A very private liberal

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Via Brad DeLong, Mark Schmitt asks where are the liberal privatizers in the current Social Security debate.

It suddenly occurred to me that, in addition to the missing Democrats on the Hill, there was also a faction entirely missing from the public debate: the pro-privatization liberals.

I count myself in this group, and agreed with pretty much everything Bob Kerey wrote in the WSJ a while back, and my reservations are similar to DeLong's: I don't trust the Bush II White House to do anything well.

The reason is the conceptual structure of trust, which, as I recall from a seminar that I took in college with Karen Jones, has two components: disposition and capacity. I don't believe that Bush II and his cronies have anything by way of a good moral disposition; and even if their hearts were in the right place, I doubt their capacity to pull a program through.