David Brooks: Fool? Dupe? Democrat?

No one can say the New York Times is not diverse. It features liberals who defend Obama (Paul Krugman, Charles Blow, Nicholas Kristof, etc., etc.) and conservatives who defend Obama (David Brooks and occasionally even Ross Douthat [Obama’s “willingness to grapple with moral complexity has always been one of the things that Obama’s admirers love about him”]).

Take Brooks’s December 23 column (please!), which argues that we the people have woefully failed our beneficent government. Because of our opposition to government “coercion” (“Cast aside for a second any negative connotation to that word. Almost all large government programs, even very popular ones like Social Security, involve a degree of coercion”) and our unfortunately lingering commitment to such outmoded values as “the ethos of individual choice,” we “do not accept the legitimacy of the government to overrule individual decisions, even on something like health insurance.” Imagine that! Even on health insurance and the medical care it enables!

Whether or not we the people will accept the coercion by the government that is necessary for our well-being, Brooks writes, is one of two “large questions to be settled by the fate of Obamacare. The other is whether we will lose the faith we should have that “the government is competent enough to manage large programs,” such as whether it can “set rules for the right insurance products or impose efficiency measures to restrain costs?”  Brooks’s belief — or is it faith? — that there actually are “right insurance products” and that the government, unlike its subjects, has the wisdom to discern what they are is touching.

Competence is presented as a second “large question,” but that impose suggests it really isn’t so different from “coercion,” the first large question. Try as he might, Brooks can’t seem to move far beyond touting the necessity, and hence the desirability, of governmental coercion. Take Obamacare (again, please!):

Obamacare, as originally envisioned, mandated that people join the system in order to redistribute money from the healthy and young to the sicker and older. It coerces some people to do something they might not want to do, and which, in fact, may not be in their short-term interest to do.

Really? If so, why didn’t Obama and his Democratic followers describe it this way? Why did they, as everyone now seems to agree, lie about it, claiming that it would have no effect on most people — who could keep their insurance plans and doctors — except that it would save the average family $2500 a year? Forget Obama and the Democrats (I’d certainly like to). Did Brooks and his colleagues in the press describe Obamacare as a colossal redistribution scheme when it was being debated? Even as a redistribution scheme, I’ve always wondered — and still do — why Democrats were and are so eager to champion what at its core is a massively regressive penalty tax. The young and healthy from whom it is designed to take much are by no means all wealthy, and the elderly are certainly not all poor.

Brooks’s explanation of why we the people are so miserably failing our government is that we have become too “distrustful,” a lament that seems to be a new mantra at the Times — see my post on another example from a few days ago, “Trust Me,” He Lied…. Here’s Brooks on our inability to trust:

Governing in an age of distrust is different than governing in an age of trust. Government now lacks the legitimacy to impose costs on losers, so politicians face unprecedented pressure to create situations in which everybody looks like winners. Government lacks the legitimacy to coerce. People like Social Security, but I bet you that Congress could not pass a Social Security law today. If people were unfamiliar with the concept, you couldn’t pass a bill that said: Government is going to confiscate money from each paycheck and spend it on other things, but don’t worry because you’ll get it back decades from now when you retire.

It never seems to have occurred to Brooks that government in general, and Obama’s government specifically and in spades, deserves the distrust with which we now regard it. He regards it as wrong — perhaps even irrational or paranoid — for citizens to be skeptical of the government telling us not to worry about Social Security remaining solvent. Even odder, like Joseph Stiglitz’s recent OpEd (see link above), Brooks somehow manages to blame us for being distrustful of government without even mentioning the president’s epochal outright lying about the most important social legislation of a generation, the IRS’s abuse of trust, etc.

Brooks has got things exactly backwards. It’s the government that doesn’t trust us enough to tell the truth, but that distrust is neither dumb nor irrational. If Obamacare “as originally envisioned” had been accurately described by the Democrats and reported by Brooks’s employer and other mainstream press outlets, it clearly would never have passed.