Is Michael Moore a Double Agent?
Katherine Mangu-Ward | June 29, 2007, 1:05pm
Reason contributor Todd Seavey, with more on Moore's Sicko, including a novel theory that Moore may be a secret saboteur of his own cause.
By the time it's over we'll have seen Moore unspooling actual Soviet propaganda films to mock American (and in particular, long-ago American Medical Association) fears of socialism and will have seen him gazing appreciatively up at a famous, massive bust of Karl Marx in London. And it's at about this point that if I were, say, Hillary Clinton's point person on how to make voters comfortable with the idea of socializing medicine (and rest assured she has one), I might start to wonder whether Moore is trying to help or sabotage the cause.
Seavey's conclusion: "If Moore had stopped about one third of the way through his film, after sharing some genuinely funny/infuriating tales of insurance bureaucracy gone awry...he might well have had the majority of the audience on his side, even the right-leaning or free-market-oriented viewers. But if he knew when to stop, he wouldn't be Michael Moore, would he?"
For more Todd Seavey, go here.
For Moynihan on Moore, go here.
Dave W. | June 29, 2007, 1:34pm | #
The difference between Michael Moore and
Reason is that Michael Moore is conscious that he is doing propaganda.
I think part of the idea is that if the extreme left US position on healthcare moves, then the center will also move to the left. Any actual reforms are likely to come out of this center, so Moore just pulls left for all he's worth at every ridiculous margin.
Reason has been exaggerating how bad Cuba is for years. So now Moore is going to exaggerate how great it is. Hopefully those who read
Reason and watch Moore films will come away with an opinion somewhere in between, which is probably where the truth lies.
I think the other part of the idea is that Moore expects audiences to think for themselves and wants them to. The last Moore movie I saw was
Bowling For Columbine, and that movie asked a lot more questions than it provided answers, and that was a good thing. A lot of post-9-11 culture is about finding like-minded people, furiously clinging to them, and calling everybody else a "troll." Even though people still disagree, the act of disagreeing has come to be considered impolite. Memo to the 20 somethings out there: the world didn't always work like that, and Moore definitely evokes this pre-9-11 world where it wasn't always "us versus the trolls" or "us versus the wackos" or the classic "I can't decide whether this dissenting voice is a troll or a wacko."
Moore is putting a lot of stuff out there, and he clearly doesn't expect everybody to agree with all of it. My guess is that Moore prefers a debate on healthcare to a non-debate over a divisive issue (looking at you, John Kerry). My aunt sent me a nice, new WSJ editorial about Republicans talking about free market reforms in US healthcare now. 4 words: "Thank you, Michael Moore."
lunchstealer | June 30, 2007, 10:07am | #
Your first link advocates getting rid of a TAX EXCEPTION, which is kind of a tax raise. That's a libertarian solution? WTF.
Yes, in soundbite world, libertarians are simplistically antitax.
When you sit down and listen to the actual policy discussions that libertarians have, one of the things we decry is the convoluted nature of current tax law, where the government is trying to use taxes to get people to buy the things that the government wants them to buy.
For example, the mortgage interest deduction sort of encourages people to buy a home, but mostly encourages people to buy MORTGAGES, which are less ambiguously good.
The tax exemption for health insurance, as well as the general corporate trend of offering health insurance as part of overall compensation, is largely a result of obscure 1960s labor law - especially wage controls. There were, for bog knows what reason, government controls on wages, much like price controls (assuming I'm picking up the history correctly - I'm not an expert here).
Companies needed to hire people and recruit people, but couldn't legally offer them more money. They faced a dilemma. How do you recruit better people than your competitors when you have a legal cap on salary? The solution they started offering perqs, like company cars and health insurance. So the companies that were doing this lobbied to get a deduction for health insurance, and suddenly we had an insurance company paying the middle class's medical bills, and a middle class thinking that that was the way it was supposed to be. My medical problems are somebody else's responsibility to pay for.
The tax code changes are what libertarians call a 'market distorting tax'. They make people spend money in ways that they wouldn't spend it in a tax-neutral environment. This is not free-market thought.
So yeah, libertarians can support ending narrowly targetted tax exemptions which would result in an increased tax bill, if it would reduce a distortion to the market. Because a good deal of the dramatic rise in health costs is the result of perverse incentives which are not solely the result of government tax policy, but are at the very least exacerbated by it.
