Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog

So, um, I guess I haven’t posted in a while. Since I continue to be really busy, I’m going to make September my month off. Expect blogging to resume in October. In the meantime, my colleagues at at the Tech Liberation Front are dishing up good stuff daily.

Every time a libertarian-leaning Bush supporter is backed into a corner, he has a trump card. “Yeah, Bush is bad on the budget, and on free trade, and on civil liberties, and the war, and Medicare, and energy policy, and just about every other issue you can think of, but what about Social Security?”

My suspicion is that Social Security reform won’t happen even if there is a second Bush term. But lately I’ve become more worried about an even worse outcome: what if Bush does push for Social Security reform and screws it up beyond recognition, giving the concept of privatization a bad name for decades to come?

The precedents are not good. This president has consistently shown he doesn’t care terribly much about free-market principles, as demonstrated by his haphazard protectionism, his pork-laden energy bill, and his signing of the 2002 farm bill that lavished more handouts on farmers.

But even worse, this is a president that doesn’t care very much about good policy, period. Exhibit A is Medicare. The original idea wasn’t bad. A new prescription drug benefit was supposed to be the carrot that persuaded seniors to accept reforms that would hold down costs in the long run and move the system toward solvency. But after that proposal had made its way through the Congressional meat grinder, what we got instead was an orgy of tax breaks for well-connected health care interests, no meaningful competition until some minor pilot programs take effect at the end of the decade, and a drug benefit whose cost the administration concealed until after the bill was passed. Did the president veto that monstrosity? To the contrary– he twisted the arms of every conservative Republican in Congress to make sure it got the votes it needed to pass.

No honest analyst, left or right, thought the Medicare bill was a good idea. But this is not a president who cares about good policy. He wanted something that he could call “Medicare reform with a prescription drug benefit,” and he got it. He didn’t seem to care if it would actually rein in costs or improve seniors’ drug coverage.

If that’s the kind of “reform” we can expect on the Social Security front, I’d much rather take a pass this election cycle and wait for a competent Republican president to get elected in 2008 or 2012. I’m starting to think that libertarians should want George W. Bush as far away from our favorite reform proposals as possible, because all he’s likely to do is screw them up and make us look bad in the process.