Put another way, it is irrational for Republicans to be ambivalent about the difference between Denmark and France. But neither the GOP nor the conservative movement seems able or willing to distinguish them from one another. They're conceived in the popular imagination of right-leaning Americans as bastions of big-government socialism that might as well be identical. I'd rather live in America than Denmark or France. But as Jason Brennan once put it in his book Libertarianism, "There's a difference between the administrative state -- which tries to control, regulate, and manage the economy (and everything else), and the social insurance state, which taxes citizens and provides publicly-funded social insurance. Hard libertarians oppose both the administrative state and the social insurance state, because they believe both violate people's rights. Classical liberals and neoclassical liberals dislike the administrative state for a variety of reasons. But they are more open to the social insurance state. The social insurance state, by itself, if run properly, still allows citizens an expansive range of economic freedom."

The GOP can expand that range of freedom even if it loses on social insurance. The proof:



Denmark ranks much higher than the United States on property rights, freedom from corruption, business freedom, monetary freedom, trade freedom, investment freedom, and financial freedom. Denmark also rates 99.1 in business freedom, 90.0 in investment freedom, and 90.0 in financial freedom. In comparison, the US scores 91.1, 70.0, and 70.0 respectively on these measures.



It's plausible to imagine an America where citizens preferred a social-insurance state like what we have now, or slightly bigger, but an administrative state that is smaller and more constrained. My instinct is certainly that Republicans would have more success at this particular moment attacking and reforming the administrative state than significantly shrinking Medicare and Social Security. And administrative-state reforms could help stimulate significant economic growth.

It's also possible that voters would prefer generous social insurance and a smaller administrative state ... but that forced to choose between shrinking or growing both they'd grow 'em.

The distinction I'm suggesting would seem to make particular sense for a Republican Party that never in fact cuts major entitlement spending anyway. Paul Ryan, who is held up within the GOP as an allegedly courageous fiscal conservative, insists that the current cohort of seniors shouldn't see any reductions in Social Security or Medicare spending -- his cuts are always scheduled to take place many election cycles from now in a distant year when, according to the life plan I can't imagine he doesn't have, he's president or a senator or a game-the-system executive.