With the moral and legal legitimacy of an “individual mandate” to purchase health insurance continuing to be the subject of controversy, it’s worth observing that conservative hero Paul Ryan lights the path to reformulating the exact same policy in a manner that seems to pass the right’s ideological litmus test. After all, once Ryan abolishes Medicare what does he want to replace it with? Well, with vouchers to buy private health insurance. And what’s the structure of the Affordable Care Act? Well, it’s vouchers to buy private health insurance. So why did Barack Obama’s proposals include an individual mandate and Ryan’s don’t? Simple. Ryan has solved the adverse selection problem without a mandate by simply saying that everyone gets a voucher, but the voucher can only be used to buy health insurance. In principle you “could” opt out from this system but nobody would.

The way it would work is that instead of imposing a mandate, and then offering subsidies to low and middle income people in order to help them comply with the mandate, you’d impose a progressive income tax (whose constitutionality I take it is not in doubt) and then hand everyone a flat voucher that could be used only to buy health insurance.

My proposed revision to the plan would make the underlying nature of the proposal more transparent, and in that sense would be a marginal improvement over the way the ACA actually works. But the point is that in practice they’d be exactly the same. And the latter policy—taxes to fund vouchers—is so uncontroversial, that even Paul Ryan thinks it should be allowed. So anyone who thinks about the issue for a bit will swiftly recognize that there’s no real principled objection here coming from the right. The real difference between Affordable Care Act coverage and RyanCare is that the idea of the ACA is to ensure that everyone—even poor people—get adequate health care. Under RyanCare, by contrast, over time only rich people will be able to afford health care. But with the money Ryan saves by not ensuring adequacy of care, he’s able to ensure that rich people will pay much lower taxes. This, unlike mandate nonsense, is a real point of divergence between the right and left in America.

By Ryan McNeely

When Ted Olson announced his intention to partner with David Boies to challenge Prop 8 in federal court, many observers suggested that while his goals were noble, he was not “right about the timing.” Some gay rights groups, wary of Olson’s track record, actually did question his motives — and many went on the record to say explicitly that the decision to bring the suit was a mistake, that Olson would lose, and that this loss would do serious damage to the movement.

There’s a general hesitancy in some quarters to use the courts to advance marriage equality at all, the theory being that it actually does more harm than good in the long run. Matt responded to a nice example of this type of thinking, when Megan McArdle argued that “If socially conservative voters hadn’t felt they needed to protect themselves from activist judges, we wouldn’t be seeing these provisions written into state constitutions…In general, courts are the wrong place to press these sorts of claims.” In Lawyering for Marriage Equality, Scott Cummings and Douglas NeJaime address this head-on:

Finally, we find that the evidence in support of the backlash account’s causal claim is weak…By focusing solely on court decisions, the backlash thesis fails to account for the influence of nonjudicial factors. Specifically, the legislative push for domestic partnership in California motivated, at least in part, the statutory prohibition on marriage for same-sex couples embodied in Proposition 22. And during their television advertising campaign, Proposition 8 proponents emphasized the specter of same-sex marriage being taught in schools over the fact that the right to marry for same-sex couples derived from a court decision, suggesting that the schools issue resonated more powerfully with voters.

Now, a new report empirically validates this thesis: Prop 8 was almost certainly approved due to false and misleading advertising that had absolutely nothing to do with any sort of backlash against “activist judges.” Cummings and NeJaime also hit on a key point that somehow constantly gets ignored by the process nitpickers: “Opponents were mobilized to place a constitutional ban on the ballot irrespective of the form in which marriage equality was passed.”

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One of the most unfortunate aspects of transportation policy in the United States is that it winds up playing as a “culture war” issue. It’s a contingent aspects of American life that the sort of people likely to live in walkable urban areas are overwhelmingly liberal, and this creates large distortions in the discourse around what should be rather dry policy debates. For example, John Hickenlooper is running for governor of Colorado. He’s currently mayor of Denver. And like many mayors, he’s acted recently to promote bicycling as a way to get around the city. There’s no particular reason that “100 percent of the space on roads should be allocated for the use of motor vehicles rather than bicycles” should be an article of faith of conservatism (you won’t find it in Hayek or Burke or what have you) but in practice it often is, so you get this kind of nonsense:

Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes is warning voters that Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s policies, particularly his efforts to boost bike riding, are “converting Denver into a United Nations community.”

“This is all very well-disguised, but it will be exposed,” Maes told about 50 supporters who showed up at a campaign rally last week in Centennial.

Maes said in a later interview that he once thought the mayor’s efforts to promote cycling and other environmental initiatives were harmless and well-meaning. Now he realizes “that’s exactly the attitude they want you to have.”

I don’t really think bike commuting is going to take America by storm next week, but it is a cheap and healthy way to get around that will appeal to some people. And since in addition to being cheap and healthy, it’s also better for air quality than driving a car, it makes perfect sense for municipal leaders to try to ensure that transportation infrastructure accommodates cyclists.