost bearers are immoral, lazy, stupid, etc., they deserve it.

Creation of Free Lunches

How, one may ask, did those intelligent people come to believe in free lunches? (By the way, given that intelligent people believe in pseudo-sciences and superstitions, one should not be that surprised; however, given the amount of discussion and debate those policies have received, as well as seriousness of their nature and consequences, they should not have inspired such fever following). I am no social scientists (or economists, who seem to be in just about any field these days), but I can summarize a few ways that free lunches are conceived. Since they are equivalent of unicorn in nature, each free lunch always deploys more than just one, often all of the below strategies to convince people to switch side.

First, and most often, free lunches exaggerate a well-known, proven fact and principles. Think about tax-cuts-raise-money budgets. It is well proven that, given more money, people spend more. It is also well-proven that one dollar spent by consumer is amplified and grows the economy more than just a dollar (imagine you buying a dollar of grocery; this means that the employees at the store are paid; these employees then use their pay to buy something else; so on and so forth). Lastly, bigger economy increases tax income, given that everything else is equal. But of course, when you cut taxes, everything else is not equal. Thus, the real question of such tax-cuts-raise-money budgets should have been, "how much tax cuts will raise enough money to pay for themselves?" However, this question is extremely hard, because human behaviors (thus, the economy) are extremely complicated and dependent on specifics. For example, cutting tax rate from 90% to 80% is totally different from 33% to 31% (the first one doubles real income, the second one is rounding numbers for most); or, in debt ridden time like 2008, people save more. However, free lunches ignore the real questions and their difficulty, and cling onto simplistic ideas and stretch those ideas to cover the costs.

Talking about "all things equal," free lunches also often ignore changed or invalid assumptions. As seen above, cutting taxes at different rate and times produces different results. However, free lunches skip over the "all things equal" disclaimer, and proclaim the validity of a proven facts (always proven with a specific set of assumptions) over all situations. Another example of this: free market regulates. The idea is simple and intuitive: when a firm does something bad, consumers punish that firm, and put it out of business. Thus, the market regulates its participants. However, this assumes that the majority of the consumers know about the misconducts of a firm in a timely and actionable manner; otherwise, how can they avoid such firm? For example, let's say that a firm produces bad food that kill people. This means that for the market to regulate, two things must happen: 1. some people must die; 2. those deaths must be well publicized immediately. The bad firm can circumstance both: it can keep the poisoning low enough for massive amount of food to be sold before someone death; it can delay the analyses of the deaths; it can throw smoke and mirror to distract; it can cover up the news. Oh, this is just a severe, thus easy example. Imagine situations where bad products cannot be noticed for years, or decades (pollution comes to mind, as well as carcinogens). Market can't regulate these, since its assumptions can't apply. However, our lovely free lunches ignore such inconveniences, and loudly proclaim the unchanging "facts."

To distract people from the changing assumptions, free lunches rely on anecdotal evidences and demonizes of certain groups of people. The most obvious example is cutting social safety nets (I swear, every Republican has a library of neighbors and acquaintances who live off welfare). However, most other free lunches involve this to a certain degrees. Remember all of those stories about people putting fake fingers into their food to sue the restaurants? How about those story of Andrew Carnegie reducing steel price during his virtual monopoly? By the way, the anecdotes don't even need to be real. During the campaign against estate tax, various media watchdog groups reported that GOP made up stories about people paying huge taxes, and apparently those stories persuaded quite a few people over. Similar stories, of course, are told during the campaign against healthcare reform.

Another distraction is wrong intuition and common sense. Remember, public policies deal with the whole nation, and sometimes the whole world. In such situation, personal intuition and common sense often mislead. An analogy in physics is matter's behavior at speed approaching light speed; those behaviors are totally different from the normal, classical physics of everyday life, and thus daily intuition is often wrong. Similarly, right things for a person may not be correct for the whole nation. For example, Tragedy of the commons. Or, another example, a family save during hard time and splurge during good time; a nation does the reverse: splurge during bad time to make up for private sector, then save during good time to pay off the debt. To apply a family intuition onto a nation produces Ireland and Italy in 2011. Similarly, when talking about law suit, people imagine two sides battling out in front of a (clueless?) jury. In fact, a multi-billion corporation (the only worthy targets for suing for money) employ an army of lawyers and array of tactics to delay, justify, and publicly defend itself. The idea of an crafty individual, aided by a rogue lawyer, legally robbing innocent companies resonates with daily thugs, but not at the level of million-dollar-law-suits.

If anecdotal evidences fail, let's distort the history! For example, Reagan cut taxes, and boom, the economy went into ecstasy. Greece spent money, and boom, they are bankrupted. Better yet, let's read and interpret well-regarded (or, indeed, legal) documents in special light. From the Constitution to the Bible, those "literal readers" have wrecked the world over quite a few times with their awesome understanding that resembles neither the original creators (people, listen up, humans had slaves instead of high-speed internet connections back in those days!) nor the popular needs and demands (which, generally speaking, those documents read intentionally ambiguous to serve). History (very similar to statistics) proves lies. The difference lies in consequences and intentions. Lying through statistics is a crime, and only employed as the last resort. Improving history, on the other hand, is creative and original, indeed it is celebrated, and employed free as the arguments require.

But of course, when needs be, statistics works, too. Budget fights famously employ those (you know, we will make up the short falls with unspecified loop holes closing), but given their nature, all free lunches (or, at least those reaching policy form) stretch their numbers one way or another. However, frankly, this strategy has limited effects, and generally employed as the last line of defense. By the time a group of people put down numbers, they must have invested heavily onto the ideas to manipulate the numbers.

Basically, most of these strategies share one thing: lack of attention to details. They generally present a grand idea, whose footnotes totally contradict and destroy it. However, in our impatient world, who has time for foot notes, right?

The Cost of Free Lunches

Let's get one thing out of the way: there are no free lunches. Thus, "free-lunch" policies have costs somewhere. The most popular spots to hide costs are: the other people and the future. The other people, obviously, are those unessential to the continuation of the policies; i.e. the minority, the poor, the disadvantaged, etc. Sometimes, those people are specifically targeted (after being demonized and dehumanized, of course), such as in safety nets dismantle. Sometimes, they are simply collateral damage, such as tort reform and tax reform. Damage to the future usually comes with short-term benefits and long-term destruction. The benefits can be financial (tax reform) or spiritual (Iraq war, condemnation of certain group of people). The destruction, similarly, can be either financial and visible (such as public debt, deflation), or in social structure and degradation of social values (inequality, lack of social trust, terrorism), or loss to the entire human race (extinction, environmental change, nuclear threat).

Tragically, in many cases, the cost of those policies befalls upon the very people demanding them. Well, to be completely fair, since everyone lives together, the implementers of those policies will eventually feel the cost, but some cost comes sooner than others. For example, the "free market health care," which reigned the richest country in the world until 2008, maintained poor care at high prices. Tax cuts and war with random country (aka Iraq) vanquished the precious budget surplus and deprived the federal government of tools to fight later depression. Nonsensical monetary policies have dragged Europe back into the recession like twice now (and seems to do it again), and is a constant threat to American economy (look at China, people. When the economy is in depression, help it, not kick it).

Now, of course, there are various ways to soften the blows, so to speak. First, there is denial or blaming the other side. This actually works remarkably well. For example, Obama is responsible for the recession (that started before he took office) and the public debt (which his part was paying just before GOP went to war). Second, there is blaming environmental factions. Bush is a genius in this: economy tanking? 9/11; domestic liberty eroding? 9/11; Iraq war went south? 9/11. However, blaming only takes it so far. When dreams crash into reality, real money demands real victims. Thus the third stratagem: shift the cost to the others. As defined above, the others are people unessential to the policies, usually the poor, the minority, the disadvantaged. Occasionally, foreigners get to pay, too (for example, some town in Florida systematically extract money from driving-by; another example is Iraq war to distract people from the problems at home). Ironically, sometimes, to fix the problem, the proponents of a policy would claim that it is not applied rigorously enough, and thus needs a surge in application. A good example of this is the European demand for governmental cuts and strictly balanced budgets. In the good old days, Ireland used to be the example of good governmental. It crashed. I think Cyprus was held up for a while, who also crashed. Then Germany became the shining example. Meanwhile, the union spiral near death.

Free lunches are nice. To dream about, that is. In real life, though, we have no perpetual engine, and we have no free lunch. Instead, we have scientific method, statistics, rationality. Those can help us differentiate good and bad policies. Remember, we, as human, has about 3000 years of recorded history spanning 5 continents. Lots of policies have been tried. Gold standard, for example, has been tried, abandoned, and tried again quite a few times. Militarism has also been tried. Execution of "lazy people" has been carried out (albeit not this century). We know, with some degree of certainty, what lie ahead. So, let's look at it, and think rationally, rather than rely on "common sense" (what is common sense, anyway? Mob rule?) or fancy rhetoric (America is special! Remember, once upon a time, Rome was special, China was center of the universe, and Persia ruled the world) and theory. Maybe then smart people will stop demanding for free lunches and make stupid decisions.