Hypocrisy

[rowyn]

From a WSJ article on Joe Miller, a Republican
candidate for US Senate:
 

”In the past week, Mr. Miller* acknowledged that his family had received low-income medical benefits and that his wife briefly drew unemployment checks. Previously, he had criticized his rival for supporting the medical-benefits program he used and had called federal unemployment benefits "not constitutionally authorized."

 I don’t consider this hypocritical, actually.  Saying that you don’t think a tax loophole or a program is a good idea in general and that you would be happy for it not to exist does not, in my opinion, oblige you not to use it while it does exist.  This is like saying that a socialist who has a job in private industry is hypocritical; no, he’s practical.  We live in this world, not in the one we want to live in.  If the rules of the game say “you will be jailed if you don’t do X”, doing X is legitimate even if you really don’t want X to be mandatory.  As near as I can tell, the idea behind the Tea Party is smaller government: lower taxes, fewer services.  If you have to pay the taxes anyway, is it still wrong to use the services? If your point is “I want the state to run this program and not the feds”, are you being hypocritical to use the federal program when there is no state alternative?

I admit that refusing to use the service seems the more principled stand, and in some cases “following the rules” can be pretty sleazy**.  But … these are the laws that we have.  Following them when they hurt you and taking advantage of them when they help you -- even as you are seeking to change them -- doesn’t seem that unreasonable to me.  What do you think?

 * I don’t know much about Mr. Miller or his campaign and I am not trying to argue that he is an awesome candidate; I have no idea.  I just found this particular complaint about him to be an interesting topic.

** A kind of sleazy example: walking away from an underwater mortgage that you would have no trouble whatsoever paying, but since your home is in a no-recourse state it makes more financial sense to stick your bank with the loss while you buy an equally good house for less money.  There are much worse examples in totalitarian countries; I am not trying to extend my point to cover committing human-rights violations.

Comments

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

I think it's better if you're up front with it and say, "We used x benefit, but I wish we'd had y alternative, and I support y alternative," than to not come clean initially and then get called on it. But I think increasingly the problem in politics is that so much of it is spin and appearance as opposed to what candidates believe and have experience doing. It feels like that's an issue on both/all parties.

I agree with you that the bank scenario is sleazy. I understand people walking away when they are overwhelmed with the financial responsibility, but not to the point of taking advantage of how the system works in order to upgrade or save $.

[rowyn]

I think we also expect an overwhelming amount of disclosure, too. Like the media has hundreds of reporters scouring for anything interesting and the candidate is just one person who may not even have thought about the incident when the related subject came up. :/

Walking away from a mortgage you can no longer afford seems like taking advantage of the way the system works, and walking away from one you can easily manage feels like taking advantage of the way the system is broken. :/ I really think that the former is in the long-term interest of both borrowers and lenders, by making borrowers more confident about taking the risk of borrowing, while the latter works against borrowers' long-term interests by making lenders less willing to lend.

[duane-kc.livejournal.com]

I think...that I hadn't thought about this in this way before, and I'm going to need to think about it some more.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Well, he's demonstrating his lack of actual belief in the political stances he's taking. Although it's more his family and his wife don't believe in his political stance, which is kind of different.

If his stance is 'medical assistance and unemployment aren't necessary' and he's using them anyway, then that's the sleazy scenario right there, isn't it? If he wanted to do some other kind of medical and unemployment assistance that doesn't currently exist, then he might be in the clear, but that's adding some (pretty unlikely) facts to the situation.

[rowyn]

I was thinking of it more as "I didn't want this, but since I am paying for it anyway (via taxes), I may as well use it."

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

The reason that it's bad (or good) is that you're not paying for it -- everyone's paying for it for the people who need it. If the people who don't need it also use it, then that's money that wasn't really budgeted (or was budgeted because projections took parasites into account, but shouldn't have had to be).

[rowyn]

But I am paying for it. I am paying taxes to pay for it. If I had not paid taxes to pay for unemploment insurance or Medicaid, maybe I'd be able to cover it out of my own pocket. Maybe the other people who have paid taxes for Medicaid an unemployment insurance would have contributed to charities that I could use. Maybe the economy would be so much healthier that the marginal cost of healthcare would be cheaper. Maybe I wouldn't have lost my job at all and I wouldn't have this problem.

My point isn't that any of these arguments are *right*, but that I think it is legitimate to *make* those arguments. To believe in getting rid of government social services WITHOUT believing that poor people deserve to starve and die without them -- or believing that they inevitably would. Libertarians really do think that gov't aid undermines and deters private charity.

[fortyozspartan.livejournal.com]

You make it sound like he's just going to the local library to rent a movie. In my mind, welfare programs are a little more complicated than the "Well, I bought it, so I'm going to use it" scenario. You can't just at some point collect your welfare check, because hell, you've paid into it. These things have requirements and I have to imagine that the vast majority of people don't want to have to use food stamps or collect a welfare check. Like say, all of the children that are fed by food stamps.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

A larger point is that saying that you should abuse the law whenever you can get away with it is a toxic attitude that is destructive to *any* form of government. And I've seen you making that argument a lot -- or rather, assuming that everyone is going to act that way and therefore doing anything is futile.

Because really, doing anything *is* futile if everyone acts that way. Society would collapse entirely, or you'd have a police state, and either way you're screwed.

[rowyn]

I think that people will tend to do what you give them incentives to do, and so you should try to give incentives to do the things you actually want. Yes. I don't think that everyone is going to abuse the incentives laws set up, but I do think that some laws and regulations do a much better job of managing them so as to minimize unintended consequences.

For the record, I do NOT advocate or recommend or think that abusing laws is a great and wonderful thing that all morally upright people should do. Cancelling your insurance while you're healthy and then buying it if you get sick is not good. Walking away from your affordable but underwater mortgage is not good. But some people will do these things if you set up a system that rewards them for doing it.

Taking an unemployment check for $400 a week when you've paid $50,000 in social security taxes already, though, does not really strike me as contemptible even if your political stance opposes both.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'm annoyed that people can look at planned economies and see them fail, and then not make the connection to treating the law like a complicated computer program whose letter matters more than the spirit. Yeah... that's going to work.

Or else they do go with 'fewer laws are good' and then somehow conflate that with 'so the government should do less' which isn't the same thing at all.

And I think your argument isn't 'he isn't a hypocrite', it's that 'some hypocrisy is okay', which I've said before myself. The reason I'm not sure that's the case here isn't because he's necessarily contemptible, but because you've got a choice between 'contemptible' and 'lying politician'.

Although 'lying politician' is kind of the default *anyway*. v.v

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Government indulges in insider trading too.

A perfect time to use my WTF icon!

[fortyozspartan.livejournal.com]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/matt-taibbi/blogs/TaibbiData_May2010/218982/83512

Maybe this can help you see where "liberals" are coming from? It's a decent enough read and nowhere does it say that tea people are hypocrites. It does, however, use the term contradiction. It is hilarious to listen to someone tell you that absolutely any form of welfare is evil and will undermine capitalism and our way of life when he has sampled just about every kind of welfare our nation has to offer. I'm sure by his explanation he just needed it to get over a rut in life. Well guess what, that is exactly why we have social programs.

[bikerwalla.livejournal.com]

I always think of the old miser who had $20,000 in his savings account. Every morning he'd walk to the bank and make them show him "his" twenty thousand dollars. He wanted to make sure nothing happened to it.

People are told to be angry at the misuse of "their" tax dollars. There's a lot of anger at people who land in a safety net. There's anger from the grandparents being asked to pay taxes for a new school. It's not for their children, so why should they give THEIR money to OTHER PEOPLE'S children? And the answer of course is that previous generations were taxed to provide schools when they were children, they just don't see the similarities because they listen to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and they get mad at who they're told to be mad at, but back in simpler times they didn't listen to Father Coughlin or Sister Aimee to be able to draw the parallels.