Perhaps ObamaCare will be remembered as the breaking point for top-down planning. There is not enough information available for the government to micromanage a system as complex as health care, which represents more than 15% of the economy. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek wrote some 50 years ago about the "pretence of knowledge," meaning the conceit that planners could know enough about complex markets to dictate how they operate. He warned against "the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess."
True enough, ObamaCare was built on an unworkable foundation. The original sin in health care goes back to the wage and price controls in effect during World War II. The federal government let employers avoid wage controls by adding health insurance as an untaxed benefit for employees. Employer-provided insurance has since insulated most Americans from the cost of care. The predictable result is endless demand for increasingly inefficient services.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303302504577327752347952344.html
Simpler is better. In other words, in those few cases when the ends justify the means (government's coercive force), the less coercion imposed the better. This is why direct subsidy for health care makes infinitely more sense than constructing, or trying to construct, "the perfect beast" for supplying health care to all absent all the mechanisms - primarily price - that make it possible for systems to run well.
True enough, ObamaCare was built on an unworkable foundation. The original sin in health care goes back to the wage and price controls in effect during World War II. The federal government let employers avoid wage controls by adding health insurance as an untaxed benefit for employees. Employer-provided insurance has since insulated most Americans from the cost of care. The predictable result is endless demand for increasingly inefficient services.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303302504577327752347952344.html
Simpler is better. In other words, in those few cases when the ends justify the means (government's coercive force), the less coercion imposed the better. This is why direct subsidy for health care makes infinitely more sense than constructing, or trying to construct, "the perfect beast" for supplying health care to all absent all the mechanisms - primarily price - that make it possible for systems to run well.
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