The Right Answer to a Stupid Question

Ryan Cooper, How Are You Going to Pay For That? Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics

We’ve all heard it, whenever we postulate any changes or reforms, no matter how nominal, no matter how piddling. “How are you going to pay for that?” President Biden’s Build Back Better platform, a mere shadow of his campaign pledges, nevertheless collapsed in part because journalists kept quoting the aggregate price tag, which was, admittedly, huge, if you sand off all context. Large dollar figures are considered project-killers in today’s political milieu.

Journalist Ryan Cooper has grown weary of pretended neutrality. He objects to the widespread American background presumption that private property needs defended at all costs. He calls this position “propertarianism” and derides it altogether. This individualist assumption that my money is more important than social good, has completely failed to deliver the goods. Privatizing collective functions, like public health and climate change, has resulted in cost bloat for inadequate services.

Cooper divides his book into two sections. The first, slightly shorter part, is a lesson in applied economics, the difference between high-minded classroom theory and how economics actually happens at street level. The market, Cooper insists, isn’t antithetical to government interference, despite what both major American political parties believe. Indeed, without government creating enforceable standards and relatively stable money, there can be no market.

One can immediately start mustering counter-arguments. Governments don’t create markets, as proven because black markets exist. Markets functioned in places like Mogadishu during the anarchic 1990s, when no functioning government existed. Admittedly, these were markedly violent markets with no backstop against fraud. But the existence of markets qua markets says nothing incontrovertible about the governments backing them up.

His second part applies his anti-theoretical economics to common American needs. Both political parties and the mainstream media have characterized health care, climate change, and labor markets as individual concerns; the fetish, for instance, for employer-provided health insurance and privatized Medicare have bilateral support. These approaches, however, have produced worse results at higher costs. The rich suffer under this inequality as much as the poor.

Ryan Cooper

Despite the promise of “smart answers” in his book’s secondary title, Cooper doesn’t offer prepackaged responses. Cooper writes primarily for progressives like himself, seeking a broad, inclusive background for economic discussions. His final chapter does include some rhetorical techniques that have worked in political messaging in other countries and other times. However, his primary goal is providing a foundation for collectivist economic thinking in an individualist culture.

Indeed, Cooper’s argumentative style throughout his book is reliant on “smart answers” in the sense of exceedingly well-informed. He quotes statistics and evidence volubly, at quantities far beyond what ordinary readers can hold in working memory. Anybody who’s tried to dispute their racist uncle by quoting stats knows that stats aren’t an ironclad justification. If somebody asks “How are you going to pay for that,” and your response runs over 300 pages, you’ve probably lost.

That said, while I, a Distributist, might debate Cooper’s finer points, he says little out-and-out wrong. He demonstrates how America’s private property morality, which we have exported aggressively, has produced substandard outcomes. America’s life expectancy, after growing for years, has been rapidly contracting, even before the pandemic (which he cites extensively). He makes a persuasive case that lack of economic solidarity is having tragic consequences in real time.

And he postulates workable alternatives with practical applications. Some of Cooper’s suggestions come from other countries, and he demonstrates how successful nations, which he calls “peer countries,” have placed necessary parts of their economy under democratic control. (That democratic control matters to him: he dislikes Marxism as strongly as propertarianism, though less volubly.) It’s important to Cooper that governments shouldn’t reinvent the wheel.

Where Cooper’s alternatives don’t have proven real-world antecedents, he carefully articulates multiple solutions. If one doesn’t work, or produces unintended outcomes, we can repair or replace it. Cooper isn’t a naïve utopian, spitballing solutions for a friction-free world. He wants to create solutions that readers, and the candidates they vote for, can apply practically, drawing on a firm foundation of proven success and consistent theory.

In his final chapter, Cooper articulates a number of rhetorical approaches progressives can use to sell these policies. We live in a world plagued with abbreviated attention spans (stats indicate you probably have already stopped reading this review). Selling innovative policies will mean reconfiguring our message machine, having evidence to support our claims, but also being equipped to penetrate the automatic defenses others put up.

Because Cooper is right. That’s a stupid question, and we need better, more useful answers ready to deploy.