David Frum contemplates conservative victory in the health care fight and doesn’t like what he sees:

The problem is that if we do that… we’ll still have the present healthcare system. Meaning that we’ll have (1) flat-lining wages, (2) exploding Medicaid and Medicare costs and thus immense pressure for future tax increases, (3) small businesses and self-employed individuals priced out of the insurance market, and (4) a lot of uninsured or underinsured people imposing costs on hospitals and local governments. [...]

Even worse will be the way this fight is won: basically by convincing older Americans already covered by a government health program, Medicare, that Obama’s reform plans will reduce their coverage. In other words, we’ll have sent a powerful message to the entire political system to avoid at all hazards any tinkering with Medicare except to make it more generous for the already covered.

If we win, we’ll trumpet the success as a great triumph for liberty and individualism. Really though it will be a triumph for inertia. To the extent that anybody in the conservative world still aspires to any kind of future reform and improvement of America’s ossified government, that should be a very ashy victory indeed.

These are good points. There’s a difference, of course, between a political win and a policy win. A policy win for conservatives would probably not be to block Obama’s proposals, but rather to modify them in exchange for the kind of “bipartisan” win that the White House and congressional leaders crave. Less generous minimum benefit packages, and therefore somewhat smaller subsidies. More financing through taxing health benefits and less financing through taxes on the rich and employer mandates. Encouragement of the administration’s efforts to cut waste out of Medicare rather than criticizing them.

That said, handing the White House a big bipartisan victory wouldn’t be helpful to Republican Party efforts to win elections in the future. Those crossed incentives interact with the anti-majoritarian elements of the congressional process in a way that makes certain kinds of compromises hard to pull off.

I don’t know whether the recession is “over” or not, but even if it is I agree with Steve Clemons that it seems risky for the administration to get too invested in selling an upbeat narrative about the economic situation. There’s an extremely strong possibility that the decline in measured unemployment reported yesterday is the result of measurement error. The actual number of jobs went down after all, and even the U6 measure of “discouraged workers” didn’t go up. These surveys are imperfect tools, and we’re talking about a very slight decline that possibly didn’t happen. Ten percent unemployment is still a real possibility and there will be pressure to withdraw expansive economic policies more quickly than is wise.

Most of all, while I think you do need to try to convince the public that your health care plan is a good idea, trying to argue with people about the state of economic conditions seems like a waste of time. If people feel that things are getting better, they’ll base that conclusion on what they’re seeing in their lives and their communities.

Postal van in Sundsvall, Sweden (wikimedia)

When considering a policy issue like the quality of mail delivery it’s often intriguing to ask oneself “how is this done in Scandinavia?” What appears to be the case is that the government of Denmark quasi-privatized its postal services, creating an independent corporation called Post Danmark that’s partially owned by a private equity firm, partially owned by the firm’s employees, and partially owned by the Danish state.

Meanwhile, Sweden has a state-run postal agency but a deregulated market in postal services. So the state-owned Posten AB needs to compete with a firm called Bring CityMail. Bring CityMail operates as a private company in Denmark and Sweden, but it’s actually a subsidiary of the Norwegian state postal service. Meanwhile, in order to better compete with this Norwegian juggernaut, Sweden’s publicly owned postal service and Denmark’s semi-public postal service are merging to form Posten Norden AB. This is going to be organized as a private firm, though a large share of the ownership will be in the hands of the Danish and Swedish governments.

International mergers of postal agencies seem to have a certain logic when you’re talking about very small countries that doesn’t necessarily apply to the United States. But I would say that one key thing here relates not so much to state ownership versus non-ownership, but to a regulatory climate that seems designed to promote meaningful competition between different mail delivery services regardless of ownership structure.

Of course part of the story with the USPS is that it’s a way of having the majority of Americans who live in metropolitan area subsidize the rural minority. I assume this same issue exists in Sweden and Norway which contain US-esque large sparsely populated hinterlands and I don’t know how they handle it. Providing subsidies for rural living doesn’t strike me as a particularly worthwhile policy objective, but given the strongly pro-rural bias of our political institutions it doesn’t seem avoidable either.

Yesterday’s Charles Krauthammer column was unusually non-mendacious, but also phenomenally stupid. His argument is that we need do only two things to fix health care—malpractice reform, and replace the employer tax exclusion with an individual tax credit.

He doesn’t just say that these are good ideas, but that they’re actually sufficient ideas. It’s nuts. Suppose you’re a 52 year-old with a pre-existing medical condition who kinda wants to leave his job and start a new company. Under the current system in the United States, you have a serious problem. Krauthammer’s proposals do nothing for you. Or suppose you had good insurance, got sick, and are now suffering from “rescission” of your policy. He’s got nothing. In Krauthland we’d have endless adverse selection problems and “solve” the problem of cost largely by having people not get the health care

Ooops. I realize that yesterday I forgot to actually provide the link to the free online edition of John Holbo and Belle Waring’s Reason and Persuasion: Three Dialogues by Plato.

Jason Zengerle says I would like parks more if I had kids. I never find this to be a particularly useful way of talking about a policy issue. It used to be that when I criticized the home mortgage interest tax deduction, people would tell me I would feel differently if I had a mortgage. Well, today I have a mortgage and I don’t actually feel differently about the issue. I recognize that I now have a self-interest in not seeing a bad policy ended, but it’s still a bad policy. Rephrasing, then, perhaps it’s a “pro-family” measure to turn no-longer-used city properties into parks rather than into development.

If that’s true, then I think the case against building more parks in DC gets stronger. The District has been losing children for years, and shows every sign of continuing to do so. If the main purpose of parks is to be nice to children, then it’s strange to be adding parks while we’re losing kids. The whole reason the parcel is open in the first place is that DCPS has been closing schools to cope with the declining number of children.

That said, it’s far from clear to me that this analysis is actually correct. Developing the property would increase the supply of available housing. And cheaper housing is strongly pro-family, since people with kids obviously need more square feet per income-earner. Severely constrained housing supply encourages row houses to be used as “group houses”—households of unrelated individuals with three, four, five, or even six income earners—rather than as homes for families with children. Similarly, opening land to development increases the city’s tax revenue, thus increasing its capacity to provide public services. People like me don’t consume a great deal of public services but children, especially poor children, really benefit from the ability to provide generous services.

Again, none of this is to say that we should be trying to rid our cities of parks. But I do think this is something people ought to think a bit more critically about. Nobody wants to be “against the park,” because it sounds bad. But urban land is often extremely valuable, so you need to think seriously about using it in the most valuable possible ways. And part of that means making the most out of the parks we already have, making sure that real usable facilities exist and that they’re filled with people. A little patch of empty green space looks nice, but it’s a bad way to use a scarce resource.