ObamaCare, Like All Central Planning, Is A 'Big Failure'
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Posted 10/14/2013 06:50 PM ET
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Bureaucratic Tragedy: ObamaCare promoter Ezra Klein admits the law has been a "big failure." We could say his comments are those of a useful idiot. But what they really do is underscore the perils of central planning.
Washington Post blogger Klein has been a longtime advocate for ObamaCare. He has predicted great days ahead and wrote in April in a Bloomberg column that ObamaCare will be so successful that Republicans will ultimately embrace a "policy that they did everything to destroy." Klein even saw the GOP trying "to build on it" once it was established.
But he wasn't so upbeat on Monday. On MSNBC's "Morning Joe," he acknowledged that ObamaCare was having great trouble with its rollout. He noted that it's now "a couple of weeks in and people can't sign up," even though some "have tried 20, 30, 40 times."
"One of the Obama administration's jobs, separate from all of the political stuff we talk about here, is to simply run things like this well, to run their signature legislative initiative well," said Klein.
"On that, so far, this has been a big failure."
Did he expect something else? Was he anticipating some kind of grand opening, a glorious balloon-release of reform that transitioned into a smooth sailing for all?
To do so would have been naive, because history — and common sense, along with a large catalog of economic theory — tells us that central planning has not and cannot work.
What works and always has is voluntary cooperation among free people. Consumers and producers don't need functionaries in Washington managing their transactions. Groceries, wrist watches, cheeseburgers, bowling balls, aspirin and any number of other goods and services are bought and sold just fine without government involvement. These markets organize themselves.
Buyers and sellers speak clearly to each other through price signals. Government planners would only wreck what has developed efficiently on its own.
It's foolish to believe a group of planners in Washington, D.C., or anywhere else, could organize a market as large and complex as health care.
Big businesses usually start out as small enterprises, then develop over time. ObamaCare tried to start out as a mega-corporation serving a customer base exceeding 300 million people and learned the hard way that it didn't work.
Ensure that all Americans have health insurance coverage at an affordable cost is simply too much to manage. A goal so ambitious always will be.
As Michael Schaus at Townhall Finance reminds us, "The same people who failed miserably at launching a website will soon be regulating the sophisticated day-to-day decisions of hospitals, insurers and doctors."
The fundamental complaint against central planning is that there's too much information for planners to take in and then understand.
"Central planning," economics professors Tyler Watts and Nicholas Curott wrote in the Freeman in 2010, "cannot substitute for the knowledge generated by the trial and error of the market process."
Realclearmarkets.com contributor Robert Tracinski pointed out what should be obvious when he wrote in 2011 that "the job of central planning is inherently impossible; even the smartest person can't do it."
But that's never deterred narcissistic technocrats willing to make plans for everyone else's life. They assume they know more than they do and believe they understand more than they are able to learn.
The natural outcome of this arrogance, as economist Friedrich Hayek told us, is that central planning will eventually lead to an authoritarian regime in which "the will of a small minority" is " imposed upon the people."
In other words, central planning is planned tyranny. Yes, we'd say that's a big failure.
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