What It’s All About With Health Care
28th October 2013
Tom Smith cuts to the chase.
Big government has gotten to the point where it cannot do any longer the things it aspires to. First, as we all know, it is running out of money. To remedy this problem, the Dems propose taking more out of my already stretched to the breaking point budget, and yours too. I’m enough of an egalitarian not to mind if George Soros gets a few billion skimmed off the top of his cache, but the idea apparently is to go after me and lots of people like me, whatever 100 minus 47 percent is, and raise the money that way. I’m against that. But beyond that, it won’t be enough money. But other people are making that argument better than I can. What strikes me is not only that there isn’t remotely enough money, but not enough time and competence, to construct the massive machines government wants to construct in order to build the dreamlands of tomorrow they want. Why can’t we have an insurance system where policies get sold as easily as books? Straightforward, on the web, with government backstopping the sorts of things that are for sale? It turns out to build such a thing is beyond the capabilities of our government and probably any government. I think building such a thing is wrong, but forget that. I might think building the Tower of Babel was wrong as well. The point is the Babylonians lacked as it happened steel and so could not build such a tall tower. We similarly lack the technical wherewithall to build such a big, complicated website, where the only people who want to build it are governed by the hugely complex rules of procurement regulations and motivated by the strands of public choice economics. It’s very like what happened to the old Soviet Union. It’s not that big missiles and tractors and potatos were beyond technology as such. We had had them for a long time. It’s the combination — those things, but built by an enormous state-planned political economy, where the planning was done by fallible and corrupt human beings.