The Disaster That Is Obamacare

Obamacare is not a disaster because a critical web site doesn’t work. That operational failure is a good thing, assuming that people learn from it the larger lessons that government can’t do anything right and that they should reject government control in the health industries and by extension all other industries too. If this failure causes a higher and permanent degree of discontent with government, then it is a good thing.

Obamacare is a disaster insofar as the ideas used to justify it have been or are spread through America and are accepted. The real and ongoing disaster of Obamacare is its acceptance as a good thing, apart from the operational issues it has experienced.

Obamacare is premised on the centralization and monopolization of health care via legislation, the very opposite of free markets. Its passage, however engineered, and Supreme Court endorsement, however slim, signal a government that believes, contrary to ample theory and experience in other nations, that the exercise of centralized and uncompetitive government power is superior to the exercise of decentralized people power operating through free markets competitively. Obamacare’s passage was the triumph of irrational power over the rationality of markets operating through prices and private decisions over property and resources. If Obamacare should be patched up and remain, that would signal the continuing and necessary irrationality that always accompanies legislative dominance.

Obamacare appealed to many supporters because of their vain hopes of providing health care for all on some sort of equal access to health care. These people are willing to use force to achieve their objective. They have not learned the lesson that means become ends. Emma Goldman who went to Russia in the 1920s and saw what government force meant there explained clearly in her books that means (government coercion) become ends (power exercised for the sake of power or for ends like wars). Many liberals and progressives of today haven’t learned the lesson she taught. Consequently, many find themselves supporting government power per se, not only for Obamacare but for the empire’s wars.

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10:44 am on November 23, 2013