He really said that. I guess people take their kids to annual checkups because they want to signal their high status to others.
This is totally in keeping with Jonathan Haidt’s findings: on measures that “have anything to do with compassion,” libertarians are at the very bottom of the political spectrum.
Likewise Tyler Cowen’s paean to autism, whose defining characteristic is an inability to empathize with other humans.
You’ll constantly hear libertarians claiming that their ideas and policies would be “good for the poor,” but given their measured failure of empathy and compassion, you have to wonder whether those claims might merely constitute false status signaling in a species for which empathy and compassion are hard-coded values.
I really should stop donating page views to the Koch Brothers-funded GMU/Mercatus cabal (and you’ll notice I don’t provide a link here; you can Google it if you wish). But it’s like watching a very well-choreographed train wreck: it’s hard to look away.
Update: I find that some obvious googles don’t turn up Kling’s post, so here’s a link with a “nofollow” tag so the post doesn’t get any Google juice from it.
Comments
3 responses to “Arnold Kling: Non-Acute Health Care Is a “Status Good””
You’d wish these morons would at least do their homework first, but I guess that gets in the way of ideology (and doesn’t hold if you secretly believe that the ‘poor’ do not ‘deserve’ healthcare).. Regular checkups by (and cheap access to) GPs who act judiciously actually lowers overall costs (though of course not at the vaunted “individual” level), pretty much in the same way to how regular car maintenance costs less than catastrophe management by only spending on it when it has broken down.
on measures that “have anything to do with compassion,†libertarians are at the very bottom of the political spectrum.
Remember the Randian precept that selfishness is a virtue. From my long-ago reading of ATLAS, I think I also remember the corollary, that altruism lies somewhere between a major personality defect and outright evil.
I guess believing these things has a tendency to color your world view . . .
JzB
@JazzBumpa Let’s never forget that mantra of the Civil War South:
“Slavery is Freedom”