Uhlmann’s Razor and the Blank Check for the Empty Mind
7th November 2013
Steven Hayward points out some inconvenient truth.
Today in my Constitutional Law class I’ll be taking up the famous case of McCulloch v. Maryland, the bank case from 1819 in which Chief Justice John Marshall observed that “the power to tax involves the power to destroy,” which immediately set my mind to thinking about . . . Obamacare. Obamacare’s medical device tax—a tax not on profits remember, but on revenues—is doing its destructive work already.
The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that “Funding Dries Up for Medical Startups,” noting that “Investment in the medical-device and equipment industry is on pace to fall to $2.14 billion this year, down more than 40% from 2007 and the sharpest drop among the top five industry recipients of venture funding.” It seems we have to relearn every few years (such as the luxury boat tax of 1990, swiftly repealed when it killed the boat-building industry) the basic lesson that Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan taught us: tax something and you get less of it. Especially when you tax it like Obamacare, where the tax significantly reduces the after-tax return to investors.
It is a popular theory that failure is the deliberate design of Obamacare, the better to force us into a single-payer system. True enough that Obama voiced this sympathy some years ago. But I tend in these matters to go with Uhlmann’s Razor, the bureaucratic-age variant of Occam’s famous blade, provided to us by professor Michael Uhlmann of Claremont Graduate University: “When stupidity is a sufficient explanation, there’s no need to have recourse to any other.” Remember that it was Congress—Nancy Pelosi’s Congress—that wrote most of the (Un)Affordable Care Act.