Rep. Paul Ryan

I’m with Steve in the NN box. The key word in his post is “spreadsheets.” Specialists have been selling financial products to non-specialists since the South Sea Bubble and before, but enhanced desktop-computing power this past 30 years has massively swung the vendor-purchaser balance in the vendor’s favor, as we saw in the mortgage mess. Conservatives seem not to realize how much this fact has degraded magic-of-the-market arguments all around.

Back in my Wall Street days I used to be responsible for writing credit and risk-management code for bright young traders buying and selling complex financial products from/to other bright young traders. On the rare occasions these Masters of the Universe deigned to talk to a back-office geek such as myself, I more than once came away from the conversation with the impression that the trader didn’t altogether understand his product (which generally had a face value in seven or eight digits).

There was at least some symmetry of incomprehension there, though”€”both parties to the transaction flying by the seat of their pants on adrenaline fuel. The thought of one of those yellow-suspenders types up against Grandpa, who never graduated from high school (a thing much more common in Grandpa’s time than now) sends shivers down my spine. And things have gotten much more complicated since I left the number-crunching business. I’m not completely sure I understand my own life-insurance policy.

I favor there being as little government in our lives as possible. Outside a few garrisons of collective authority”€”defense, public safety, currency stability, maintenance of customary social norms”€”society ought to be able to get along on the basis of free citizens freely engaging in consensual contracts with each other. I’m simply having trouble convincing myself that this position is tenable in an age of massive information asymmetry.

Consider the second of those questions above. Given that Medicare spending must be reduced, would American seniors at large prefer it be reduced via a Ryan-type voucher system that puts them at the mercy of “bright MBAs with spreadsheets” (and quite likely yellow suspenders) or just bluntly by across-the-board reductions in what Medicare, as currently structured, will pay for? Someone should do a poll, preferably before RyanCare settles in as Republican conventional wisdom. Whoa”€”“Republican” and “wisdom” in the same sentence! You don’t see that too often.

No doubt the bright MBA could give you fifteen reasons why Rep. Ryan’s vouchers, wisely invested, are a better financial deal than a Medicare account and the great sluggish federal bureaucracy behind it. Yeah, well: Probably the clerk who checked out my printer ink could have talked me into filling out that receipt tail, filing my gift card, and posting reminders to myself to use it before the expiration date…but it all seems like too much damn trouble. Simplicity’s looking good right now, and I bet it’ll look even better when I’m eighty. Is simplicity worth the cost? Definitely.