An interesting column from Glenn Reynolds, AKA the Instapundit, at the Washington Examiner noting the failure of the regulators in Congress to anticipate the consequences of their health care takeover, in spite of much effort:
…both Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and Securities and Exchange Commission regulations require companies to account for these changes as soon as they learn about them. As the Atlantic’s Megan McArdle wrote:
“What AT&T, Caterpillar, et al did was appropriate. It’s earnings season, and they offered guidance about, um, their earnings. “So once Obamacare passed, massive corporate write-downs were inevitable.
They were also bad publicity for Obamacare, and they seem to have come as an unpleasant shock to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who immediately scheduled congressional hearings for April 21, demanding that the chief executive officers of AT&T, John Deere, and Caterpillar, among others, come and explain themselves.
Obamacare was supposed to provide unicorns and rainbows: How can it possibly be hurting companies and killing jobs? Surely there’s some sort of Republican conspiracy going on here!
More like a confederacy of dunces. Waxman and his colleagues in Congress can’t possibly understand the health care market well enough to fix it. But what’s more striking is that Waxman’s outraged reaction revealed that they don’t even understand their own area of responsibility – regulation — well enough to predict the effect of changes in legislation.
In drafting the Obamacare bill they tried to time things for maximum political advantage, only to be tripped up by the complexities of the regulatory environment they had already created. It’s like a second-order Knowledge Problem.
None of this comes as a surprise to those of us who understand that the health care market in the United States is too large and complex to be “managed” from Washington and should instead be made more free than what it has been in order to give individual health care consumers more options, thus placing downward pressure on prices and so forth – Hayekian Catallaxy in action. (I’ll have to check with HR, but I’m pretty sure I get some sort of a cash bonus for using the term “Hayekian Catallaxy” in a blog post.)
In an interesting riff off of Reynolds’ column, the Blogprof notes that part of the problem is that even in government, we all have to deal with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics:
But the 2nd Law doesn’t end in the physical world. It extends to other aspects of nature. Unless intelligent energy is expended, relationships decay. I’ve lost touch with some of my best friends from high school and before. There was no falling out. At some point, intelligent energy wasn’t expended to maintain those bonds and they naturally decayed. Divorce is more common now than ever before for precisely the same reason. It’s just a natural function for decay to occur. On a societal level, some of the greatest civilizations in human history are all but gone, with only relics remaining. The Roman empire, the Persian empire, the Egyptian empire, more recently the Soviet Union. Just decayed out of existence. Nearly the entirety of human civilization was corrupted beyond redemption before the great flood. In our own country, I don’t think anyone argues that we are not on a path of increasing decay. Intelligent energy isn’t being applied by our leaders in maintaining this country, and it is decaying. Depravity is going mainstream. God is being devalued. Life is being devalued. Christian principles are being devalued. All natural occurrences of a civilization in decline.
Can it be stopped? Slowed down? Reversed? As a matter of fact, it can. But it won’t be easy.
I know that I, for one, often feel a sense of fatigue about the direction of my country – a sense that many of the social and governmental trends that I abhor have been around far longer than I have, have only become more pronounced since I have been aware of them, and have a real feeling of inevitability about them. But we just celebrated Easter, and if Easter teaches us anything it’s that nothing is inevitable. The Apostles took the basic, powerful truth of Christ’s resurrection, and in the face of insurmountable odds began a movement that would utterly change the course of world history. Our task – proclaiming the truth about the inherent value of the human person in the eyes of God and defending the ability of that person to engage freely in economic matters – is almost nothing by comparison. It’s not easy, to be sure, but it’s worth it.
