Third Party Nonsense

Matt Miller has a column in the Post titled "Why We Need a Third Party." After reading this, the answer seems to be "because many Americans don't understand the parties we have." Miller starts out by complaining that the government isn't doing enough to put people back to work:

Our president calls himself “a warrior for the middle class” because he’s campaigning for a plan that might add 2 million new jobs next year at a time when 25 million Americans who want full-time work can’t find it. If that’s war, what would surrender look like?

Meanwhile, Republican zealots apparently feel that if they can’t cut 0.04 percent of the budget in the next few days they’d rather shut down the government. The party’s presidential candidates boast that a 10-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases isn’t good enough on a long-term debt deal — even though we’re about to double the number of seniors on Social Security and Medicare.

Why should we have to choose between timid half-measures and anti-tax fanaticism? Why doesn’t the president propose measures equal to the scale of our challenges? Why can’t Republicans acknowledge demography or math?

Ok, Matt, let me explain. Republicans reject the whole notion that it is the government's job to put people to work. They think, as George Will put it in the title of a recent column, that the government should "Get Out of the Way." If you think the government should be spending massive amounts of money to put people to work, you are a Democrat. As to why the President has not proposed bigger measures to get the economy moving, well, he has, but they have been whittled down by conservative Democrats or blocked by Republicans. Starting a third party is hardly a way to make the government more liberal.

Then we move on to education:

Democrats can’t say we need to fire bad teachers who are blighting the lives of countless kids, because teachers unions are the party’s most powerful interest group. But Republicans can’t say we need to raise salaries for new teachers substantially if we’re going to lure a new generation of talent to the classroom, because that’s admitting that money is part of the answer.

Actually the country's most prominent advocate of firing bad teachers as part of education "reform" is President Obama. It is true that at the local level many Democratic pols fight for teacher tenure, but at the national level the party has pretty much been captured by the reform faction. Been paying any attention to this, Matt?

Health care:

Republicans say the answer is to repeal President Obama’s reforms — but they won’t offer plans to insure more than 3 million of the 50 million Americans who lack coverage. Yet Democrats want to micromanage providers, protect the trial lawyers who bankroll their campaigns, and fully insulate people from the costs of their own care, assuring that there’s no consumer brake on runaway costs. Again, Democrats and Republicans can’t solve the problem.

The Affordable Care Act does not "micromanage providers." It does contain some pilot studies and the like of ways to reduce unnecessary care, but none of that is mandatory. And if, as Matt Miller seems to think, we should insure everybody, we need to find the money somewhere, and one obvious place is by reducing the amount we waste on useless medical care. As for the trial lawyers, well, that is a problem. But it is not a simple one; if Matt Miller has a way to simultaneously protect patients from medical malpractice and prevent lawsuit-driven medicine, he should suggest it. Come to think of it, the Affordable Care Act includes measures that are supposed to help, i.e., establishing "standards of care" and immunizing any doctor who follows them from suits. Most malpractice suits are at the state level, and reforms launched by Republican legislators in conservative states like Texas and Mississippi, advertised as radical measures that would all but do away with malpractice suits, have had no impact whatsoever on the problem.

But, see, this is all details. If you accept that the government should be trying to get health insurance to all Americans, you are a Democrat, and can squabble with other Democrats over exactly how. Republicans reject the whole notion.

Matt Miller has been captured by the fantasy of obvious solutions. He thinks -- and I have met many other Americans, mostly engineers, who think the same thing -- that the solutions to our problems are obvious. If we aren't implementing those obvious solutions, it must be because of corruption in the system. Miller:

First, both parties’ chief aim is to win elections, not solve problems. Second, both parties are prisoner to interest groups and ideological litmus tests that prevent them from blending the best of liberal and conservative thinking. Finally, neither party trusts us enough to lay out the facts and explain the steps we need to take to truly fix things.

No, that isn't it. We haven't solved our biggest problems -- educating poor people, reducing poverty, providing health care to everyone -- because they are hard problems, and the only way anyone has found to solve them is the creation of a European-style welfare state with high taxes and many freedom-reducing regulations. Since only a minority of Americans wants a European-style welfare state, we don't have one. A third party would do nothing to change this fundamental reality.