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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26661 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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Which leads me to my takeaway: I think the only way to really release the pressure permanently will be is to give in to populist demands and start reforming parts of the economy that are currently set up for rent extraction at the behest of shareholders. Enforcing the anti-monopoly laws already on the books as written would probably be enough to improve many sectors of the economy, especially those where local monopolies are pushing up prices, like homebuilding and dental care. Removing principal-agent conflicts of interests in healthcare (the employer wants to pay for the cheapest plan) would be another good reform. But neither of these will happen. If there has been a single guiding principle since Clinton, it would be that the ruling party will do what is good for shareholders, and enforcing anti-monopoly law would help small businesses at the expense of shareholders. In its stead, I would predict that there will be more security expenditures for high-profile CEOs, at least until the predictive panopticon is complete.

Unfortunately impossible: the populists' policy prescriptions will not achieve their policy goals, and will in fact make things much worse. Which will only exacerbate their certainty that they're being exploited somehow. Even when things do get better for them, they just don't notice and insist they're getting intolerable and something must be done about it.

(For those who don't want read the link: real wage growth for the bottom decile since the start of the pandemic is nearly triple the real wage growth for both the middle and top deciles. This ought to be obvious to anyone paying attention: construction workers and cooks saw huge raises during the pandemic, and they haven't gone away. Actually, the former is a meaningful component in skyrocketing housing costs, though not the primary one. And this analysis doesn't account for government transfers, which are enormous and only growing.)

There are only really three areas where things have gotten meaningfully worse for consumers over the past couple decades: housing, healthcare, and education (and the last is only really hurting middle-income-plus families), all three obviously rooted in bureaucratic strangulation. But populists love bureaucratic strangulation! They think the problem is we don't have enough of it! Try telling them we need to stop requiring employers to bundle health insurance -- and that is the way to break the real principal-agent problem you mention -- and see how they respond. Trust busting has at least a little leftist cachet and might help a little, granted. Realistically, no, the neighborhood dentist is not a 'local monopoly;' you can just travel a little further twice a year. (Or is there some city in the US where all the dentists in a fifty mile radius work for the same company? Certainly nowhere I've lived.) But I'll acknowledge cases exist where it might actually improve things.

Try telling them we need to stop requiring employers to bundle health insurance -- and that is the way to break the real principal-agent problem you mention -- and see how they respond.

"Medicare for All" is one of the main slogans among the populist left. I don't think you'd get the response you're claiming.

That's, uh, not exactly removing principal-agent problems from healthcare. I mean, it could work out better than the current system, which is a terrible chimera of the worst parts of several systems, but the mechanism of that improvement certainly isn't how it doubles down on separating beneficiaries from decision-makers. At least in the current system you can get a new job if your insurance is awful; if Medicare for All turns out to be awful, too bad.

If it's not clear, that was not at all what I was proposing. My solution to the principal-agent problem is just to make other arrangements legal (as it is currently not legal for an employer not to provide health insurance to fulltime employees). I imagine some still would, and some employees might prefer it, but it opens new options for those who don't. And I promise you, this is not a popular position with the populist left; I've argued with a few friends about it.

Not to bulverise, but I struggle to phrase the argument in a way that doesn't sound obviously stupid, which, uh, I kind of think is because it is obviously stupid. But my understanding is that they:

  1. Believe employees have no leverage when negotiating with employers and that they will only ever offer the bare minimum required by law. (All of them have jobs that pay above minimum wage; never got a clear answer on how they think that works.)
  2. Believe that if the employer pays for something (health insurance, but also payroll taxes), it 'comes out of' profit, not compensation. Meanwhile, if an employee pays for it, that's a direct reduction in compensation. (The truth is the employer only cares about total cost of employment, and has no issue rearranging how that cost is divided up if it lets them give the employee a better deal for the same amount of money. If they could get away with taking away benefits without giving out raises, they'd have already reduced your salary by the cost of your benefits.)
  3. Believe that employer-offered insurance is a better deal due to pooling, but that employers will immediately stop offering the option if they're allowed to. (But if employees value employer-offered insurance more than the cash value of it, companies that don't do this will have lower total compensation costs and outcompete those who do. Also, pooling is clearly net-negative for them, childless healthy-ish late-twenties/early-thirties professionals.)
  4. Believe that it's worse for the most unfortunate, e.g. people who get cancer young. (This is probably true -- though less so than they think, in my opinion -- and does represent a genuine values difference; it's not just that they're willing to donate to help these people, they strongly believe that everyone should be forced to do so)

That's hardly the same policy.

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