One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.
The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.
He fails to understand the very concept of individualism, the principles that we founded this country on. Individualism respects the primacy of the individual, each individual is equal, with equal rights, and that the individual may own property to which the individual has a true and valid interest and the purpose of the Government is to protect the rights of the individual and their property. Slavery was always a gross and immoral aberration of that view, as was the acceptance of a class society. Individuals were able to enter into associations freely and these associations could be fluid and flexible. Government is Coasean in its actions, arbitrating disputes based in property rights and doing so with minimal transaction costs.
The "favorite economist" see two other world views; first his which is communal Government controlled state as morally superior. The other is a Spencerian-Darwinian survival of the fittest environment. The Individualist would reject both. For the communal state denies the individual and the individuals rights, whereas the Spencerian view denies the very objective of association.
He continues:
There’s no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care. The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.
As we have demonstrated, universal health care has economic benefit. What was objected to was the central Governmental control. From an individualist perspective, equality of opportunity demands equality of health care, equality of access, at a fair and equitable price to each. The Libertarian would most likely be the Spencerian at the extreme. To my "favorite economist" there is no middle ground. That seems to be his mind set. There is indeed a middle ground, a place for the individual to become the engine which made our society the best. It was and is individualism which drives the entrepreneur. It is the entrepreneur which has made the US what it is. The communal Group mindset is that of the left.
It is not strange wonder therefore that my "favorite economist" is an Asimov fan. For in Asimov's world there are no individuals, all are part of the state, there are no entrepreneurs, there is only a large communal universe, a future of drone like existence, excited from time to time by robots, a metaphor perhaps of what we would become in his world view.
Individualism has been a part of American for centuries, it was observed by de Tocqueville in his writing so eloquently, especially in contrast to the communal, Government controlled, class based societies of Europe. Perhaps that is the world my "favorite economist" wants us to return to, an Asmovian past, not a future.
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