Why Democrats love markets

Mark Thoma describes the party politics of regulatory schemes. It's not that market-based regimes are always better science than traditional command and control regulation, but in these times market-based regimes are always better politics for Democrats.

There's an inconsistency between free market ideology and the need for reform in areas like health care and financial services. One of the first steps in reforming the system is to acknowledge that the market won't take care of the problems itself. Once that is acknowledged, i.e. that regulation is needed to fix these market failures, the only question is whether that regulation will be of the "market-based" variety or by edict (e.g. this is the difference between system of tradable carbon permits that allow least cost carbon reduction strategies to emerge and a government set emission limit for each industry which generally does not achieve carbon reductions at least cost).

With Democrats mostly opposed to old fashioned edict style regulation --  with their willingness to embrace market-based solutions to regulatory issues --  and with Republicans unwilling to embrace anything that Democrats propose, there is little ground left for those Republicans who are willing to admit that markets sometimes fail to stand upon. Democrats have taken the middle ground -- market based regulation -- from Republicans. This leaves Republicans with a choice of going along and compromising (and thereby embracing proposals they have made in the past, e.g. the health care bill looks an awful lot like the health care program Romney put in place in Massachusetts), or standing in opposition simply because it is a Democratic proposal. The choice they've made, standing in opposition to everything, is a losing strategy that allows policy to be shaped entirely be the other side. It will be interesting to see if a fissure develops within the Republican Party over this.