Rep. Paul Ryan ably responded in this space to Thomas Frank’s criticisms. On the other hand, there wasn’t much to defend himself against. Frank’s entire response to the argument that corporations can use regulation to protect themselves — and that this possibility is a reason for skepticism about the value of regulation — is that it requires us to “disregard the wreckage all around us courtesy of three decades of regulatory rollback.” Yes: If you believe that our current recession is the result of “three decades of regulatory rollback,” then you will be more enthusiastic about regulation than Representative Ryan is (although you might still want to know what specific regulations we ought to order up). Since this premise is planted in pretty much every column Frank writes, it might be nice if one of these days he mounted an actual argument for it.

But Frank’s column reminded me to link to Ed Kilgore’s post on the subject of government policy toward business, which is considerably better. Kilgore argues that conservatives are too self-congratulatory about their opposition to government subsidies for business. And I think on this main point he is correct: Neither conservatives nor liberals are sufficiently mindful of the perverse effects that government support for business can have. On the other hand I don’t think conservatives are quite as bad as he suggests.

He writes,

Consider the default-drive Republican approach to health care reform, such as it is. . . . The centerpiece is invariably large federal tax credits, accompanied by killing off the current tax deduction for employer-provided coverage, all designed to massively subsidize the purchase of private health insurance by individuals (with or without, depending on the proposal, any sort of group purchases for high-risk individuals). Another conservative pet rock is federal support for Health Savings Accounts, which encourage healthy people to pay cash for most medical services, perhaps supplemented by (very profitable) private catastrophic insurance policies. And most conservatives, when they aren’t “Medagoguing” Democratic proposals to rein in Medicare costs, favor “voucherizing” Medicare benefits—another gigantic subsidy for private health insurers.

I would not favor (at least as my ideal policy) replacing the tax break solely for employer-provided insurance with a tax break solely for individually-purchased insurance; I’d prefer a tax break available in either case. But how would switching from one tax preference to the other be a net increase in subsidies for insurance companies? It would just be a reconfiguration of an existing subsidy, right?

I also don’t know whether a market with more use of HSAs would make for bigger insurance-industry profits. Isn’t it possible that profit margins would be lower because insurance companies would be selling coverage of a smaller share of health expenses than they typically do today? And if recipients of Medicare vouchers were able to put their payments into HSAs rather than use them to buy insurance policies, they wouldn’t be subsidizing those companies in any objectionable way, would they?

Debates about corporate welfare can bog down similarly, with conservatives and liberals both opposing it in principle but in practice reaching different conclusions about what counts as an example. Suffice it to say that I don’t think Kilgore has chosen good examples — although, again, I agree with what I take to be his main point.