Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…That’s it, the mandate, exactly. A mandate, that’s interesting. That would seem to be a left‑wing idea because the right in America tends to be wary of mandates. But the economists there concluded there’s some benefit to doing this, so it came up more from the right, but as soon as it was then promoted by Obama in such a tribal and hostile time, then it was tagged as bad. Almost anything that can be associated with an ongoing hot conflict can be moralized. Let me ask you a very concrete question. I’ve had dialogue with people on the left, and I’ve made a harm argument to them. I’ve said, “Based on work by Mark Pauly, if you look at the people who are covered by the mandate, they have to pay more for health insurance than it’s worth, actually most of them. So Obamacare is imposing a harm on them. ” Now generally I agree with your characterization of the left as more worried about harm. But when I make this harm argument, there’s a remarkable lack of interest in it. It could be the data are wrong. It could be Mark Pauly’s paper is wrong. I would grant all that but the striking thing is they’re not interested in hearing about the harm. Of course they’re not gonna — yeah.…

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