Matt Yglesias

Popular Music and Social Democracy

Cato’s Ilya Shapiro says Michael Jackson makes the case for capitalism:

The King of Pop’s creativity allowed him and his family to make hundreds of millions of dollars, yes, but it also created thousands of jobs in the music and marketing industries and brought joy to fans around the world. Whatever his personal eccentricities — perhaps, in part, as a result of them — Jackson represents a capitalist success story.

No central planner could have invented him, and no government bureaucracy could have transformed pop music in the way he did.

It’s unquestionably true that central planning’s record in pop music is extremely poor, though they did okay in film, but this seems to have limited relevance to our current policy debates. Suppose that Jackson had paid somewhat higher taxes over the course of his career, and that the funds had gone to provide nutritious meals to poor children? I think the world of pop music would have been just about as strong under that scenario, but America as a whole would also be a stronger and more just society. After all, among non-Anglophone countries I think you’d have to say that it’s Sweden which has had the most pop music success. High tax rates don’t seem to discourage their music entrepreneurs.

What’s more, if you consider musicians operating outside of the “child star with horribly abusive father” paradigm, I think it’s clear that a more social democratic system is going to be advantageous. Consider that in the United States quitting your day job to focus on your promising band can have dire implications for your ability to obtain health insurance. This is particularly the case if you have the misfortune of a pre-existing medical condition. An up-and-coming Canadian or British guitarist is taking a financial risk by choosing to focus on the band, but an American can be really putting his life on the line.

European-Style Socialism is Pretty Awesome

Here’s some diavlogging with Matt Continetti in which I make the case for European-style social democracy:

Henry Farrell and Daniel Drezner also did a BHTV discussion of some related issues. I also wrote on a similar theme for the Daily Beast this week.

I did, however, want to clarify that with regard to the Daily Beast headline I don’t actually think Obama’s budget proposals are tantamount to a full-bore social democratic agenda. They move somewhat in that direction, but are still quite a bit more moderate than would-be proposals to give the United States a Northern European social model.

Learning to Love the European Welfare State

Russell Shorto has an excellent article in The New York Times Magazine about how he found himself living in the Netherlands and after at first rebelling against the high tax rate he learned to love the European welfare state:

In fairness to Europe’s critics, the Netherlands is one of the highest performing countries and things don’t look as great in Italy or Spain. Still, it’s a crucial point. The average standard of living enjoyed in the top European countries is better than the average standard of living in the United States and while we almost certainly can’t just copy Dutch practices, we can certainly learn from them and stop telling moronic scare stories.

I might add that one thing that tends to give a distorted picture of the situation is that the kind of Americans likely to travel to the Netherlands and other European countries are hardly socioeconomically representative. Shorto is writing from the perspective of a college educated professional, but the biggest contrast is probably found in the standard of living enjoyed by people in the bottom 25 percent of the wealth/income distribution.