My politically homeless views

There are great ideas that neither coalition wants to push for.

Here’s some good ideas that don’t fall neatly into either coalition. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker)

I wrote about my most progressive and most conservative views, and now I want to write about my opinions that exist in a Death Valley of cross-ideological disdain.

I’m not talking about my most judiciously moderate takes; those are boring. Like, I think Republicans’ fanatical opposition to progressive taxation is insane, but progressives just blithely assuming that you can achieve a European-scale welfare state by taxing billionaires is stupid.

Today I’m talking about my strongly held ideas that I think are very good on the merits, but that neither side of the big debates has any interest in taking up.

That’s typically because these ideas are unpopular.

I sometimes get invited to wonk-fest panels or dinners in D.C. where people talk about ideas that can’t get any traction, and then they roll their eyes at the cynicism and opportunism of “politicians.” It’s fashionable to hate on politicians in this manner.

But I don’t find catering to public opinion to be nearly as distasteful as most pundits seem to. It’s good that we have representative government rather than government by plebiscite. In a democracy, policy outcomes are supposed to reflect voter preferences. If the voters don’t agree with some smart take of mine or yours or anyone else’s, then it’s not the job of random House members to try to persuade them — it’s our job.

I don’t want to write about ideas that are merely unpopular, though, because the truth is that both parties are actually pretty willing to push pretty unpopular ideas. If anything, I wish they would be more pragmatic and attentive to what the voters want.

My goal here is to write about ideas that don’t just poll poorly, but that conflict in profound ways with the agendas of both sides, even though I believe sincerely that the country would be much better off if these policies prevailed.

Carbon pricing is good, #actually

Political unpopularity aside, environmentalists turned against pricing the externality as a climate solution when they realized that no vaguely plausible price would solve the problem as they defined it.

That’s largely because going through the explicit pricing exercise reveals that hitting United Nations I.P.C.C. climate targets would be insanely costly.

Trying to hit those targets through other regulatory measures does not improve the benefit-cost analysis, nor does it change the fact that there is limited political willingness to bear short-term costs for the sake of addressing long-term climate problems.

The good news is that a lot of progress has been made on the issue thanks to our old friend technological innovation. There are also lots of things policymakers could do to facilitate clean energy deployment (nuclear regulatory reform, permitting) or facilitate less energy-intensive modes of economic growth (zoning reform) that involve less-than-zero economic costs.

Realistically, though, we clearly can’t halt warming entirely with negative-cost measures. We do need to do something with costs, of which pricing is by far the most cost-effective option. That’s both because pricing operates on all margins simultaneously and also because pricing generates revenue, which can offset other taxes that have their own economic costs.

Conversely, conservatives decided they hate pricing because pricing only makes sense if you’re willing to acknowledge that climate change is a problem, which they are not.

The very qualities that make carbon pricing an orphan are exactly what’s good about it. A pricing scheme says that climate change is a real problem, that it is worth bearing some cost to address, but also that it is not an apocalypse-scale problem that is worth bearing infinite costs to address. A pricing scheme avoids the magical thinking of positing that fossil fuel use is some kind of corporate conspiracy rather than something people do because fossil fuels are useful, while avoiding the opposite magical thinking that since fossil fuels are useful it must be the case that there are no downsides. The world should have much less regulation aimed at curbing energy use or fossil fuel production, and much more explicit pricing.

America should have more guest workers

Conservatives who dislike immigration for cultural or values-related reasons tend to understate the economic case for immigration. Conversely, though, progressives who tend to like immigration out of abstract humanitarian concerns tend to be wary of singing the praises of cheap labor.

That’s how we got the Biden administration running an overall very permissive immigration regime but tightening regulations on au pairs and seasonal farmworkers.

What we ought to be doing is the opposite.

Something like the au pair program is not a comprehensive solution to the problem of child care costs. But it really is pretty helpful!

For the minority of American families with a bedroom to spare, an au pair can be a relatively affordable way to help balance work and family. In a sane world, we would be looking for more solutions like this. The au pair program only really exists because we’ve agreed to classify it as a kind of cultural exchange venture rather than a labor program. But viewed as a labor program, it has a lot of positive attributes and we should expand the opportunity for people from poor countries to live in the United States for a year and do domestic work.

Watching kids is the paradigmatic labor-intensive sector with very little prospect for productivity growth. The only way for it to be affordable en masse for Americans is for the wages paid to be low. The miracle of immigration, though, is that what counts as a very low wage for an American is not low by the standards of many other countries. Creating “good-paying nanny jobs” does not make sense as an economic development strategy for the United States, and we should be more worried about creating affordable child care than about undercutting earnings potential.

Seasonal farm work, similarly, is a paradigmatic bad job.

Even if it paid well, it would be incredibly annoying to have a job that pops in and out of existence on the cycle of farm work. Moving from place to place and picking different kinds of crops at different times of year is not an aspiration people have for their kids. In fact, throughout all of human history “landless farm laborer” is basically the absolute worst role you can play in the economy. And yet, cheap groceries are good. And, again, these low-paid, annoying seasonal farm jobs are work that lots of people are happy to have.

Part of why this works is that by making the workers temporary, you address a lot of legitimate conservative criticisms of low-skilled immigration. There’s no fiscal burden from committing to take care of these workers when they’re sick or elderly. We’re not committed to educating their children or altering the long-term demographic composition of the country. People come, they work, they pay a little bit in taxes, and we reap the economic benefits of an expanded labor supply.

Spend more to make prisons better

Sometimes people break the rules and should be punished. A span of time in prison is a reasonable punishment because it has deterrent value and also “incapacitates” people from committing additional offenses.

Unfortunately, many American prisons are not just unpleasant (which is part of the idea) but downright cruel in their conditions.

What’s worse, this cruelty is somewhat arbitrary because part of the badness of being in prison is that you’re subject to the capricious will of the guards and (even worse) of your fellow inmates. This overall results in a bad situation where de facto punishment is being meted out to offenders in part by the state but also in part by other incarcerated people in a way that empowers prison gangs and undermines the purposes of the carceral system.

We have plenty of documented instances of corrupt prison guards and the related issue of brutality, both of which further entrench the power of gangs in many prisons.

The upshot is that the penal apparatus does not really dole out punishment in a rational, planned, carefully dosed manner. Time spent in prison should be a boring, unpleasant drag that leaves prisoners motivated not to return.

But prisons should be safe and calm and free of addictive substances. We don’t need utopian conditions, but people should at least have a chance at getting sober and receiving mental health treatment and learning about work and discipline. What we really do not want is a situation where the penal experience puts people into contact with ongoing criminal enterprises and ensnares them further in illegal activity.

The difficulty is that making the prison system more effective would require spending more money (which conservatives don’t like) but also embracing punishment (which progressives don’t like).

Much the same is true of parole.

Parole supervision should be considerably more intense and professionalized, which would reduce recidivism among parolees. But then if parole worked better, a decent share of prisoners could be let out on parole sooner.

Spending money on corrections — and especially spending it on anything other than longer prison sentences — is in practice an orphaned cause, even though all kinds of people will agree it makes sense if you talk them through it.

Taking everyone’s concerns seriously

What these three ideas have in common, I think, is that they emerge from taking seriously the concerns raised on both sides of arguments.

Climate change is real, and it is genuinely bad. If you don’t do anything at all to restrain people from putting greenhouse gases into the air, they will put more greenhouse gases into the air than is socially desirable. Progressives are right about this! But conservatives are correct to say that a lot of the specific policies that environmentalists propose to address climate change undervalue economic growth and/or abstract away from the practical reality of running a modern industrial economy. Conservatives’ preferred solution to this, though, is just to get mad and pretend there’s no problem.

On immigration, we have a progressive movement that undervalues capitalism running into a conservative movement that has become paranoid about immigration.

But immigrant workers, including low-skilled ones, add real value to the economy. If you actually try to think through, in detail, the upsides and downsides of low-skilled immigration, it is not that hard to design policies that capture the upside while minimizing the downside.

You just need to take the task seriously.

Part of the growing dysfunction of Congress is that on a practical level, the United States’ policymaking process is meant to work via a series of ad hoc elite bargains between elected officials. There are other ways for legislatures to work, but we don’t have the institutions to support the “win an election and implement your manifesto” mode of governance or the “hammer out a comprehensive coalition agreement after the election” mode.

In our system, people who care a lot about a given topic need to be able to sit down at a table and hammer out some deals that take into account competing considerations.

This still happens via Secret Congress, but the fact that it requires secrecy means it can’t be applied to high-profile topics that matter a lot. So we get people yelling at each other rather than listening to the competing considerations, and a lot of potentially good solutions end up orphaned.