Politico reports that Democrats
in Maryland are at odds with one another over the slip shod rollout of
Obamacare in the state.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Doug Gansler wonders
aloud why a state that has, in his estimation, “literally the smartest people
in the country” is having such problems getting ACA enrollment right.
Here is what Gansler doesn’t get. It doesn’t matter how many smart people there
are in Maryland. Any centrally market
disruption is bound to fail. No one can
doubt that there were plenty of smart people in Soviet Union or in the entire
Eastern Block, yet conditions were miserable, there was no prosperity.
However, just beyond the Wall, West Germany and
Western Europe experience a spectacular post World War II recovery.
Ditto with the PRC.
Life there was fairly primitive, while free Hong Kong was setting the
business world on fire.
Centrally planned systems are doomed to failure. That’s because no individual or group of individuals
can ever possess the knowledge that resides with thousands or millions of
freely acting producers, consumers and middlemen. F. A. Hayek demonstrates that order in a
society emerges spontaneously from countless numbers of people making even more
countless decisions based upon their estimate of what best suites their particular
needs. Those decisions that are
successful get repeated and emulated while those that fail are discarded. This
how a healthy society evolves adapts and grows without guidance from some all
powerful planner.
The idea that one
man or some central committee can know what is best for each every person in
society is what Hayek calls the “conceit
of knowledge” or The
Fatal Conceit.
So, back to Obamacare and back to Maryland. The Dems can argue all that they want who is
to blame for the ACA’s flubbed execution and who is most competent to handle
it. It is a losing proposition from the
get-go no matter who is in charge because it is impossible for a handful of
politicians and technocrats to guess what is most right and satisfactory for
each and every citizen. The longer that
is takes them to realize this, the crabbier everyone in Maryland will be.
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"Half the people are stoned and the other half are waiting for the next election.
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon
Half the people are drowned and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction."
- Paul Simon
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