Always ends up being idiocracy:
…the elites had to wait for the man of their dreams.
When they found him, he was a rare breed: a genuine African American (his father was Kenyan) who thought and talked like the academics on both sides of his family, a product of the faculty lounge who dabbled in urban/race politics, a man who could speak to both ends of the liberals’ up-and-down coalition, and a would-be transformer of our public life whose quiet voice and low-key demeanor conveyed “moderation” in all that he spoke and did. Best of all, he was the person whom the two branches of the liberal kingdom—the academics and journalists—wanted to be, a man who shared their sensibilities and their views of the good and the beautiful. This was the chance of a lifetime to shape the world to their measure. He and they were the ones they were waiting for, and with him, they longed for transcendent achievements. But in the event they were undone by the three things Siegel had pegged as their signature weaknesses: They had too much belief in the brilliance of experts, they were completely dismissive of public opinion, and they had a contempt for the great middle class.
…Obama had reassured them again and again that if they liked their plans and their doctors, they would be able to keep them, but this proved inaccurate. For the first time in American history the cost of a massive social program would be concentrated on a small slice of the populace that was not rich, and in some instances, could not afford it. Those costs came in many different dimensions: Parents found they could not take sick children to the same hospitals they had used before. People with complex chronic conditions found that the teams of doctors who had worked together to treat them had been broken up. For the people who had been insured through the individual market the elites had little compassion. Cancer patients who took their complaints to the press (and to the Republicans) were “fact checked” and then viciously attacked by the Democrats, among them Harry Reid, who called them all liars. “We have to pass the bill, so that you can find out what’s in it,” Nancy Pelosi infamously said. People had finally found out and they were furious.
In February 2010, in the midst of the row over Obamacare’s passage, 80 highly credentialed experts in health care, graduates of and teachers in the best schools in the country, sent an open letter to the president and the leaders of Congress insisting the bill be passed. The Affordable Care Act, they maintained, would “cover more than 30 million people who would otherwise have gone uninsured. . . . Provide financial help to make coverage for millions of working families. . . . Strengthen competition and oversight of private insurance. . . . Provide unprecedented protection for Americans living with chronic illness and disabilities. . . . Make significant investments in community health centers, prevention, and wellness. . . . Increase financial support to states to finance expanded Medicaid insurance coverage, eliminate the Medicare prescription drug donut hole . . . provide a platform to improve the quality of the health care system . . . [and] reduce the federal budget deficit over the next ten years and beyond.”
They were not alone. “Historians will see this health care bill as a masterfully crafted piece of legislation,” wrote Jonathan Chait in the magazine Herbert Croly cofounded. “The new law untangles the dysfunctionalities of the individual insurance market while fulfilling the political imperative of leaving the employer-provided system in place. . . . They put into place numerous reforms to force efficiency into a wasteful system. They found hundreds of billions of dollars in payment offsets, a monumental task in itself. And they will bring economic and financial security to tens of millions of Americans who would otherwise risk seeing their lives torn apart.”
It did none of these things. It did not fix the dysfunctions of the individual market; it destroyed it. It did not save money; it squandered billions. It did not bring peace and security to tens of millions of people; it took it away from them. The best and the brightest had made their predictions. They were wrong.
Hayek wrote a book or two about this sort of thing.
Hayek wrote a book or two about this sort of thing. Yes he did. He said Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance – where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong. (Pg 148-149 on “The Road to Serfdom:)
Do you really imagine that Hayek would approve of ObamaCare?
Really?
Of course he does, RS. The Admiral lives in the alternate universe, Gerribland, where Hayek was a collectivist, the laws of economics vanish whenever a “liberal” waves a magic wand, and the syllogism is just a bogeyman to use to frighten the kids with!
Why wouldn’t he? Requiring people to have health insurance and assisting the purchase of that for individuals who can’t is the least disruptive way for the state to ” assist the individual in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. ”
Or shorter Hayek – few people have a couple of million lying around to pay for chemotherapy, so help them insure for genuinely insurable risks.
The problem, Rand, is you’re not following Hayek – you’re following a plaster cast of him into which you’ve put your own ideas.
No, Hayek would point out that this is a perfect example of the knowledge problem, and the fatal conceit.
Do you have any reference for your statement?
“Requiring people to have health insurance and assisting the purchase of that for individuals who can’t is the least disruptive way for the state to ”
If only that was all Obamacare did.
That’s 90% of what it does. The other 10% define what health insurance is and block various problematic practices, such as pre-existing condition exclusions and lifetime treatment caps.
The other 10% of what it does is make sure the 90% of what it attempts fails abjectly.
Rand,
Well, actually yes. In Dr. Hayek’s own words…
https://sites.google.com/site/wapshottkeyneshayek/hayek-on-health-care-social-safety-nets-and-public-housing
The Road to Serfdom, pp 148-149
[[[ “Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance – where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong. There are many points of detail where those wishing to preserve the competitive system and those wishing to super-cede it by something different will disagree on the details of such schemes; and it is possible under the name of social insurance to introduce measures which tend to make competition more or less ineffective. But there is no incompatability in principle between the state’s providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom. ]]]
You may now throw that Obamacare loving European Socialist Dr. Hayek under the bus as a Libertarian traitor 🙂
Again, that paragraph is not inconsistent with the reality that Hayek would consider a 2800-page bill an abomination.
So if the bill was only 2,000 pages Hayek would be okay with it?
It seems very unlikely.
And you know Moby has read Hayek cover-to-cover and bqack again. Because Moby is a libertarian! (Who almost always takes the Hive’s side in any controversy.) Or at least posed as one in the past, when he’s not posing as an independent Republican or something else.
That’s not the point, Rand! The point is to derail the discussion from one about technocratic “liberalism” into one about how consistently pro-liberty Hayek was. That’s a topic far less threatening to the Hive.
Rand,
Sorry, there is NO evidence to support your statement. As Dr. Hayek noted, folks would debate the details, but also note that he supported such a safety net as one of the functions of government.
Sorry Rand, but your appeal to authority just doesn’t fly beyond your automatic “yes’ groupies who would support you even if you claimed the Sun didn’t rise in the East.
Hayek would not be so lunatic as to think that ObamaCare is a “safety net.”
Like Rand said.
(a) Some social safety net might be a good thing. (b) This particular implementation might be a terrible thing that kills far more people than it saves.
Are you suggesting that these two statements are inconsistent? I happen to believe in both of them, and polls show that most Americans agree.
“Like Rand said. . . . some social safety net might be a good thing.”
Those who think so should pay for it, but keep their larcenous little hands out of other people’s pockets.
“I remember when ‘liberal’ meant being generous with your own money.”–Will Rogers.
This might lead to much more serious restrictions of the competitive sphere, and, in experimenting in this direction, we shall have to carefully watch our step if we are to avoid making all economic activity progressively more dependent on the direction and volume of government expenditure. But this is neither the only nor, in my opinion, the most promising way of meeting the gravest threat to economic security.
The very source you quote refutes your sentiments. In fact, Hayak would be the first to recommend avoiding government overhandedness (and subsequent hamhandedness.)
I also wanted to point this new regulation, passed on Friday before Memorial Day so it was out of the press’ eye. Creepy.
http://www.huduser.org/portal/affht_pt.html
Jon – and here Hayek is talking about building public works to stimulate the economy, not health insurance.
That quote is rather ironic, considering that as he was writing his country was getting the crap bombed out of it by the Germans and would only get rebuilt with vast government expenditures.
…we shall have to carefully watch our step if we are to avoid making all economic activity progressively more dependent on the direction and volume of government expenditure.
The above quote is the essence of Hayak. We don’t need tea leaves to understand where he is going with his argument.
That is a funny interpretation given how Dr. Hayek refused to take a job at a U.S. think tank because he didn’t want to leave the Austrian run health care system in was in.
http://www.thenation.com/article/163672/charles-koch-friedrich-hayek-use-social-security
[[[Hayek initially declined Koch’s offer. In a letter to IHS secretary Kenneth Templeton Jr., dated June 16, 1973, Hayek explains that he underwent gall bladder surgery in Austria earlier that year, which only heightened his fear of “the problems (and costs) of falling ill away from home.” (Thanks to waves of progressive reforms, postwar Austria had near universal healthcare and robust social insurance plans that Hayek would have been eligible for.)]]]
If you were truly familiar with his work you would understand that he saw redistribution and society providing a safety net as different issues. He was in favor of a safety net, not the redistribution of wealth. Again, he wasn’t as libertarian as many who only read “The Road to Serfdom”, a book written in haste to compare and contrast capitalism, socialism and national socialism.
Thanks Chris for making it more apparent to others why Hayek isn’t the great authority so many have made him out to be. The abridged image of Hayek many people hold, likely having not fully read and comprehended him, doesn’t contain all the glaring contradictions and philosophical dissonance of his actual writing. I certainly fell into that camp, when my opinion of him was based only on quotes and descriptions by others. When I actually read “The Road to Serfdom” it became pretty obvious that Hayek, while having some great contributions to economic thought, also sold those same ideas short in many particular applications and refused to steadfastly support the keystone principles. And he always did it with really pathetic crappy arguments, like your quote above makes clear.
Almost 100 years ago, the great American humorist Will Rogers noted that “Everyone is ignorant, only on different subjects.” This statement, while undoubtedly true, is a call for humility. No one, no matter how well educated, can possibly know more than a tiny fraction of the world’s knowledge. The idea of rule by largely self-proclaimed elites and experts is the opposite of humility. It’s easy to think you have everything figured out when chatting within your liberal bubble in academia (or smoking pot in Obama’s case) because you get to ignore all of the real-world realities out there.
When Bill Buckley said, “I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University.”, he was not being anti-intellectual, he was being anti-snob.
As anyone who’s actually read Hayek (that excludes the Admiral and Moby), he was hardly the consistently radical libertarian that, say, Murray Rothbard was, or even Von Mises. But let’s say about ten per cent was inconsistent with his general pro-liberty approach. (If a true) Hayek scholar can show me the percentage should actually be higher, so be it.) Then it’s funny that the statists here would focus on that ten per cent. Why, I wonder? Are they trying to “co-opt” Hayek and make him out to be as big a State-humper as they are? If so, for what purpose? I find the proposition that Gerrib has actually laid aside his Piketty, Ehrenreich or Frank* to read much of anything much of Hayek risible; but why try to make Hayek seem like a statist? Do you think it’s one of those ploys these bozos regularly use to steer the discussion away from the real topic (in this case, the pitfalls of technocratic “liberalism” in general and
Obamacare in particular)? I wish they WOULD read THE ROAD TO SERFDOM, although I REALLY wish they would read Mises and Bastiat.
Bilwick – well I could spend the next hour debunking line-by-line the BS about how Obamacare isn’t working (short version – it’s working so great that Mitch McConnell, running in Kentucky, is desperately trying to argue that his state’s wildly popular implementation of Obamacare really isn’t what he’ll repeal if he stays in office) or I could just spend 5 minutes with Google and flatly prove Rand Simberg wrong. Since my day job does not involve arguing with Rand, I picked door #2.
Sadly (for you), your waste of time on Google didn’t accomplish that goal.
Actually, Rand, it did. Hayek specifically and unequivocally came out in favor of the state “helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance.” It’s every bit as clear as “the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” for example.
It’s actually clearer, in that one doesn’t have to handwave away “a well-regulated militia.”
That doesn’t mean that he would have favored ObamaCare. But logic has never been your strong suit.
This argument on the second amendment being obscure is simply a canard. One simply needs to read the Federalists Papers to know the true intention of the founders regarding firearms. Simply read Federalist 29 and Federalist 46.
The goal of the Progressives was to disconnect Americans from the philosophies that led to our constitution. Unfortunately, that seems to have worked.
“helping to organize”
Is not the same thing as micromanaging every interaction between a patient and doctor.
Simply read Federalist 29 and Federalist 46 – except the 2nd amendment was written AFTER those articles. The militia being referred to there is the one “organized, armed and regulated” by Congress.
Is not the same thing as micromanaging every interaction between a patient and doctor. which Obamacare does not do.
Hayek specifically and unequivocally came out in favor of the state “helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance.”
Well that’s a lie. Let’s look at the paragraph that Hayek wrote and the part that Gerrib and Matula decided not to include:
“But there are strong arguments against a single scheme of state insurance; and there seems to be an overwhelming case against free health service for all. From what we have seen of such schemes, it is probable that their inexpediency will become evident in the countries that have adopted them, although political circumstances make it unlikely that they can ever be abandoned, not that they have been adopted. One of the strongest arguments against them is, indeed, that their introduction is the kind of politically irrevocable measure that will have to be continued, whether it proves a mistake or not.”
Seems like Hayek provided an argument specifically against a state system, and Gerrib and Matula decided to amend Hayek’s statement. What’s funny about Gerrib’s “unequivocally” statement is Hayek also wrote this:
“There are so many serious problems raised by the nationalization of medicine that we cannot mention even all of the more important ones.”
Seems Hayek had so many arguments against Obamacare, he couldn’t get to them all. Wow Gerrib, looks like Google let you down. Next time try actually reading Hayek. If you find the paragraph that includes the last quote, consider how kind I was not to include the rest of it, particularly since most progressives consider the best part of Obamacare to be the national database of health records.
” which Obamacare does not do.”
Sure it does. It changes how doctors conduct visits and mandates how they treat patients.
In Washington state it is working very well. We had a front page story in the paper the other week about how 600k people signed up for Obamacare. It is an amazing achievement. 45% of the people were already on Medicaid, another 15% or so were previously eligible for Medicaid, around 15% were eligible for the Medicaid expansion, and 15% got insurance. Right around 90k people got insurance. What the article didn’t mention was that 600k or more lost their old insurance policies. If they got new ones, it wasn’t through Obamacare.
I have to schedule my free yearly exam. It should be short because I can’t talk about any of my pre-existing health issues without being charged for a doctor visit.
You should be ashamed of your ingratitude. We all know you are getting better service for the money you’ve forked out. Much better than four years ago.
Right Jim?
“well I could spend the next hour debunking line-by-line the BS about how Obamacare isn’t working”
Only if you lie, Gerrib, only if you lie.
As someone in Mitch McConnell’s state, I had no idea that anyone here liked Obamacare. I don’t think our liberal newspapers have dared print a word about the program all this year.
George Turner – over 421,000 Kentuckians have signed up for health insurance through “kynect” — about 75 percent of whom didn’t previously have insurance and about 52 percent of whom were under age 35. That’s almost 1 in 10 Kentuckians.
Apparently you don’t get out much.
Based on the lies coming out since Obamacare’s implementation, I wouldn’t be surprised that the above claims are false. I’m not saying they are, just that there’s a good track record of obfuscations and lies.
“over 421,000 Kentuckians have signed up for health insurance through “kynect” — about 75 percent of whom didn’t previously have insurance and about 52 percent of whom were under age 35. That’s almost 1 in 10 Kentuckians.”
Gerrib – how many paid?
How does the Guv’ner know 75% had no coverage before?
How many had covereage but lost it under Obama-cide and therefore count as “didn’t have coverage”?
And best of all, how many like it?
“Do you think it’s one of those ploys these bozos regularly use to steer the discussion away from the real topic (in this case, the pitfalls of technocratic “liberalism” in general and
Obamacare in particular)?”
No, because Obamacare is such a smashing success. Just ask anyone who has been a victim of it.
Bilwicke,
Tell me are you able to even name the books in the series that followed “The Road to Serfdom”? Its clear you haven’t read them. Unlike the “Road to Serfdom” they don’t have a comic book version. If you had you would realize that Dr. Hayek was for individual and economic freedom but also saw a role for government in providing regulation and a safety net, as long as it was a safety net and didn’t redistribute wealth.
You don’t think that ObamaCare redistributes wealth? Are you insane?
Being able to name Hayek’s book proves about as much as Matula’s and Gerrib’s googling, which was an epic fail. No wonder Matula’s thinks that such information is valuable.
Also Gerrib mentions social insurance, which is more social security then healthcare. Now Matula’s mentions safety net, which again is social security and not healthcare. But Matula wants to know what Hayek said in his other books, and so from The Constitution of Liberty chapter 19 “Social Security” begins with Hayek quoting The Economist:
“The doctrine of the safety net, to catch those who fall, has been made meaningless by the doctrine of fair shares ..for those of us who are able to stand.”
That’s on social security. Free riding (those of us who are able to stand but choose not too) is a feature of Obamacare as it expands Medicaid coverage to include not just those disabledor in dire need, but also includes those who choose not to do work Americans will not do and lower the available workforce that is actively looking for a job. It’s a good bet Hayek would reject much more strongly about Obamacare than social security because of this feature.
Leland,
You can give them quote after quote to show the spirit of Hayek’s philosophy. What these people do instead is cherry pick quotes in order to make it seem like Hayek agrees with them.
I can find quotes of FDR that would “prove” that he is a Republican, but we all know he was a Statist at heart. I won’t do it however because I would look like a fool.
I agree. The notion that Hayek supports Obamacare is as stupid as MSNBC claiming Orwell supported socialism. FDR as a Republican is easy for these fools, just quote his hawkish statements after Pearl Harbor. They’ll buy it.
Just to clarify and simplify things, who does this description
http://www.imao.us/index.php/2014/05/ok-that-makes-sense-now/
sound more like–Hayek, or Gerrib and Baghdad Jim?
except the 2nd amendment was written AFTER those articles.
Why is that important? My point is that the Founders intentions were well known. There’s no “hand waving”.
The Bill of Rights was proposed after the Constitution was written, as a response to the worries of the Anti-Federalists. They were put into the Constitution to assuage fears of a tyrannical government. Since the 2nd Amendment is part of the first 10 amendments (if my math is correct) then it is logical to conclude that its purpose was to protect the citizenry from a tyrannical government.
Then why does it talk about “a well-regulated militia?” If the purpose was to merely arm citizens, you could drop that entire clause.
Because you don’t understand the meaning of the words “militia” or “regulated” of that time.
I’m more curious to why you are so eager to grow the size and power of the Federal Government. For certain issues (the left in general, not necessarily you), such as sex and abortion, the government needs to keep out. On many other issues, its Statism, Statism, Statism.
As I once heard, Republicans like to interfere in the bedroom, and Democrats want to interfere in the rest of the house (including low flush toilets that don’t work.)
Actually Rand is for statism when it comes to space 🙂 What do you think the ISS, COTS and CCP are all about? NASA planning our commercial space program.
“I’m more curious to why you are so eager to grow the size and power of the Federal Government.”
Note, Jon, that Moby avoided responding to this by saying, “Rand’s a statist too!” This is what these statist schmucks do.
The militia being referred to there is the one “organized, armed and regulated” by Congress.
Oops, forgot to refer to this line.
Those Federalist essays clearly refer to the intentions of the amendment.