Quick thoughts about good faith

Yglesias cites Mark Kleiman saying:

Remember this the next time a conservative explains how we ought to voucherize public education. The minute that happens, the conservatives will come back and decide that we need to means-test the vouchers. That done, they’ll attack the remaining program as “welfare.”

This seems bang on, and is a good part of why I changed my mind about these things. Given a sufficient degree of good faith and such, it would make sense to argue that the government ought to means-test the safety net, and that people who've got the money to send their kids to school or themselves to the hospital ought to spend on such things. But of course any means-tested program is vulnerable to the welfare-for-people-not-like-us line of attacks unless it provides goodies for a sufficiently large number of people; conversely, any public program that provides goodies for enough people is politically invulnerable. Therefore the best model for sustainable safety-net programs is something like Medicare, which spends most of its money on people who pay (slightly) more in taxes than they get out of the program, but feel -- being irrational -- as if they're getting free stuff. [One could argue about the existence of economies of scale, as with e.g. the NYC subway, but this is beside my point.] Another promising line of attack is to make most people feel vulnerable and in need of a safety net -- this is Tony Judt's notion of a "social democracy of fear" -- but I'm not clear how much mileage an approach like this would have in countries like the US where the rate of downward mobility has not historically been very high.

Link roundup

1. The Short Career of Amy Bishop (LRB)
2. Inappropriate Witticisms (Scott Adams blog)
3. How to split up the US using facebook connectivity data (Pete Warden)
4. Binge drinking won't mess up your test scores (Awl)
5. Margaret Antwood (Book Bench)
6. A well-known case of forgery (LRB) [see also Judith Thurman in the NY'er on fake Roth]
7. Having daughters makes you a reactionary (Gelman)
8. Dead men flying (Awl)
9. Sex in space (NSS review)
10. Horse sense and heartache (NYRB, review of Lydia Davis's collected)
11. Williams kids are too dumb to form racial stereotypes (NatureNews)
12. Fake NY townhouse (Curbed NY)
13. Womb with a view (Metafilter)
14. Trustworthiness of beards (Flowing Data)
15. Europe as Marge Simpson (Strange Maps)
16. What do Norwegian dirtheads and Richard Perle have in common? (NY Press)
17. Swiss euthanasia outfit dumps ashes in lake (Awl)
18. Free land out west (Toothpaste for dinner)
19. Illusions of the year (Neural Correlate) [see also Electric Brae]
20. Three-toed sloth video (Andrew Sullivan)
21. The Froot Loops bubble (Yglesias)
22. Ambien walrus adventure (Toothpaste for dinner)
23. Liquids can form craters too (Phys. Rev. Focus)