How can treating electricity as a right undermine the aim of universal access to reliable electricity? We argue that there are four steps. In step 1, because electricity is seen as a right, subsidies, theft, and nonpayment are widely tolerated. Bills that do not cover costs, unpaid bills, and illegal grid connections become an accepted part of the system. In step 2, electricity utilities—also known as distribution compa- nies—lose money with each unit of electricity sold and in total lose large sums of money. Though governments provide support, at some point, budget constraints start to bind. In step 3, distribution companies have no option but to ration supply by limiting access and restricting hours of supply. In effect, distribution compa- nies try to sell less of their product. In step 4, power supply is no longer governed by market forces. The link between payment and supply has been severed: those evading payment receive the same quality of supply as those who pay in full. The delinking of payment and supply reinforces the view described in step 1 that elec- tricity is a right. We describe these steps sequentially, but they can be thought of as parts of a low-quality, low-payment equilibrium. This equilibrium, we argue, is what differentiates electricity markets in developed and developing countries.
This is from Robin Burgess, Michael Greenstone, Nicholas Ryan, and Anant Sudarshan, “The Consequences of Treating Electricity as a Right,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 34, No. 1, Winter 2020, pp. 145-169.
Hmmm. Do you think maybe that applies, in the long run, to treating health care as a right also?
HT2 Timothy Taylor.
READER COMMENTS
Daniel Hill
Feb 11 2020 at 11:44am
If you need a case study, look at Lebanon. You have a government dominated by a party (Hezbollah) most of whose supporters steal their electricity. The end result is a national power company (EDL) which loses billions of dollars every year, but is incapable of providing electricity for more than a few hours a day.
KevinDC
Feb 11 2020 at 12:57pm
I was recently in a discussion with someone who said they’ll “never understand people who think healthcare isn’t a right.” I don’t think healthcare is a right, so I did my best to offer up a fairly simple syllogism for why I’ve reached that conclusion. It goes:
Premise 1: I am not entitled, by right, to another person’s labor.
Premise 2: Providing healthcare requires other people’s labor.
Conclusion: I do not have a right to healthcare.
Premise two is pretty indisputable. So if you want to convince me that healthcare (or electricity, or housing) is a right, you’ll have to change my mind about premise one. So I asked my friend, can you convince me that I am entitled, by right, to forcibly compel someone to provide labor on my behalf for which I will owe them nothing in return? Until I hear a good argument that I have such a right, I will continue to hold to my conclusion that healthcare, electricity, housing, etc, are not rights.
I’m not ruling out such an argument could exist either. The idea that I might have the right to force people to perform uncompensated labor on my behalf is not incoherent. It’s not like asking to be convinced that an object is green all over and red all over at the same time. Even though I have never heard any good arguments for the former, I see no reason they couldn’t exist in principle. But the second is obviously nonsense. So I think it’s a fair question for me to ask.
Jon Murphy
Feb 11 2020 at 2:19pm
I like the way you frame things, but in my experience, I have had trouble convincing many people, left, right, and center of your 1st premise. The typical argument I have heard is some variation of expanding the familial bonds to the larger community. For example, because a father has a duty to take care of his child, and that such a duty can be compelled, the doctor can be compelled to take care of someone else.
KevinDC
Feb 11 2020 at 3:31pm
Hey Jon,
Regarding the difficulty of getting people to accept the first premise – for me, that’s a yes and no. It depends on how strongly you intend the premise to be taken. Rothbard took it so strongly that he would permit parents starving their children to death – a conclusion so absurd that I would take it to be a refutation of my initial premise if started literally. So, yes, I definitely oversimplified there. I take more of the approach Micheal Huemer does, where the normative premises are presumptions, rather than unshakable axioms.
I’ve found that most people don’t find “I’m not entitled by right to another person’s labor” to be all that controversial as a presumption. They recognize that if you want someone to labor on your behalf and to your benefit you can’t just compel them to do so against their will and in exchange for nothing – but also that this presumption can be overruled in special circumstances. Parental obligations towards children is the easiest example, and a very good one. But the sort of people you describe (and I’ve met them as well) make it a bit too easy on themselves. They leap straight from “parents have positive obligations to care for their minor children” to “therefore, everyone also has positive obligations to provide care to complete strangers.” I feel like there’s a few steps missing there.
But when I press people to fill in the blanks from one end of that to the other, I find that I don’t get much by way of argument. I just get assertions. They’ll just declare that familial obligations extend to larger society as well. Okay, but why? Don’t just tell me – persuade me! Tell me what your premises are, and offer me an argument for why your conclusion follows from those premises! I’m perfectly happy to change my mind on that topic – I’ve been persuaded of stranger things before. But until I get more argument and fewer assertions, I will remain unimpressed.
Jon Murphy
Feb 11 2020 at 6:49pm
That’s a good way to phrase it. I think I’ll consider the matter in that light.
David Seltzer
Feb 11 2020 at 5:26pm
The typical argument I have heard is some variation of expanding the familial bonds to the larger community. For example, because a father has a duty to take care of his child, and that such a duty can be compelled, the doctor can be compelled to take care of someone else.
Expanding the first premise. Sovereignty of the individual is property in one’s person. Logically, that person has complete dominion, authority and jurisdiction over their skills and labor. As none of us has the right to coerce others of us, virtue is found in voluntary exchange. When compelled, a person will resist. I know with certainty, I would.
Mark Z
Feb 11 2020 at 3:43pm
I think many/most people would disagree with 1 in extreme cases, e.g. a doctor has a moral obligation to help someone in an emergency (hence EMTALA, which already makes healthcare a right in some measure). Of course I’d argue that it is only fair, if such an obligation exists, that the doctor has a right to extract compensation.
More relevantly: I think many would argue that you, if capable, have an obligation to financially assist others in obtaining healthcare, food, etc. if not to provide them yourself. For some reason or other (of course I don’t agree with this position), most people believe there’s a stark moral distinction between compelling someone to render you a service and compelling them to pay someone else to render you the service voluntarily.
I’ll add that another issue is that healthcare – or really any commodity – is not a binary entity. “Healthcare is a right” is thus rather meaningless. How much healthcare do you have a right to? In the US, people have had a right to healthcare through EMTALA and Medicaid for a long time. What they want is a right to *more* healthcare, but there isn’t some intuitive cutoff when it comes to a right to a commodity, which is yet another reason why framing it as a right is not helpful even if one supports some degree of guaranteed universal healthcare. It’s politically useful, of course, but not philosophically.
Thaomas
Feb 11 2020 at 7:53pm
Basically “they” want the same expensive, inefficiently provided, subsidized health care that employees of large firms have had in the post War period.
Phil H
Feb 11 2020 at 4:26pm
There are a couple of arguments to be made, and Jon pointed out one important group – that we may have obligations to each other, even if we are strangers.
But perhaps a more important one comes from your characterization here of healthcare as “labour”.
Of course, your premise 2 is technically correct, most healthcare does involve some labour. But that’s not where the value of healthcare lies. The vast majority of the value of healthcare lies in the knowledge that doctors possess. Knowledge that they worked hard to learn, no doubt; but not knowledge that belongs to them. The vast majority of medical knowledge lies in the public domain; doctors draw on this infinitely precious human resource, on everyone’s behalf.
This is a woefully incomplete argument, but it points a little toward why I think many people feel that doing medicine is different from doing software, or building houses.
KevinDC
Feb 11 2020 at 5:18pm
Hey Phil –
I acknowledged a few caveats in my reply to Jon, but there’s a bit here that’s worth unpacking too.
You note that “we may have obligations to each other, even if we are strangers.” Indeed we may. But as I mentioned to Jon, it seems to me that if you’re going to positively assert that such obligations exist and are strong enough to justify forcing others to accord with it against their will, you need to provide strong arguments for that. I’ve yet to find any really good arguments for it – more often than not, it’s just asserted, nor argued for at all. I’m not saying no good arguments exist, of course, just that I haven’t found any. Are there any books or articles you’d recommend that make the case?
I’m also a bit puzzled by this part:
This seems to be a classic case of “proving too much,” because this description is true of almost every single career I can think of. The vast majority of the value of virtually every industry and career path comes from the knowledge of their practitioners on how to do it properly, knowledge they no doubt worked hard to obtain, and knowledge that doesn’t “belong” to them and is in the public domain. It’s true of engineers, architects, farmers, actuaries, carpenters, electricians, oil rig workers…pretty much anything that doesn’t involve classified information or legally protected trade secrets. I don’t see why this applies to a doctor any more than an electrician or plumber or auto mechanic.
Jon Murphy
Feb 11 2020 at 6:57pm
I guess that’s going to depend on what you mean by “public domain.” Given that much of knowledge is inarticulable (even something like two plus two equals four requires implicit understanding of inarticulable foundations), it seems to me that the doctors do own certain aspects of that knowledge.
In other words, why are some doctors good, some great, and some quacks? If all that knowledge is “public domain” wouldn’t we expect to see uniformity among doctors?
There’s the labor involved. That’s why the knowledge isn’t public domain.
True, but those obligations are largely negative: don’t mess with other people’s stuff (what Adam Smith and Plato called “commutative justice” and what Hugo Grotius calls justitia expletrix). Relatively little are positive obligations. So, even with those obligations that doesn’t imply a right to one’s labor.
Phil H
Feb 11 2020 at 10:21pm
Thanks, both.Kevin: “proving too much…engineers…farmers” I’m not sure I have proved too much! In most countries, there are building codes (codifications of engineering knowledge); and some form of public housing. Plus public roads and other infrastructure. The benefits of engineering are in fact delivered to all citizens, almost as though they are a right. And farmers make food, available with food stamps in the US, and for money from benefits in the UK. The benefits of farming are delivered to citizens, a bit like a right.Jon: “If all that knowledge is “public domain” wouldn’t we expect to see uniformity among doctors?” We do! I have spent much more time choosing my brand of pasta than I have choosing my doctor. In the UK, at least, all doctors are educated to a very high level of skill, so for the vast majority of doctor’s visits, there is nothing to be gained by choosing between them. “much of knowledge is inarticulable” – This is nonsense, thousands of doctors are taught complete medical courses every year, by lecturers reading explicit statements out of explicit textbooks, then examining them explicitly. Surgery obviously includes some dexterity skills that are a bit different, but plainly most of medicine can be taught explicitly.I’m not certain about this “heirs of public knowledge” theory. But I don’t think that those objections knock it down.
nobody.really
Feb 11 2020 at 9:05pm
Yup. In other words, pretty much all rights are fictions. Pretty much all rights require some investment of labor, if only to defend the right.
That said, if you acknowledge the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness–and thus, the option to call upon society’s resources (e.g., the police, the courts) to defend these rights–then I don’t see any conceptual reason not to recognize the right to electricity or medicine.
KevinDC
Feb 11 2020 at 10:48pm
If you mean “positive rights” then I definitely agree.
Well, the most obvious conceptual reason is, again, positive rights vs negative rights. I find it very easy to see how someone can believe courts and police are appropriate mechanisms for making sure you’re not assaulted or stolen from, but not appropriate mechanisms for making sure you’re given things at other people’s expense against their will.
nobody.really
Feb 11 2020 at 11:29pm
I don’t see the distinction between positive rights vs. negative rights–provided you acknowledge that people must provide services to enforce those rights.
Do you think its ok to compel police and judges to give you services against their will? Or are you assuming that police and judges provide their services willingly–in exchange for a paycheck? And if you can envision that, couldn’t we devise a similar mechanism to pay people to willingly provide medical or electrical services?
James
Feb 12 2020 at 12:47am
Maybe you are just assuming too much about rights and the problems you perceive arise from your own assumptions.
For example: I believe I have a right to own property. I might also believe that I have a right to assistance from the courts and police if someone tries to steal my property. You seem to assume that both positions are identical but they are not.
nobody.really
Feb 12 2020 at 1:14am
Great. So I can envision two scenarios.
Scenario 1: People have rights–but no expectation of enforcement. Rights are a kind of fairy tale that people tell themselves.
Scenario 2: People have rights–and also organize society to marshal resources to defend those rights.
If you live in Scenario 1, good luck to you. But if you live in Scenario 2, then I see no conceptual difference between society hiring police and hiring electrical workers and physicians.
Rights are fiction. Enforcement is real. And enforcement isn’t free.
KevinDC
Feb 12 2020 at 9:51am
There’s a distinction here that I think you’re not making – or perhaps doesn’t strike you as important, but it certainly seems substantial to me.
Police and courts and military defense are things that are provided by the state because of problems associated with public goods and free rider problems and the like. (I’m feeling far too lazy and under-coffeed to outline the arguments behind it in greater detail, but I trust they’re well known enough that I don’t need to.) This leads to a situation where we can say “X is a good or service that’s universally desired, but can’t be provided by market mechanisms because public goods and free riders etc etc, therefore it will be provided by the state.” But that’s wholly different from saying “you have a right to X.” There’s about a light year of distance between those two statements.
If someone mugs me, they violate my rights. If third party defense is a “right”, it means that if someone mugs me, and you could have intervened but didn’t, then you violated my rights too, because I’m entitled to your intervention. And I just don’t think that’s true. If you had come to my defense while I was being mugged that would have been nice, but it’s supererogatory.
nobody.really
Feb 12 2020 at 10:19am
Fair enough. I read this to say that we can identify POLICY REASONS for society to socialize the provision of some goods and services (say, police services), and not others (say, electricity or health care). But those arguments are unrelated to the concept of rights.
Henderson cites a study talking about the breakdown of the provision of electricity services, and blames it on claims of “rights.” I point out that the problem is not related to “rights,” but related to finance–and that if your police department faced the same financing problems, you’d experience the same problems there.
I repeat, rights are a fiction–that is, a story that groups of people choose to tell themselves. Some people in the US tell themselves that Texas is a part of the United States. Other people tell themselves that Texas is an autonomous nation. The difference between these groups is that one group enforces its story. If you want to tell yourself that the concept of “rights” has some meaning absent enforcement, knock yourself out; I begrudge no man his religion. But, like many religious claims, I don’t find it a compelling basis for public policy arguments.
Phil H
Feb 12 2020 at 10:21am
@Kevin
“Police and courts and military defense are things that are provided by the state because of problems”
It’s good that you’re spelling it out as clearly as possible, because it really helps us find the distinctions and points of disagreement.
I get what you’re saying about criminal law, but I don’t think it’s correct. No expert here, I did half a law degree a few years ago, then quite, but in that time I was very much struck by how much of the law is *not* criminal law. Like, most of it. If you take “the law” as a whole – at least in England – it’s really not mostly concerned with crime. It’s concerned with fine distinctions in contracts and torts and land sales. Historically, I think this was true: law developed as a rich person’s tool, and they were just as concerned with not getting shafted in land sales as they were with not getting kicked.
I think this really is a fundamental difference in what we’re seeing. It seems like you’re picturing the law as a tool that you pick up occasionally to solve a problem. I see it as constitutive of the institutions that allow us to live. For example, we couldn’t have a rich economy without deep, complex employment law.
I guess, pretty much the same as Nobody above, I’m basically denying that the idea of negative rights is coherent without all of the other stuff. If you don’t have “thick” law, you can’t have the simple negative rights; and if you have thick law, it will almost inevitably also contain positive rights.
To put it another way: the distinction you’re making sounds like it works in theory, but doesn’t exist in practice.
nobody.really
Feb 12 2020 at 10:59am
And that’s a fine statement of a libertarian viewpoints: We are all autonomous individuals, without duty to others. I have no claim for assistance from you. Or from the police. Or from the fire department. Or from teachers. Or from the lifeguard. Or from my parents or guardian while I was a minor.
Wisely or not, English common law does not share this perspective. The Restatement of Torts, Second (1965) acknowledges that there is no general duty to aid, but then acknowledges a number of exceptions. In particular, people can assume such a duty by, for example, entering into professions such as police, firefighter, teacher, lifeguard–and even by becoming a parent or guardian. Indeed, as far back as the 1760s it was already common law that people who enter the profession of “inn-keeper, or other victualler” owe a duty to passers-by.
In short, we have different views. My view has the advantage of being enforced by courts.
KevinDC
Feb 12 2020 at 11:54am
Phil,
Alas, you have projected quite a lot of views in the content of that comment which I do not hold. My comment was simply addressing the question about whether one can believe that police and court enforcement of negative rights are appropriate in a way that doesn’t entail endorsing positive rights. I believe one can hold those beliefs consistently for the reasons I described. However, as to the rest of your comment, I do not in fact hold any of the views you were ascribing to me.
Nobody –
There’s only so much that can be unpacked in the comment sections of blog (and this had become unwieldy enough, methinks), but I’ll just close out by disputing one thing you said and leave it at that. You said
You seem to be saying that if rights aren’t enforced, they don’t exist. I disagree. The fact that someone’s rights are lacking enforcement doesn’t mean they don’t exist, it simply means their rights aren’t being respected. To use an example – religion. I think everyone has the right to choose their own religious beliefs, or, like myself, to lack any belief in the supernatural. But there are places on earth where that right is not protected or respected – theocratic societies certainly exist. It seems to me, from what you’re saying, that you’d endorse the statement “The people who live in that society don’t have a right to change religion.” Whereas I would say “Those people have every right to change their religion, but their rights are being violated.” These don’t seem like two ways of phrasing the same idea – they seem very different in their content to me, and the difference really matters.
On your view, I don’t see how it’s possible to ever say that any society or government has ever violated the rights of it’s citizens. Maximum lazy – I think the institution of slavery is as clear an example of violating people’s rights as there ever could be. But your position would seem to lead to this syllogism:
Premise 1: Rights are merely whatever stories are told and enforced by a given society – they have no meaning absent this storytelling and enforcement.
Premise 2: In the early US, the story that was told and enforced in society was that white skinned people had the right to own dark skinned people.
Conclusion: The institution of slavery was never a violation of anyone’s rights.
The historical fact of premise 2 is not really up for debate, so the only options available are to embrace the conclusion or to reject premise 1. At least prima facia, it seems far more likely that premise 1 is false than the conclusion is true, so I reject premise 1. I could be wrong about that – maybe premise 1 really is true. But you’d need really, really strong arguments to convince me of that – arguments so forceful that the likelihood premise 1 being false is even more implausible than the conclusion above being true.
James
Feb 13 2020 at 12:20am
nobody:
Initially you claimed difficulty in seeing the distinction between positive rights and negative rights. When I and others made a good faith effort to explain the difference you changed to subject to enforcement. Can you not see the distinction between a right and the enforcement of that right?
Maybe this will help: A landlord sues a non-paying tenant for breach of contract demanding back rent. The tenant, inspired by your comments here, argues that since no one has already enforced the landlord’s right to payment the landlord has no actual right to back rent.
See the problem now? If rights do not exist prior to and independently of their enforcement, then cops and courts would have no way to know if they are defending rights or colluding with criminals.
Jon Murphy
Feb 12 2020 at 5:28am
An investment of labor does not necessarily relate to a claim of labor.
Loom
Feb 12 2020 at 4:47pm
I like the premises discussed however…..
I think it’s far simpler: health care costs money. So do Jaguars. If you can convince me that we have a right to free health care, then I say we also have a right to expensive automobiles.
Health care is a business that provides a good or service. Nothing provided by a business is free and therefore, is not a right. Pretty cut and dry.
Floccina
Feb 13 2020 at 4:54pm
I agree with you, it can’t be a right, but I’m OK with some level of Government charity in healthcare.
I assume that what people really mean by healthcare is a right, is that all citizens have a right to similar access to whatever level of care government provides.The problem with that is that we have that.
A compromise would be Gov pays for Vaccination, trauma care, pregnancy care, infant care and a few other of the most cost effective categories of healthcare. For everything else your on your own, they tend to low benefit for the dollar anyway.
Thaomas
Feb 14 2020 at 6:00am
I think the problem is one of framing. One might reject (except for special circumstances) “I have a right to others’ labor” but accept “Others have a duty to give up a small part of their labor so that others in special circumstances (poverty, extreme bad luck) can have “X.”
I do not mean that “we should provide X” is irrefutable, but it’s different from “I have a right to X”
Hazel Meade
Feb 14 2020 at 4:21pm
The reasoning I usually have heard goes more like this:
Healthcare is a right.
Providing healthcare requires other people’s labor.
Therefore, I am entitled, by right, to other people’s labor.
Thaomas
Feb 11 2020 at 7:48pm
I question whether step 1 “X is a right” is the proper exogenous variable that sets off the dystopian spiral of stylized facts.
I think what is more usually the case is that some subset (a better off subset) of the population has access to X with state support. Take the pre-2009 way employers received subsidies to compensate workers with health insurance. The unemployed, self employed and employees of small firms were more or less excluded from the system. In that situation saying it is wrong to exclude anyone from subsidized health insurance is pretty close to saying that the previously excluded group has a right to subsidized access, which is pretty close to saying that everybody has a right to right to access. This is especially strong when the subsidized access is at the extreme a matter of life and death.
Whether the remaining steps follow depends on the details of how the previously excluded group is given access and how the costs of expanded access are distributed.
David Henderson
Feb 11 2020 at 8:02pm
To almost all above.
Normally I don’t like it when commenters veer from discussing the content of my posts, as most of the commenters above did. What I found striking in the article I posted on is how proclaiming a right to electricity and trying to implement it meant that people actually got less electricity. I asked whether we might apply that same reasoning to health care. Most of the commenters didn’t discuss that but, instead, discussed whether health care is a right.
This time I didn’t mind it, though, because a lot of that discussion was interesting.
Phil H
Feb 11 2020 at 10:29pm
Haha, I’m working up to electricity… I’m not sure I have anything intelligent to say on the subject yet.
But on the question of “does making it a right mean you end up with less of it”, it’s worth remembering the original rights. Free speech: in places where it’s a right, there’s much more of it. Justice: takes a *a lot* of labour to produce, and in places where it’s a right, there’s much more of it. The vote: In places where it’s a right, there’s much more of it.
It feels like electricity isn’t like those other things. But I have to admit, I’m struggling to articulate why it’s different.
Hazel Meade
Feb 14 2020 at 5:08pm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics)
Gordon Johnson
Feb 12 2020 at 6:58pm
You’re asking, if heath care becomes a “right” will we get less of it? I think the answer is yes. Things work better when people do the things they do because they want to do them.
I’ve been watching my granddaughter go through ten years of education beyond college to become, finally, a doctor of urology. That was her choice. She wanted to do that. She wanted to serve. She particularly wanted to serve our veterans and is now on the staff at a VA hospital and teaching at the nearby university medical center.
When I hear people talking about everyone’s “right to health care as a human right” I really worry. I think people should be very grateful that they can receive good health care, and grateful that some young people have devoted years of long hours and demanding work to be able to offer good health care. If they simply say “this is my human right” and don’t say “thank you” with a grateful heart to their doctor, doctors will feel unappreciated, stop their extra long hours, and discourage their kids from becoming doctors.
We will have less excellence and fewer doctors.
Thaomas
Feb 14 2020 at 6:06am
I was questioning whether identifying electricity as a “right” leading to non-provision of electricity applies to electricity. 🙂
nobody.really
Feb 11 2020 at 10:16pm
Does this post strike anyone else as tendentious?
1: When I hear people discussing health care as a right, it seems as if they’re discussing some form of socialized medicine. So I’d answer Henderson’s query by asking whether socialized medicine has resulted in less medical care or worse health outcomes in nations that have implemented it. We might look at life expectancy or infant morality as proxies. Or perhaps life expectancy/per capita medical expenditures. I think you’d discover that socialized medicine produces some pretty favorable outcomes.
2. Moreover, I question the diagnosis offered by Robin Burgess et al. The problem they identify is not declaring electricity a “right,” but in lack of appropriate finance mechanisms for electricity.
In my country, we regard police protection as a “right.” And yes, this means that many people who demand police services pay NOTHING in exchange for the services they receive. In other nations, people must pay the police bribes in order to receive services, and must hope that they can afford to pay more than any other party they might need the police to oppose. Would Burgess conclude that the second situation is better than the first? I would say no–but that’s because, in my country, we have created finance mechanisms for police that is unrelated to incremental consumption. And if countries that regarded electricity as a “right” did the same, they might have similar outcomes.
True, in the absence of incremental pricing, people would have limited incentive to conserve. But honestly, how close is your current price of electricity to some kind of marginal cost–let alone any kind of “what the market will bear” price? If you want to make some kind of market-based argument, the retail electric market would not be my first choice of analogy.
3: I surmise many challenges in the electric market arise from network economics: There are large economies of scale, making it incrementally expensive for people to pursue service outside of the group. It’s less clear to me that health care faces the same network economics. Many nations with socialized medicine (Canada, for example) have socialized networks, but also private providers. Apparently these providers are able to operate just fine outside of the network.
Jon Murphy
Feb 12 2020 at 5:37am
Regarding your point 1:
Socialized medicine does indeed suffer from many of the problems as socialized electricity. Cuba, Venezuela, China, North Korea are all stark examples, but so is the UK and Canada to lesser extents.
One thing that socialized medicine can benefit from and other industries cannot as easily is free trade. Much drug research is conducted here in the US. The subsequent results (ie the medicine and techniques) are then sold overseas. If the US were to go full socialist, that pipeline would dry up (unless the R&D moves to somewhere else with relatively free markets and patent protection).
One other quick point: one needs to be careful about comparing health outcomes between countries, especially things like infant mortality. In the US, we have a relatively high infant mortality rate precisely because our health care system is so good: people travel here to bring high-risk babies to term. Babies that would have been aborted elsewhere are birthed here and treated.
There’s also the problem that medical statistics are not uniform among countries, so you’re not always comparing apples to apples.
nobody.really
Feb 12 2020 at 11:23am
While I don’t concede the deficits of socialized medicine, you raise sound arguments. Fair comparisons are hard.
Jon Murphy
Feb 13 2020 at 10:00am
Oh yes. Which is not to say we shouldn’t attempt comparisons; just to be aware of what the stats are actually saying.
Robc
Feb 13 2020 at 8:03am
Infant morality is a great typo that could lead to interesting discussions in some other thread.
Jon Murphy
Feb 13 2020 at 10:00am
Agreed. Not the least of which is “are we born with Original Sin?”
Thaomas
Feb 14 2020 at 6:13am
Recall Niebuhr’s quip that Original Sin is the only Dogma of the Church for which there is empirical proof. 🙂
Thomas Sewell
Feb 13 2020 at 8:25pm
Just want to chime in to note that your argument regarding police protection is backwards.
It does indeed suffer from similar issues as electricity does. What you’re describing in your first example is the lousy police protection (which doesn’t usually provide much protection, just some poor investigations after the crime happens) in the U.S. and the even worse situations in the government-run “rights” to police protection in many other countries.
In what non-government-run area would we be okay with much fewer than half of the expected work being paid for (solving crimes, let alone preventing them) getting done on a regular basis?
Contrast that with actual market-based police protection and you’ll find that private suppliers of the same tend to provide much more actual “protection” when allowed by law.
Hazel Meade
Feb 14 2020 at 4:38pm
The thing with aggregate statistics like life expectancy and infant mortality is that they are by definition socialized. It’s entirely possible that socialized systems might raise average life expectancy, while also decreasing the variance of life expectancy such that there are fewer very long lived people. I.e. more people live to be 68, fewer people live to 100. Those are the sort of choices inherent in any socialized system – you redistribute resources and average things out. But a non-socialized system might still have the highest liklihoods of a 90 year old surviving cancer, for instance.
nobody.really
Feb 11 2020 at 11:13pm
That said, while this wasn’t Henderson’s point, “rights” related to electricity create a variety of challenging circumstances.
1: First, the ability to build generators, transmission lines, or other large projects often triggers the need for environmental review or elaborate factual review–if a certain number of people ask for it. So organized crime–especially in Japan–now shake down project developers: Give us a kickback, or we’ll file a bunch of signatures requesting enhanced environmental review or more elaborate procedures. Basically, they’re engaging in “greenmail” to cash in on their “rights.”
2. Electric utilities often have an “obligation to serve”–that is, they must design their systems to meet the maximum demands of their customers. And that’s expensive. So rather than building that extra generator and transmission line in order to serve a need that will occur once a year, utilities sometimes find it cheaper to buy back from customers their right to be served during that rare period of maximum demand.
Indeed, this has become an industry, with “aggregators” entering into contracts with various customers (typically industrial customers) wherein the customers agree to NOT consume electricity under certain circumstances–for a fee. In short, we as consumers have rights–but in the case of electricity, they are ALIENABLE rights.
Mark Brady
Feb 12 2020 at 2:45am
Would we agree that doctors, nurses, and other professional medical personnel in the United States have no right to restrict, or to attempt to restrict, the right of U.S. citizens and residents from hiring the services of foreign medics and the concomitant right of those foreigners to enter the U.S. to provide those services? Or are these also phony rights?
I submit that they are genuine rights that are more honored in the breach than the observance by an unholy alliance of the American Medical Association, the American Nurses Association, and other professional bodies, and Congress to prop up the wages of doctors and nurses. For all the talk about “socialist” threats to private healthcare, there is little acknowledgment of how these cartels promote the economic interests of their members at the expense of consumers’ rights.
David Henderson
Feb 12 2020 at 9:39am
You ask:
I can answer only for myself, but I agree. And no, they are not phony rights.
Vivian Darkbloom
Feb 12 2020 at 3:05am
I’m not sure what the authors mean by “right” in this context. As applied to healthcare, for example, I would imagine that being equated with a “right” means someone else is paying for the good or service (perhaps not for all, but for a good many people, e.g., without the means to pay for what they need or want). This is often referred to as an “entitlement”. I notice the authors use the phrase “seen as a right” rather than “is a right”, so the idea seems to be as much perception as reality. Both the perception and reality apply more to health care and education today than to electricity.
The authors mention unpaid bills and theft, but these don’t seem to correspond to my idea of how making electricty a “right” would work in practice. If someone else is paying the bill, it strikes me that a bigger problem than unpaid bills and theft (why would theft be needed to access something that you are entitled to?). Rather, the biggest problem, not mentioned here, is that people would consume the good or service without regard to actual need. That is a problem of wastefulness. Initially this would result in rising prices and eventually, these forces will lead to rationing as the authors suggest. We already see rising prices in education and healthcare, for example.
nobody.really
Feb 12 2020 at 12:47pm
Regarding anti-social populism:
Henderson cites Burgess et al. for the proposition that people regarding electricity as a “right” leads to anti-social results. In part, this arises because people imagine (or act as if they imagine) that they should be entitled to pursue things that they regard as their “right” at no incremental cost to themselves, regardless of the systemic consequences.
Indeed, I suspect we could all identify circumstances of populist externalities—people demanding their “rights” regardless of the consequences for the larger society.
US citizens have become accustomed to getting—and now regard it as their “right” to receive—tax breaks for mortgages and charitable contributions, even if studies suggest that these policies reduce government revenues while generating doubtful incremental social benefits.
Similarly, homeowners put solar panels on their roofs and expect to be compensated for their generation based on their utility’s retail price of electric energy (“net metering”), even though this practice represents a subsidy to these customers at the expense of all the other customers.
In some cities, candidates for mayor would promise to forgive all parking tickets when they got elected. Surprise: Prior to elections, the streets would be clogged with people double-parking without fear of consequence—and citizens would die because ambulances could not get through the streets.
Likewise, in the US, Republican presidential candidates regularly promise to let companies repatriate foreign earnings with little or no tax consequences. Surprise: Firms would regularly park their foreign earnings abroad, awaiting the next Republican president to grant them a loophole.
More generally, politicians regularly promise—and even deliver—on cutting taxes, regardless of the consequences for government deficits.
Finally, people have grown accustomed to using the waterways and atmosphere as a dumping ground for all kinds of emissions that harm third parties. Governments have managed to rein in some of this antisocial behavior—but many people still regard these efforts as an invasion of their “rights.”
Gordon Johnson
Feb 12 2020 at 7:33pm
I remember attending many years ago a discussion of human rights in which Senator Pat Moynihan, a good democrat, asked if all this discussion of human rights would lead to deciding that there is a human right to air conditioners, and where would that lead us?
We should stop talking about “rights” as they pertain to humans and groups of humans, which then must be defined and spelled out by lawyers and regulators because laws can’t just deal with individuals, and focus on what every person deserves. That shifts the emphasis away from someone else’s right, which I am suddenly required to accord to them, to society’s need for me to help provide, voluntarily, because I want to do so, better opportunities for those supposed “right holders” to receive the benefits in question.
AMT
Feb 14 2020 at 4:27pm
Quite obviously, the answer is about state capacity. A significantly smaller portion of economic output is subject to taxation, or is taxed at lower rates in developing countries. Is it at all surprising that “budget constraints start to bind” very early on for developing countries? Of course a market won’t work if there is no connection between payment and provision of the service, UNLESS it is funded by the state. But clearly the same problem does not apply to developed countries. If health cars were a right, the question is just what is the national consensus of how much to supply? In full agreement with Mark Z above, what constitutes a “right” for the minimum to be provided is a key ambiguous, debatable question.
I’m not sure if enough decades of Canadian health care have passed for you to consider that as a probative example. But basic economics tells us that people will inefficiently overconsume if their marginal cost is zero (or even just subsidized at all) and so they may not hesitate at all to go to the doctor unnecessarily, e.g. for mild colds. Demand curves slope downward! So I would guess that basic health care services would likely increase. Overall health care provision could easily increase if most people vote for increased resources allocated, especially if they think a small, rich minority will mostly pay for it, such that most individuals personally benefit from a progressive system.
You might counter that America gets more “healthcare” based on GDP per capital expenditures but there are many reasons to think that is a poor metric. It could just mean it is very inefficient (the entire health insurance industry is unnecessary in Canada), or that providers simply get paid more for comparable services.
None of that says health care should be a rig he, just that of course it could work for a developed country. Sure, there are long specialist wait times in Canada, but do you honestly believe that Canadians CAN’T spend money hiring more specialists? I would say clearly voters just don’t value that at the margin, given the costs.
Similarly, we can provide high quality roads, if we want to, despite a massive disconnect between usage and payment. How are the roads in rural sub Saharan Africa?
I’m a Canadian that moved to America, and I don’t care about calling health care a right. But comparing what you get in each country and what it costs, I’m now leaning back towards the Canadian system, purely on efficiency grounds. What does America really get for spending an extra 6% of gdp on it? (11.6% vs 17.7%) Maybe I should frame that as America spending over 50% more than Canada. This is even assuming there must be large inefficiencies in the CANADIAN system, like increased use due to no marginal cost! AND that a substantial fraction of Americans without insurance have limited access to health care.
Hazel Meade
Feb 14 2020 at 5:21pm
<i>do you honestly believe that Canadians CAN’T spend money hiring more specialists? I would say clearly voters just don’t value that at the margin, given the costs.</i>
My understanding is that it is basically illegal for an individual Canadian to hire a private specialist outside of the system. Also, Canadian doctors, if they take public clients, are forbidden from also taking private fee-for-service clients, due to the possibility that the private clients would basically be line-jumping over public ones and this might cause doctors to prefer private clients and drop out of the system.
What you are saying that the decision to hire more specialists must be made in the aggregate, by voters electing politicians who wish to budget more money to hiring specialists. But surely you realize that is a problem that is fraught with all sorts of public choice problems, right? As individual might value spending their personal income on hiring a specialist, but if their money is going into a big pot, there is no way they can be assured it will be spent on hiring the particular specialists they need.
Comments are closed.