Clyde Wayne Crews, Jr. writes,
here we are in the 21st Century with Obamacare’s futility characterized as “glitches” and “hiccups” by the Washington Post and NPR.
Those aren’t “glitches.”
They are, as one title by the great Ludwig von Mises put it, an inevitable manifestation of the impossibility of Economic Calculation In the Socialist Commonwealth.
In modern America, this abomination should never have even been suggested, let alone enacted.
The entire essay expresses frustration. If you are in the minority in a majority-rules environment, how can you be anything but frustrated?
This is preposterous. I’m as annoyed as anyone by the use of the word “glitches” to describe an embarrassing, non-functioning system, but the idea that private sector firms never have difficulties with product roll-outs is just complete BS. Libertarians would be well served to dump the Austrian crackpottery here. For starters, the “glitches” aren’t about price setting, which is what the calculation problem is about in the first place.
Wait for the crash. It’ll be a sad waste of resources, but a lesson will be learned.
Reconciliation shenanigans aside (and non-execution by the Executive branch), this is what people voted for. Libertarians need to find a way to broaden their appeal.
If ACA is an unmitigated disaster, it might help usher a new wave of pro-growth, pro-freedom elections.
@Chris, if every engineer in a private company said hey, if you roll this out, everyone’s going to switch to part time, thus making the cure worse than the disease, then one of two things would have happened:
1. The program would have been stopped at the design phase, because there wouldn’t be a plausible design on the table to work with.
2. A head would have rolled, once it was learned that someone pushed a hopeless program just to gain a political advantage.
@Jack, I wish I could be confident it will “crash” per se. France and Germany just go on indefinitely with persistently high unemployment.
We are going through a wave of job losses right now as young people realize that starter jobs like low-end restaurant work are no longer around. However, I’m not sure how many of them have connected the dots with the job market they are observing and the public policy choices that led to it. In 5-10 years, unemployed youth will just be the new normal.
Similarly, our generation saw all of our appliances and tools get EnergyStarred into near non-functionality at the same time that they more than doubled in price. Our generation has barely noticed, and the next generation will just think it’s normal for dishwashers to leave their dishes damp and for showers to put out water at a trickle.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikemalone/2013/10/07/why-progressives-always-get-tech-wrong/
Progressives obviously do not “always get tech wrong”. Obama’s tech guys crushed Team Romney last year.
That does nothing to excuse the October cf that is healthcare.gov. The truly astonishing thing is that they went ahead with the rollout when they could not have expected anything but a fubar fiasco. Talk about politics trumping reality.
1. The program would have been stopped at the design phase, because there wouldn’t be a plausible design on the table to work with.
2. A head would have rolled, once it was learned that someone pushed a hopeless program just to gain a political advantage.
(2) is probably true although not always, (1) is false. Lots of rollouts of junk products happen in the private sector, and the idea that there’s no “plausible design” for an actuarial website is nonsense. (Let’s revisit this in two months and see if there is “no plausible design”, even if it isn’t the one you would prefer.) How do you think countries which have functioning health care systems (this does not include the United States) work anyway? Funnily enough, they’ve stumbled through the “calculation problem” right through into lower prices and frankly better quality. Those of us in the world of empirical reality (i.e., not Austrians) have an obligation to face those facts, even if they go against our libertarian priors.
But neither (1) or (2) has anything to do with a “calculation problem”. That’s just pure derp. And I don’t think our host has anywhere near as romantic a view of the efficiency of corporations as you seem to.
As big a disaster as healthcare.gov is, it needn’t have been. Obama had already established the precedent of ignoring statutes with his employer deferral (and many similar moves). If he had half a brain he would have deferred the individual mandate at the same time, which would have garnered plaudits for “fairness” and avoided the October meltdown.