Libertarianism & Egalitarianism

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0:00:07.2 Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Trevor Burrus.

0:00:09.1 Aaron Powell: And I am Aaron Powell.

0:00:10.6 Trevor Burrus: Joining us today is Daniel Shapiro, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at West Virginia University, a founding member of the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, and author of “Is the Welfare State Justified?” from Cambridge University Press. Welcome to the show, Daniel.

0:00:24.5 Daniel Shapiro: Oh, thanks a lot. Thanks, guys. I’m a big fan and a faithful listener.

0:00:29.0 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, you have a fascinating essay we’ll be discussing today about the relationship between egalitarianism and libertarianism, so is it… Generally, people would think that they’re not just opposed, but fundamentally opposed, but you think that that’s a wrong way of looking at it.

0:00:47.1 Daniel Shapiro: Yeah, yeah, but thank you. The title of the essay is “Egalitarianism and Libertarianism: Closer Than You Might Think,” and so the basic idea in a nutshell is that egalitarianism and libertarianism clearly have very different political principles, so egalitarians talk mainly about fairness, reducing certain kind of inequalities. Libertarianism tends to talk about maximizing individual liberty, reducing state coercion. But I argue that the institutional implications of their principles are much closer than you think, specifically I argue that if you compare certain forms of market alternatives to central welfare state institutions, Egalitarians should actually end up agreeing based on their own principles with Libertarians, that the alternatives to the welfare state are better. So, that’s basically the elevator pitch of this.

0:01:43.9 Aaron Powell: Libertarianism can mean, just that term, can mean a fairly wide range of views from say, anarchism through classical liberalism and so on. Does the same apply to egalitarianism? Is there a kind that you’re talking about here?

0:02:00.0 Daniel Shapiro: Yes, thank you for that, that was one of the first things I was gonna talk about. So when I say egalitarianism, I mean the kind of egalitarianism that was predominant in contemporary political philosophy circa 1996 to 2005, ’cause that’s when I was writing the book. It’s sometimes called, I think misleadingly for reasons I’ll mention, “Luck egalitarianism.” It’s not the kind of egalitarianism identified people like Elizabeth Anderson who you’ve had on your show, which is called “Relational egalitarianism.” If you want at the end, we could talk a little about what I would hazard a guess would be the implications of her views, I don’t really think they really are gonna be that different, but when I was writing the book, Anderson was around, but I don’t think she was as big. Luck egalitarianism was everywhere, I mean, it really dominated contemporary political philosophy, so that’s sort of the pony I chose to ride on, as it were. Does that help, at least on that? I need to explain what it is, of course.

0:03:02.7 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, ’cause I find it very interesting. I was a little unfamiliar with the “Option” and the “Brute,” so that would be interesting to get into.

0:03:13.6 Daniel Shapiro: Yeah, well, let me first talk about in a thumbnail the alternatives, very bare-​bones, and then I’ll get into the structure of egalitarianism. The welfare state, the central institutions of the welfare state are basically social insurance that’s government-​provided and administered, retirement and health insurance, so we’re talking about problems like Social Security, National Health Insurance, and we’re talking about government welfare or government aid to the poor and the needy. The market, the more market alternatives I’m talking about are, I’m gonna… The shorthand I give is the term “private compulsory insurance.” Now, let me explain, that’s just the shorthand but basically, the idea is the provision of retirement savings, health insurance would be provided by the market with competing plans and policies. The government’s role would be limited to two things. One, there would be some kind of safety net, so there would be, for instance, some kind of minimum pension guarantee, so if you didn’t have adequate retirement savings, the government would have something, and the government would require that you have some kind of pension savings account and have some kind of health insurance.

0:04:27.2 Daniel Shapiro: I can fill in more, that’s very bare-​bone, I can fill in more meat as I go along. So, I think… I didn’t really argue much in the piece that Libertarians should prefer this, I think it’s clear they should. It’s not our ideal, our best thing for us would be voluntary insurance and voluntary safety nets, but I think it would be a big improvement from a Libertarian point of view, ’cause you’d reduce the government’s role in healthcare and retirement and give people a lot more freedom to choose their lives. Okay, so what I wanna or gonna argue is that Egalitarians should think that this market of health insurance… This market of market insurance is clearly better than social insurance, and that there’s at least a sort of a stalemate between private charities and government welfare. Alright, so let me talk…

0:05:24.7 Daniel Shapiro: Is it okay if I just talk now about the structure of egalitarianism? Okay. The basic idea of egalitarianism is inequalities that result from no choice or faults of your own are unjust and ought to be rectified in some way. And there are two parts to this, they have a two-​part theory of justice. On one side, where people make genuine or un-​coerced choices, people need, as a matter of respect for their capacity to shape their own lives, freedom to act on those choices, and fairness requires that people be held responsible for the cost of their choices. And the flip side of people being held responsible, of course, for their choices is people are entitled to the benefits or the advantages they gain through choices. On the other hand, where what’s called, this one gets to your question, Trevor, one, something like brute luck reigns rather than choice, then we have some kind of injustice that ought to be rectified in some way, and the reason for the word “brute”, this comes from Ronald Dworkin who’s probably the seminal figure here, a law professor, in case some of your listeners haven’t heard, very important law professor and political philosopher, who I think died, I don’t know, maybe 10 years ago, I think, or something like that.

0:06:46.5 Daniel Shapiro: Anyway, Dworkin makes this really important distinction between option luck and brute luck. Option luck or risks are the kind of luck or risks that it’s reasonable to take into account in your choices, whereas brute luck is something you just have, you just really have no choice in the matter. And most Egalitarians think advantages resulting from option luck belong on the choice side. So, I have three kind of problems in the paper. If you want, I can start to go into the first one, or if you have further questions, I can pause that, whatever you think is best. Do you want me to keep going?

0:07:28.2 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, you’re fine. I was just gonna clarify, just so we’re clear here, so basically, you can have a big discussion about, and I’m sure there is in the literature, what is option and what is brute, but the concept is just generally something that if you decided to pursue… I don’t know, if you decided to put a lot of money into a stock and then you lost all that money, and then that made you on the bottom end of the distribution, that’s different than if you were born without legs, essentially.

0:08:01.9 Daniel Shapiro: Right, that’s right. And you’re getting to some of the examples. That’s exactly right, right.

0:08:06.5 Aaron Powell: I guess I’m curious about how distinct these need to be in the Egalitarian project, in the sense that it seems like anything that is option luck, so it’s stuff that I would be responsible for. Is it option luck, is that the term? Yeah, is also going to contain a strong element of brute luck, right? I could have said, “I am going to make the decision, fully considered decision to drop out of college and pursue a career as a musician,” and I have no musical talent, it would be a terrible idea. And in most possible worlds, it would be something where I would end up in a worse place than had I stuck around and it would be my fault, but it’s also possible that my terrible musicianship sparked just the kind of… It hits on some fad, it got exactly what it needed, and I became the next big thing. And so suddenly my choice looks incredible, you know?

0:09:22.0 Daniel Shapiro: No, this is good, because you’ve anticipated almost in one question, the first problem I’m gonna run into, but it depends what you want me to do. I was gonna try to structure what they do on one side, but where I ended up going is basically the whole thing just gets reciprocal, and they mutually influence each other, and the reason I think it’s important is it ends up really being hard to justify redistribution. So this is like a more systematic problem before you even get to the comparisons, so if you’re okay, I can… But you actually pretty much… Must be the philosophy background, Aaron, right? You pretty much… Both you guys have the philosophy background. It must be… You got to the heart of it, but just in case, since I’m not sure our listeners would see the jump, if you don’t mind me being kind of… The joke is an “anal”-lytic, like “anal” analytic philosopher here, and do the… Were you gonna say something? It looked like you’re on the verge of making a joke.

0:10:19.0 Daniel Shapiro: Okay. Alright, alright. So for Egalitarians, there’s certain paradigm things that are on the option and choice luck or the chosen side of the spectrum, and there’s certain paradigm things that are on the un-​chosen side. So the paradigm ones on the option luck side are different conceptions of the good life or different kind of ambitions and voluntarily acquired tastes and preferences. And based on this, Egalitarians think that inequalities or advantages/​disadvantage resulting from efforts, different income or leisure trade-​offs, different income or consumption trade-​offs are on the chosen side of the spectrum. Also occupational choices matter, you sort of hinted that with your drop out of high school thing, right? That depends on your ambitions and life goals, and you also hit upon it with your business example. There’s disagreement among Egalitarians about this [0:11:21.5] ____ but most of them, and I think the more consistent think of business losses and profits as on the chosen side, ’cause it’s a voluntarily assumed gamble.

0:11:31.4 Daniel Shapiro: It depends on your age in your example, Aaron, like how old were you, 15, 18? We could argue about that. But if you’re a competent adult and you know what you’re doing, it’s like a voluntarily assumed example or it’s an opportunity to seize the reward. On the other hand, the paradigm examples, you got to this, Trevor, with the born without legs, paradigm examples of things on the un-​chosen side are things like your native abilities, your native or genetic abilities or talents, your race or your sex, un-​produced natural resources. So, they tend to think inequalities resulting from that are unjust, as are inequalities from the initial start in life, since we don’t choose our parents, so if you’re born a poor kid in Detroit, Trevor, and you’re born a wealthy kid in Silicon Valley, Aaron, that’s an un-​chosen event, okay? And then there are things that they don’t know what to think about.

0:12:20.3 Daniel Shapiro: There’s psychological characteristics like how grumpy or cheerful am I? That can affect your ability to succeed. I’m not sure what to say about that. What’s my ability to deal with adversity? My sense of self-​efficacy, they’re unsure about that. My first argument with the problem with them is that the welfare state is clearly redistributive. Social Security takes from workers that goes to retirees. Welfare takes from more affluent people and gives to… But the problem is once we start to think about these cases, virtually everything reciprocally influences one another. I agree with you, Aaron. That’s exactly I think the problem because let’s say, we say, “Okay, my ambition and preference, the ambitions I have and my conception of the good life that’s chosen, but then maybe I had that because I have a certain trait I was born with,” right? And you could just switch it around for the other one, “I have these traits I was born with, maybe I’m naturally not that hard working, but I work at it. And I sort of get more ambitious,” and so that’s on the chosen side.

0:13:26.8 Daniel Shapiro: So you start to do this and everything looks like a mix of chosen and un-​chosen. Now the reason this matters is, we have to think, “Okay, so any course of redistribution, what’s gonna happen? Given that… ” What we need is a causal theory. Like, we need some causal theory that’ll say, “Okay, this, we can tease out where this kind of income and wealth is on the chosen side and where is on the un-​chosen side,” but I’ve read Luck Egalitarian literature, I’ve read quite a bit of it. And there isn’t a theory. There’s some theories about other things. Dworkin has this interesting theory, about a hypothetical insurance market. Like if you were… Didn’t know your advantages or disadvantages, you all had equal purchasing power, what would we choose? But that’s not really relevant, they make claims about it. I really don’t think they have an answer to this. And the problem is, then if I start to think of a course of redistribution, well, it’s gonna take some or perhaps a lot of money from people who are entitled of it, and give it to people, victims of bad luck.

0:14:24.9 Daniel Shapiro: So that’s injustice. But on the other hand if we let things alone, so to speak, and we rely on voluntary transfers, some people who are sitting on these, on income and wealth that is not due to their choices are not gonna voluntarily give it to the people that are unlucky. So either way, you have injustice, and so, sorry if it’s long or if I was too long winded but basically, it’s coming around to the answer that the first real problem is, I think this is one way in which the gap between the two theories, that gets very small, because libertarians would say, “State redistribution, except in special cases unjust.” But egalitarian can’t say, “It’s just.” they will have to condemn it as unjust. So that’s the first gap.

0:15:07.0 Trevor Burrus: Wouldn’t they just say, “Yes, you’re correct. You need to design a welfare state well?” I mean, you’re right, that we shouldn’t be giving money to undeserving people and taking money from deserving people. So this is just a matter of design of the state not a question of something to disagree in principle.

0:15:28.6 Daniel Shapiro: Well, but it seems to me that just pushes… Unless I’m misunderstanding, it pushes the problem one step back because designing it still means you’re designing some policy that’s gonna take from some people and give to others. And if you don’t know which people or what percentage of their income and wealth is the type that’s legitimate or illegitimate, it seems like you have the same… Unless I’m missing something, Trevor. It seems like the same problem just pops up.

0:15:55.5 Aaron Powell: It seems to me too, that there is a fundamental problem for the Egalitarian project in terms of, I guess, operationalizing its theory into a welfare state. Because if they take these kinds of luck seriously, and deservingness and fairness seriously, then they necessarily have to create a welfare state that takes from, some gives to others along the lines of this particular conception of justice. And so it has to assess fairness and justice and acquisition and deservingness, and so on. But, as opposed to say, doing something where you say, like, “Well, we’re just going to… If you make above a certain amount, we are going to take this percentage away from you.” Flat out, it’s just math, “And then if you make below a certain amount, we’re gonna give you this. We’re not gonna assess your worthiness of receiving it in fairness terms.”

0:16:55.7 Aaron Powell: But that would be a rejection of their core beliefs in the nature of justice, which would be a problem. But on the other hand, it feels like, if we go into something no matter what kind of institution or metric or decision making process you have for determining deservingness of one’s wealth and worthiness of redistribution, that’s going to be subject to, as we talked about, like how complicated this question is, it seems like anyone no matter what the decision making process is going to be able to sit down and come to any answer they want, by just choosing to highlight certain kinds of luck or downplay other kinds of luck. So do all the people who didn’t get jobs out of college during COVID deserve redistribution because that was luck? That was like brute luck? Or do they not, because they should have been anticipating that something like COVID could happen and been preparing for it? And so you end up with decision makers basically being able to just kind of pick and choose, however they want to, which obviously would run counter to Egalitarian principles. I mean, is there like a third way? Or are they trapped between these options?

0:18:13.6 Daniel Shapiro: Well, the best I can do, and I really, I should have done this, when I set up the theory, I should have actually explained the key example from Kymlicka, which really motivated this, because I actually gave you the whats and not the whys. So why did they end up with this division? Because you might say, “Alright, but they just did this… What are the… ” So one of the seminal examples is a philosopher, Will Kymlicka, I think he was teaching in Canada and may still be there. And he wrote a very important book called Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction. I don’t know if you’ve read it, but it’s a really good book, actually, I think very highly of it. Anyway, there’s this seminal example, this is probably not gonna answer your question, but I wanna at least explain what motivated this, so it doesn’t sound…

0:18:54.1 Daniel Shapiro: So here’s the example. We imagine two people and they have the same natural background, and they have the same talents and abilities, so we’ve done that, and we give them the same amount of stuff, the same amount of resources, I think in Kymlicka’s example it’s land, but it doesn’t really matter. Okay, the differences between them are this: One of these people, their idea of the good life is just to play tennis as much as possible. They wanna just work as little as they can to be able to play tennis, maybe build a tennis court. Pejoratively, you could call them a tennis bum if you want. Right, okay.

0:19:36.9 Daniel Shapiro: And the other person, she’s an entrepreneurial gardener, so she takes her land, she grows vegetables, she just has this good insight in business, and she gets a lot wealthier. And this is almost a quote from Kymlicka. Kymlicka says, “If we allow the market to work freely, the gardener will be wealthier than the tennis player.” And if I were to sound like a New Yorker where I grew go up, the response would be, “So what’s the problem?” This seems like a perfectly just sort of thing, and the reason I like this example a lot, think of all the things in it. First of all, they have different occupations. They have different work, leisure trade-​offs. They have different income consumption trade-​offs. They just differ in their ambitions, and so this may sound to you almost Nozickian, except it’s Nozick with an Egalitarian twist. You’re starting with the same kind of Egalitarian background, and then it just turns out one of them is more ambitious or more hard-​working.

0:20:35.3 Daniel Shapiro: I don’t know if that answers your question, but that’s what motivated them. I was at an IHS conference with Kymlicka in ’92 and he hadn’t changed his mind about that. He said, “Yeah, I think inequalities in income, a lot of them are justified.” He said he had more problems with wealth, ’cause he thought of wealth as building up over generations, inherited wealth and stuff like that, but he said, “Yeah, you can tie inequalities to income to choices people make.” So I don’t know if it’s answering your question, but that’s at least the motivation. These kind of examples seem very compelling, so these inequalities seem…

0:21:13.7 Aaron Powell: It’s really interesting that you bring up Kymlicka, because Trevor and I have mentioned several times on the show, it’s footnote 42 in that book…

0:21:23.2 Daniel Shapiro: I remember that. [laughter]

0:21:25.2 Aaron Powell: Where he… Well, we have remembered footnote 42. I found it in college, and I remember ever since where he says… And I don’t remember which theory he’s discussing, but he basically says, “You will search in vain through these theories… ”

0:21:41.4 Trevor Burrus: He’s talking about Rawles, I think actually.

0:21:44.8 Aaron Powell: Oh right, yes, he’s talking about Rawles, but it applies more broadly. He says, “You’ll search in vain through all of this for discussions of how this would be implemented in practice or whether it can be, and that they just don’t seem to care about that.” The thing that I was getting at is this seems like a real problem for Egalitarians in terms of the putting their ideas into practice, because if you invest a sovereign or an institution or a decision-​maker with the ability to decide who is worthy and who is not worthy for purposes of redistribution and the criteria are as complicated. So that tennis player also could have just stumbled into being the best tennis player in the world and made a killing just by wanting to kick around and play tennis.

0:22:35.0 Aaron Powell: If you have to determine that heavy causal density, I suppose, then the sovereign or decision-​maker has tremendous power to be either arbitrary, because they can choose what they emphasize or to be corrupt by saying, “Well, the people who I like are the deserving ones and the others aren’t.” The Egalitarians could respond saying like, “No, you have to follow the decision-​making rubric in a principled way.” But it feels like the decision-​making rubric, even in the best circumstances, is so potentially fuzzy and so like epistemically complex that it would be hard to even know if we were getting it right.

0:23:21.9 Daniel Shapiro: Yeah, I mean, in one sense I’m not gonna disagree with you, but I wanted to be fair to them. The part where they did spend a lot of time, and I don’t wanna spend a lot of time on this ’cause that’s actually why I’d invite people to read the book, ’cause a lot of the book is about healthcare, ’cause that’s one of the most complicated things. But Dworkin and another guy, Norman Daniel, spent a long time arguing for National Health Insurance, ’cause they thought that was the most important thing. There’s also some discussion in Daniels about social security. So what they did to be fair, although, is to look at some central welfare institutions and try to justify them. I’m gonna raise some problems for that, it’ll probably be the next thing I’ll get to, but I’m not aware of this global sort of issue that I raised, about the problems [0:24:11.5] ____.

0:24:14.3 Daniel Shapiro: The awareness I did see about it was more local. There’s a lot of arguing about, what about expensive tastes? That was a big discussion. Suppose I’m stuck with, for some reason, having to survive while I have to have champagne and caviar, for some reason, I have like this bizarre psychological disability. There’s a lot of discussion about that. There’s a lot of a local discussion, but the global problem, at least as of when I stopped working on it, I didn’t see a problem. What I did see, to be fair to them, is there is a lot of discussion about specific welfare state institutions, which they try to justify or rationalize, however you wanna do that. There is that. I don’t wanna make it sound like they didn’t do anything because a lot of Dworkin’s writings are on, “Here’s how certain institutions and here’s what a fair distribution of wealth would do based on this hypothetical insurance market and so forth.

0:25:08.8 Trevor Burrus: I found footnote 42, ’cause Aaron and I have emailed it to each other at different times. The kicker is…

0:25:14.3 Aaron Powell: It’s a true definition of a nerd here.

0:25:17.0 Trevor Burrus: Yes.

[laughter]

0:25:18.1 Trevor Burrus: It says, “It seems clear that liberal Egalitarian thinkers or liberal Egalitarian theories have operated with over-​optimistic assumptions about state capacity.” And you’re like, “Oh really? No way.” [chuckle] The impaired limitations in the capacity of the state to achieve social objectives have been theorized by social scientists, both on the right and the left, but this literature has not yet permeated the philosophical debates, one looks in vain in the corpus of the major left liberal political philosophers, Rawls, Dworkin, Cohen, Roemer, Arneson, and Ackerman, for a discussion of the extent to which the state can or cannot fulfill the principles of justice they endorse. We always regarded that as, it’s quite a whopper. If you think about it.

0:25:55.4 Daniel Shapiro: Yeah, I actually did not do not do any public choice stuff in the book at all, my objections are… Without public choice. You could do that, of course.

0:26:04.7 Trevor Burrus: Well, I mean it’s related to what you’re saying, I think here, it’s not just public choice, it’s sort of what Aaron asked, it’s also, can the state determine Egalitarian perform by the principles of egalitarianism? So let’s move on to your next part too, with your next critique is about the possibilities of social insurance, private social insurance too, which maybe a Egalitarian should endorse given this first problem.

0:26:30.6 Daniel Shapiro: Yeah, yeah. Okay, so let me go on to that. So there’s two kind of reasons, and I can do them separately, so I don’t talk too long, it’s your call on this, but two kind of reasons why I think social insurance should be viewed as more unfair than this more market alternative. So the first has to do with competition. In a market, you have competing plans and policies, now in social insurance, you’re gonna have either none of that or less. Now, why is that significant? Because restrictions on competition are restrictions on choices that reflect different views of the good life, let me give some examples, so this won’t be so abstract. Let’s start with healthcare, so a time preference, suppose I have a, let’s try and make sure I get this right.

0:27:19.1 Daniel Shapiro: The high rate of time preference or is it low? I greatly prefer the present over the future, that’s high rate of time preference, right, then I’m gonna gravitate towards a kind of healthcare policy that’s gonna focus more on immediate needs, not on long term needs, vice versa for low time preference. Risk aversion, this is another big… Another way in which people’s views differ a lot. So if I am very risk-​averse, I’m gonna probably want a very comprehensive low deductible health insurance, even if it’s more expensive that covers everything, not just catastrophes, but even more routine and minor and predictable expenses. Where if I’m the other way around, I’m less risk-​averse, I’ll say, “Well, catastrophic only, that’s fine. I’ll use savings, out of pocket expenses, for the more predictable.” Occupational choices are clearly relevant, certain occupations are more risky than others, and I might wanna allocate savings over time, and moral and metaphysical views are very important.

0:28:19.4 Daniel Shapiro: Like my view about the meaning and value of life and death, and my view about the importance or un-​importance of pain and suffering that could affect… Like do I want life prolonging procedures? What about contraception? Abortion? If we had physician-​assisted suicide, which I think we only have in one state, but in other places they do physician suicide. But here’s the thing, national health insurance, it depends on the form, but either of them, doesn’t allow any of it. So think of single payer, there are no market-​based alternatives. Now, if you’re affluent enough, you can pay taxes for national health insurance and you can… There’s a market for supplemental, but the less affluent people aren’t really able to do that.

0:29:02.4 Daniel Shapiro: Now other forms of National Health Insurance have some more choice, I’m thinking of places like Germany, Holland, France, they have what’s called non-​profit sickness funds. But the government policies pretty much mandate or require that the policies, and the pricing is very similar. And the United States is like this too, though they’re not technically like Europe, but even before Obama Care, Federal and State mandates pretty much made high deductible, catastrophic-​only insurance virtually illegal, and since Obama Care it has arguably worsened. I can say a word or two, this might be the place to put some flesh on the bones, what the proposal I have, it’s actually very influenced by a former colleague of yours, John Goodman, who wrote this book with Gerald Musgrave called Patient Power. I think he’s the first one to… One of the few to propose these health savings accounts.

0:29:54.0 Daniel Shapiro: Yeah, so the basic problem right now is the US has two very strong biases, which are unusual, to say the least. One is in favor of comprehensive insurance, and the reason for that is, except for a small amount of money you can put in health savings accounts, which you lose at the end of the year, if you don’t use it, money paid out-​of pocket is taxed, money paid by insurance isn’t, so no surprise, we all gravitate towards insurance, which is comprehensive. The other weird thing is it’s employer-​based and that’s because premiums pay for… That your employer provides, are a shelter on the employer-​employee side, whereas you do it individually, it’s not sheltered or not sheltered much. So what I adopt from Goodman is open up the health savings accounts, expand the limits, accumulate them over time, and give a tax credit for the premiums, regardless of how you purchase it. It’s not the worst, reflecting how weird…

0:30:53.7 Daniel Shapiro: When I say it’s weird, here’s the thing to think about, which I’m sure a lot of your listeners know, think about auto insurance doesn’t pay for your tune-​ups, right, that would be very strange. Health insurance doesn’t pay when you get spring cleaning. Pet insurance doesn’t pay for Fluffy’s nail trims. And in most areas, we don’t get insurance from our employer, that’s just very strange. We’re locked, it creates a kind of job lock. The greater choice in the proposal I have would be, this would be the thing and the safety net would be, you can give a refundable tax credit for people who don’t pay income tax, so it’s like a healthcare voucher for the poor, it’s by a high deductible insurance and you can… Some people run uninsurable risks, you can subsidize that.

0:31:41.3 Trevor Burrus: So you’re arguing that the Egalitarians should be for this, more than a national healthcare plan that is one-​size-​fits all for these Egalitarian reasons. But I think most of them would say, it doesn’t work. And the concessions you’re making, for example, to a safety net is sort of demonstrating their point of what won’t work… You won’t have… There’ll be a lot of people who slip through the cracks, a lot of people who get a bad form of healthcare because they get the safety net, and Kenneth Arrow showed that you can’t have effective markets in healthcare. Is that… That seems relevant to whether or not… That they prefer the social insurance of the state, because they think it works in a way that a private system would collapse.

0:32:36.9 Daniel Shapiro: Yeah, let me think about what to say about that. I don’t know about the… This is a little tricky, this is an area where it gets tricky, so we don’t have actual market health insurance, so we don’t have a lot to point to. What we can do and… And when I gave… In 2007, I had an APA session on my book and Jerry Gao… So I was blessed to have Jerry Gao as one of the commentators, and he worried about this, he said, “My worry about this is you’re supposed to be doing real-​real comparisons, but it sounds like you’re kinda doing a real-​ideal” ’cause it’s… There’s no… You argue, and for reasons that I just mentioned that US is in real market health insurance, and a lot of other people have argued this, but you’re just… You’re just saying this is how it would work. And the best I can say here, I think the best anybody can say is, I’m just trying to use how markets and insurance work in analogous areas. The safety net stuff is… I don’t know if I wanna call it a concession ’cause it’s basically…

0:33:31.5 Daniel Shapiro: I’m not proposing pure free market health insurance, I am not. I don’t think you can get Egalitarians to go along with that, and it’s not… But it still would not be social insurance because you wouldn’t have the government mainly involved in the provision, you would mainly have a market and the government would just do the safety net like I said, and it would get rid of these distortions. So it would look a lot more like insurance in other markets. That’s probably the best I can do. I don’t know what else anybody can do when they’re proposing something that looks radical, I mean the closest we have in the US now is they’re starting to be these cracks, like we’re starting to get… Some places, people, or just doctors are opting out of insurance, I didn’t even anticipate that stuff, that’s a different model, it’s like the [0:34:15.0] ____ model. Doctors will flee the system and start offering… Did you guys read Reasons interview with this… Direct primary care?

0:34:24.5 Trevor Burrus: We had, we had a… Dr. Bryan Newhoffle was on an episode about five years ago, called, “Why can’t you email your doctor?” He’s a direct primary care physician.

0:34:34.0 Daniel Shapiro: Does that address… Do you feel like that addresses your question…

[overlapping conversation]

0:34:37.1 Trevor Burrus: Yeah. No, I think that’s the best we can do.

0:34:39.9 Daniel Shapiro: Best we can do is just say it’s analogous and we’re not requiring any radical changes in human nature. It’s not utopian in that sense. We’re not imagining the government becomes a benevolent, you know, like angels.

0:34:52.1 Trevor Burrus: One good thing about your argument and your paper is that you’re kind of saying, “I’ve twice studied, here’s what the Egalitarians should say.” But you’re kind of saying, “Let’s accept that this is how free markets in these areas would work.” Don’t you think your principals would have you prefer them to the state, if in fact, free markets work in this way, right? So it’s not really about arguing about the functionality of free market. It’s saying, if it does provide diverse health care, diverse retirement plans, diverse social insurance, isn’t that better on your terms? Which is what I really like about your essay.

0:35:25.6 Daniel Shapiro: Yeah, it’s one way to put it. I do, as I recall, I’m trying to remember if they do raise these market failure things. I don’t think they do. I think Dworkin, if I recall his argument is that the kind of information that insurance has is really unfair and that’s another argument. I won’t go into that ’cause that will be a long… All I can say is, again, I’ll make a plug for the book, I have like 30 to 40 pages on Dworkin because it’s just very complicated. Right. Right.

0:35:54.7 Aaron Powell: I do have one potential, I guess if I put my Egalitarian hat on, one potential concern that I think distinguishes, that might distinguish the social versus the private at a more fundamental level, is the mission and/​or intent of the actors involved, in the sense that a lot of political philosophy, including a lot of Egalitarian political philosophy, sees the state as the instantiation of justice in the world. It is that mechanism, we have a theory of justice, and then we have the state that we’ve set up, a government we’ve set up, and its job is to try to move the world in that direction. And so Libertarians have this too, to the extent that non-​anarchist Libertarians, that the state’s justice is respecting rights and the state is what protects our rights and so on.

0:36:44.9 Aaron Powell: But it would seem then that if we have a social insurance, so we have say, single payer, then it is… It’s being administered by the state, and the state’s job is to do what’s just and do what’s good for us. That’s what it nominally exists for. Whereas private providers, their job is to turn a profit. That’s what they exist for, and so as a result, when if I enter, I go out into the world and I need health insurance, say, I know the state is going to give it to me out of the goodness of its heart, or because that’s what it was elected to do. But I might worry that the private market is going to give it to me instead based on whether they think I will be profitable or not, and that these are just very, very different approaches to the provision of services, which then might play out in bad ways or ways that lead us away from at least Egalitarian conceptions of justice.

0:37:52.0 Daniel Shapiro: Yeah, this is really the intention outcome distinction, I think that’s what you’re alluding to or pointing to, because it’s like saying, “Okay, they have the right intentions.” And that should weigh much more what… I would think it’s… This is giving too much weight to symbolism over substance, that’s maybe the way I’d put it, it’s like saying, “Okay, here we have National Health Insurance,” and there are other problems which I haven’t mentioned, I haven’t mentioned the production side, most National Health Insurance rations catastrophic care, which leads to some really horrible outcomes. This is… I didn’t even do this in the paper, but this is actually one of the really strongest Egalitarian arguments, which is, who gains from this? We gain, you guys. If there’s a waiting list, we have the knowledge and connection to work the system and get to the front of the line. One thing we know, we know there’s a better [0:38:46.2] ____. When they’re non-​market forms of [0:38:50.6] ____, the smart and the really connected do well. I don’t wanna do that in the paper, but going back to your point Aaron, which is, I think it’s just symbolism over substance. Don’t we want…

0:39:02.9 Daniel Shapiro: If justice seems to require on their part that we have, it’s legitimate for people with different conceptions of the good to put that into practice. And National Health Insurance just doesn’t do it, and it also rations. But what I think my system is better is, it’s trying to cover both parts they want and has a market for choices, and has something for victims to bad brute luck. So, if you’re not paying any income tax, cause you’re poor and unlucky, you get this basically, it makes them a health care voucher. If you have an insurable risk, I think in Goodman’s book, it’s like a high risk pool, which gets subsidized. So you have… In other words, think of it this way, you have these two sides to egalitarianism. This form of market, health insurance, covers both of them, National Health Insurance doesn’t or it works as a worse job. So, that to me counts more than the fact that… It should count more I think, than the fact that the guy administering or the woman administering, not the one but the whole group of them administering is going, “Well gosh, we’re truly trying to help people, unfortunately, you’re gonna have to wait three years for your hip. Sorry.” Or “Go in the supplemental market if you can afford it.” I’m being a little facetious.

0:40:14.3 Trevor Burrus: No I think that’s…

0:40:16.3 Daniel Shapiro: Does that help? I think that symbolism versus substance is the way to argue on this. I think.

0:40:20.4 Trevor Burrus: Well also whether or not you get it, as you pointed out, and this is something that I thought of when I was reading your essay, that has an aspect of brute luck to it, of whether or not you win the lottery of the rationing system or you… In the NHS, maybe 10 years ago, they de-​ranked or I don’t know what the official terminology is, but they de-​ranked smokers in terms of what you can get for treatment. And so suddenly smokers… So then you say, “Okay smoking, they’re no longer part of the privileged class.” Now, are they being de-​ranked because… And then you actually get into this question of like: Is smoking brute luck or is it option luck? Because they really enjoy smoking, maybe, so their life choices were to make themselves better, but they’re… I mean it’s still a huge problem for them absolutely, I’d like to get to the… Yeah, go ahead.

0:41:17.0 Daniel Shapiro: Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, do you want me to go to welfare or you want the second problem where…

0:41:19.7 Trevor Burrus: Yeah, the third point. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the second… We’re gonna go to the [0:41:23.5] ____.

0:41:23.8 Daniel Shapiro: Well, I was gonna… Okay, well there’s another thing on… Another reason why… I can do this quickly, it’ll be faster, that social health insurance is worse and that… Well, we can make the same point for about different conceptions of the good with Social Security easily, because Social Security, you’re not saving at all. So, you have no way unless of course you’re more affluent, whereas, in the kind of private system I’m arguing for, which is modeled after the Chilean system that started in early ’80s where they privatized… Here’s the crucial thing about that. Everybody, virtually everybody gets a pension, same as [0:42:00.7] ____, ’cause you’re required to save, and there’s a safety net for people who don’t need it. So you have a lot more ways of translating your choices into… ‘Cause to think about retirement is thinking about your life long term. What kind of retirement I want? How long do I think I’m gonna live? How do I wanna allocate savings? So with that it’s even… I think it’s even clearer, healthcare is more…

0:42:24.0 Daniel Shapiro: But the other reason is, and this is a very powerful argument for I think a compulsory private pension system, has to do with the private system makes it much easier for the poor to accumulate assets, real assets and savings. Social security, you do not have a right to your pension, it is not your property, you do not get to accumulate your wealth over time. And this to me is something Egalitarians should be wildly enthusiastic about. The poor and the unlucky will get to own a substantial chunk of savings and capital at their… And they can pass it on to their kids, even better. Whereas with social security, I’m sure most of your listeners knows this, you cannot do this, you cannot, it is not set… And we think about this legally, I’m sure you know the Supreme Court cases, Trevor. Social security, there’ve been a couple of cases and it’s not… You don’t have a right to it. It’s not a contractually based thing. Whereas in this system…

0:43:27.6 Trevor Burrus: You don’t have a… You have due process rights to some extent, but you don’t have a right to [0:43:31.5] ____.

0:43:31.6 Daniel Shapiro: Right, you don’t have a… It’s not a property right. It’s not real property right.

0:43:34.5 Trevor Burrus: But… And what’s gonna happen. If it was, it would be interesting, it’d be crazy, which is why the Supreme Court has said it’s not but… Because you know right now, it runs out of money in 11 years, and then automatic cuts…

0:43:45.5 Daniel Shapiro: Well it ran out of money actually a lot of time ago. But that’s just… Yeah, yeah.

0:43:47.0 Trevor Burrus: I know but it ran out a long time ago, but I read this today, but automatic cuts would come in and just shave 30% off the top for everyone, this is what happens if they don’t fix anything. So of course you don’t have a right to even this amount, yeah.

0:43:56.6 Daniel Shapiro: Yeah, please don’t lie about this. I’ve been meeting with my financial planner. Trying not to think about this. Yes, yes. Anyway, so that is the second reason, and I am puzzled why Egalitarians don’t support this. This seems to me, real obvious that you’d want… If I can use Marx’s language, this is like ending the gap between those that own capital and those that don’t. I don’t know the figures but I would imagine even if you’re pretty poor and you start saving 5% or 6% in your 20s, you could, at retirement, be close to a millionaire, I would think. I don’t know the exact figures. But I think…

0:44:28.4 Trevor Burrus: I think easily. Yeah, compound interest is amazing, yeah.

0:44:31.6 Daniel Shapiro: Yeah, yeah, and so I would think… You’d think, “Wow, here’s someone that’s a low skilled, unlucky person working at low wage jobs and when they retire, they have these assets.” I would think, you’re Egalitarian, you would greatly prefer that. If it is an objection, jump in because this one puzzles me. I can think of the economic risk arguments. I don’t think it’s very good. I can think of…

0:44:54.0 Trevor Burrus: The last point you make, which is about personal responsibility, which is one that makes a lot of people upset. I’ve been in these debates where you say that, “Welfare state turns people into people who don’t wanna get a job or something.” And they get very upset about that, but you have some interesting things to say about how Egalitarians should go.

0:45:11.0 Daniel Shapiro: Yeah, so very briefly, A, whether it’s private or government, can be either conditional or unconditional. A conditional aid is, aid which is given if you get into the workforce and make a serious attempt. Unconditional, is not. Both private and government welfare, can be either coin. Private aid tends to be conditional, we can talk about the reasons for that, there are some. Some egalitarians have written on this and they say, “Oh, it’s clear unconditional aid is better. There’s a problem with conditional aid.” And you can even go back to my earlier argument, it’s gonna evolve this causal inquiry into whether you’re responsible for your plight. And that involves, I think Jonathan Wolf calls it, shameful self-​revelation. And you think about it, and you think, “Oh, this sounds right, because didn’t Shapiro just say it, right, you know we have this causal inquiry for income, so we’re clearly gonna have to have causal inquiry for responsibility.” And that sounds shameful.

0:46:06.9 Daniel Shapiro: And that sounds like incompatible in ethics and self-​respect, Kymlicka has endorsed this argument. So, I think the problem with this argument is it’s wrong that we would need a causal inquiry. That is appropriate on the what you might call, “the donors.” You guys can’t… But imagine me putting air quotes now. But on the recipients’ side, I think a new issue arises, which is changing the situation of the recipients. Even if someone’s life up until now has been battered by bad brute luck, been really terrible, they could now be in a position, they could do something about it or they could be placed in a situation where they could do something about it. And the reason, I think, Egalitarians should want this is that, what is their vision of the world? It’s the vision of the world in which people’s lives are more influenced by choice than brute luck. That’s the whole point.

0:47:03.4 Daniel Shapiro: And so, you’re not gonna… One way to do that is to use a phrase, I’m gonna borrow this from David Schmidtz, this distinction comes right out of David Schmidtz’s Elements of Justice, if you’ve read the book. “They should want recipients to take responsibility.” And that’s not about praise and blame, it’s about regarding their welfare and their future and the consequences, actions up to them and not others. And the advantage of conditional aid has some common sense tests to see if people are willing to do that. One, do they work if work’s made available? If they can’t work or they’re not in a position to get a job, can they do things like improve their skills? Or, if they have trouble with their behavior or their character, can they do things to improve that? Conditional aid is better because it has those tests, unconditional aid doesn’t, it basically just gives the aid.

0:47:53.0 Daniel Shapiro: And so, I think that is the reason Egalitarians… I agree with Wolf, you don’t want a causal inquiry, you don’t want the old noisy… And you don’t want the nosy welfares, is there a guy under the bed in the days when being unmarried, and being a woman and having a kid was… That’s not the point. The point is there’s a work test. And so that is a reason conditional aid is better. Now, we can get into private versus state conditional aid, but I can pause here if you wanna ask questions about this. Because there’s a question now, which would you want private or state conditional aid?

0:48:27.7 Trevor Burrus: Well yeah, you would want… I mean, private conditional aid is diverse, as you pointed out. It has a bunch of different characteristics to it. Church aid can be like drug test people and where it’s super controversial to drug test for welfare, a church can do that and stuff. That seems quite clear. But you still have an unconditional safety net, because a couple of times you’ve talked about the safety net for health insurance and stuff like this. Would you still have an unconditional safety net at the bottom of this?

0:48:58.9 Daniel Shapiro: Yeah, that’s a good question. The conditional aid in welfare is actually just cash aid, actually. You still have the unconditional in kind. If you look at what happened with welfare reform in the United States, it didn’t make everything contingent on work. It made basically AFDC, I think that’s the technical term, Aid for Families became temporary [0:49:20.8] ____. But it seems like food stamps would still be unconditional and housing assistance. To answer your question, Trevor, the cash aid is what would change from unconditional. Well, actually it’s changed from unconditional to conditional. Yeah, the basic argument for private is it’s more efficient, but I don’t think Egalitarians require to pick the most efficient, so I end up concluding on welfare, it’s a wash. But that still narrows the gap because Libertarians say, “We want private alternatives,” Egalitarians would have to say, “They’re not worse than state, it’s just we’re not required to pick them.” That’s the final part where there’s a narrowing of the gap.

0:50:02.9 Daniel Shapiro: Oh, one other thing I wanted to mention is in the book, I don’t just do this for egalitarianism, trying to narrow the gap. I actually argue a whole bunch of alternatives, there’s positive rights theory, communitarianism, certain forms of liberalism. So the project of the book is trying to show… And that’s why it’s called, “Is the Welfare State Justified?” Because I’m basically saying all of these perspectives should converge on more or Libertarian-​ish institutions. And Max Vilensky called it, overlapping consensus libertarianism.

[music]

0:50:48.5 Aaron Powell: Thank you for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at www​.lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.