Contraception Without Romance. The Entangled Political Economy of State and Federal Contraceptive Insurance Mandates

Abstract

Even though effective contraception has been widely available and used in the U.S. since the 1960s, access to affordable contraception became a political issue in the early 1990s and culminated in the adoption of the federal contraceptive insurance mandate in 2011. This paper analyses the emergence of contraceptive mandates in the context of Virginia Political Economy, focusing on James M. Buchanan’s distinction between a productive and a redistributive state. Buchanan would surely view insurance mandates as an expansion of a welfare state and an activity indicative of constitutional anarchy. To understand the coordinated patterns of societal coordination within constitutional anarchy I employ Richard E. Wagner’s framework of Entangled Political Economy. I conclude that the push for state and federal contraceptive mandates was driven by a rent-seeking effort oriented at increasing the demand for more profitable forms of contraception.

Keywords: Contraceptive Insurance Mandates, Obamacare, Public Choice, Virginia Political Economy, Entangled Political Economy, Forced Investors, Voluntary Investors, Bootleggers And Baptists, Credence Goods, Constitutional Anarchy, Rent-Seeking

JEL Classification: P35, Z13