The other day, John Holbo wrote:

I hereby declare – for the benefit of anyone at Oxford UP who might be reading – that I was going to require my (probably 50-or-so) students next semester to buy your serviceable little paperback volumes: Woolhouse’s The Empiricists and Cottingham’s The Rationalists. I assigned them when I last taught History of Modern Philosophy, a few years back; and it worked out fine. But now that I see they cost $45 each, for a lousy sub-200 page, 7” x 5” paperback and pretty cheap paper. What’s that about? Do I really want my students to hate me? (Do I want to hate myself?) I am quite sure they were not this pricey a few years back. There is such a thing as charging too much, given that these books are not actually so good that they cause one’s head to explode with insight into the history of modern philosophy. So I am going to put these particular books on reserve in the library, and recommend them to my students as resources, but I am re-doing my syllabus in protest at absurd pricing. So there. Oxford UP has lost a course adoption – the holy grail of textbook publishing. Let that be a lesson to you.

I find myself perennially baffled by the business model of academic publishing. Universities are non-commercial institutions that take substantial quantities of philanthropic and government funds to subsidize the production of scholarship but then turn around and try to manage the dissemination of scholarship on a quasi-commercial basis.

The rise of digital technology makes it possible to disseminate ideas for almost no money. That’s something that’s created big problems for a lot of commercial institutions, but it’s been a boon for most non-commercial ones—all kinds of DC think tanks and advocacy organizations, for example, have much broader reach thanks to our ability to cheaply distribute ideas around the world over the internet. But academic publishing seems oddly resistant to this trend. But almost every major university in the world seems to be expending funds on activities that have less social value than nearly-free distribution (public domain books on kindle seem to usually cost about $2) of the results of their scholarship would have. And on a selfish basis, I assume that the kind of people inclined to write books about the history of early modern philosophy are more interested in finding an audience for their work than in making a quick buck—that doesn’t seem like a profit-maximizing sort of field of endeavor.

Yesterday’s David Brooks column featured an interesting, but factually inaccurate, critique of health reform legislation:

Rather than pushing all of the new costs onto future generations, as past governments have done, the Democrats have admirably agreed to raise taxes. Over the next generation, the tax increases in the various bills could funnel trillions of dollars from the general economy into the medical system.

I suppose his out here is the use of the word “could funnel” but you’re clearly supposed to understand that as will funnel. This is, however, a major difference between the House and Senate bills. The House bill, financed overwhelmingly by income taxes on high earners, will represent a large aggregate shift of national resources from the wealthy to the poor and near-poor. It will also represent a large shift of resources from things that are not health care services to things that are health care services. The Senate bill is not like that at all. It is much more mildly redistributive, but its redistribution is overwhelmingly contained within the health care system via taxes on “cadillac” health plans, medical devices, plastic surgery, etc.

It’s a big, big difference that I think hasn’t gotten enough attention. And I’m not sure how the difference will be resolved. But it should be noted that one major consequence of the Republican Party’s decision to enforce unanimous opposition to health reform is that they’ve deprived themselves of the ability to influence the choice. One reason legislative fights used to be less polarized is that members seem to have been more inclined to say to themselves things like “some kind of health care bill will probably pass one way or another, I should see if I can shape it more to my liking in exchange for my vote.” One thing you see the more you hang around the health care debate, after all, is that there are sort of two different cross-cutting debates.

One is a left-right debate about how equitably national health expenditures should be and another is a basically unrelated debate about how high the level of national health expenditures should be. I would like to see NHE growth controlled, and I think Brooks would too. And I know some congressional Republicans agree with me. And the best way to make that happen would be if they would say “we’ll vote for a health care bill financed in the NHE-controlled Senate way, but not one financed in the House way.” That’s an offer the Democrats would have to take seriously. But they’ve taken themselves out of the process, so instead the choice will be made entirely by Democratic leaders bargaining amongst themselves.

Kevin Drum wants a Social Security grand bargain:

I’m entirely in favor of a Social Security commission, similar to the 1983 commission, tasked with producing a conventional basket of small revenue increases and small benefit cuts that would balance Social Security’s book in the long term. This is, admittedly, a relatively small thing, since Social Security’s fiscal condition has improved over the past few years and is now projected to eventually go out of balance by only about 1.5% of GDP. But aside from the virtue of even small acts of fiscal rectitude, it would also have the huge virtue of taking Social Security off the table as a political issue. If we could, at long last, get the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and the Peterson folks to quit droning on endlessly about this, we might actually clear the way for discussion of some real issues. And it’s the kind of thing that can be put in place now and credibly be expected to unfold as planned.

I’m not in favor of this, but I’m not against it either. Which is to say I don’t think appointing such a commission would be a good idea, but if Barack Obama did appoint me to the commission I’d agree to a package like that. Or if I were a member of congress and a bipartisan bill enacting this kind of program were on the floor, I would vote for it. But would any Republicans?

I feel like people keep forgetting about this, but the post-1992 conservative movement absolutely refuses to vote for tax increases. I’m not sure what the ideological justification for this posture is supposed to be—Saint Ronald Reagan signed a number of tax increases—but it’s clearly part of the catechism, has been for years, and will likely be formally enshrined in the new RNC purity test. This was the problem with the whole farcical spring/summer quest for a bipartisan health care bill. You couldn’t possibly do a deficit-neutral universal health care bill without raising taxes, and conservatives won’t vote for tax hikes. But if Republicans won’t vote for tax hikes, then you can’t have a bipartisan agreement to raise taxes and trim benefits growth.

Kevin’s plan is going to play out along the lines of a familiar script. First, Barack Obama proposes something sensible and centrist like a balanced package of benefit cuts and tax hikes. Then this becomes defined as the extreme left pole of the debate. Then because Max Baucus and Kent Conrad are moderates, it needs to be balanced further in the direction of spending cuts. Then the administration embraces that proposal and it becomes defined as the extreme left pole of the debate. Then because Evan Bayh and Blanche Lincoln are moderates, it needs to be balanced even further in the direction of spending cuts. Then because the package is more than zero percent tax increases, it passes with at most the support of Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, and conservatives denounce the Democrats as tax-and-spend liberals who want to punish workers and seniors alike in order to finance giveaways to ACORN and death panels. Then Alan Greenspan applauds politely, and then when the GOP gets back into office they propose large cuts in income taxes on the wealthy and he applauds that loudly.

I say: No thanks. Some day the Chamber of Commerce may become concerned about the looming bankruptcy of the United States of America and start delivering conservative votes for a balanced approach to the long-term fiscal gap. And when they do I and all responsible liberals will support such an approach. But until then what’s the point? To sound reasonable? Okay. I’m reasonable. But you can’t have a one-party bipartisan compromise—that’s silly. So as long as conservative politicians claim to believe that future taxes should be lower than current taxes, there’s really not much for a commission to do.