All in

See President Obama's bet and raise him one

Mike Warren over at Vandy Right responded very eloquently to my post (and Tennessean op-ed) on hiking the gas tax in the state and offsetting it with a cut in the food tax. Warren is a junior at Vanderbilt and his writing and thinking is impressive. Worth the read for those interested in transportation. His point that having drivers subsidize public transit users is wealth re-distribution is particularly interesting to me. Nearly everything government does has an impact on the allocation of resources, tends to re-distribute. However, not all such efforts are primarily about trying to achieve greater equity in society. If drivers benefit (they do) when more people take the bus then there is an efficiency argument in favor of such re-distribution. In short there is no great difference in having drivers pay, via the gas tax, for roads or to make those roads less congested.

President Obama was right and that is where the opportunity lies for those on the center-right

As a tactical matter it would be wise for those of us on the center-right to adjust the rhetoric on re-distribution... from whether to how. Most people for example don't object to our practice and tradition of subsidizing education. All should object to how it is done. It is a matter of who gets to decide how to spend money, the ostensible beneficiaries or a centralized bureaucracy. We should respect the views of libertarians and members of Ron Paul's revolution when it comes to their philosophical opposition to any re-distribution for the sake of improving equity, but attract them by pointing to changes that would improve how we currently try to achieve that. It is more efficient to have a person spend someone else's dollar in an attempt to improve his lot in life than have some agency decide how to spend that dollar trying to improve the life of someone they don't know.

Such an adjustment in rhetoric - away from re-distribution as a philosophical matter and toward treating it as a practical matter - would attract many on the center-left. President Obama struck a chord by insisting that most people are not as concerened with the size of government as with whether or not it works. Most would agree with the center-right position though in thinking that it works better when people are free to make their own decisions.