Central Planning and Health Care "Reform"

The current rush to nationalize heath care is lubricated with the rhetoric of "basic human rights" and other attempts to use moral superiority as a way to stifle the opposition.  But such simplistic appeals to "fairness" and "social justice" completely miss the larger issue, and distract from the larger issue at hand, which is the fundamental founding concept of individual liberty under limited government vs. centralized planning of individual lives under unlimited government.

(This is an excerpt from the post; to read the rest of it, click on the 'read more' link just below.)


The current rush to nationalize heath care is lubricated with the rhetoric of "basic human rights" and other attempts to use moral superiority as a way to stifle the opposition.  But such simplistic appeals to "fairness" and "social justice" completely miss the larger issue, and distract from the larger issue at hand, which is the fundamental founding concept of individual liberty under limited government vs. centralized planning of individual lives under unlimited government.

Yesterday's post on LD 1365 discusses the latest attempt by big government zealots in the Maine legislature to advance centralized planning, with attendant loss of liberty, to perhaps the greatest degree ever proposed in our history.

I thought I'd pass along a pithy little quote on the subject that I just came across.  I found it after reading an article called "The Relentless Misery of 1.6 Gallons," which uses low flow toilets as an example of the unintended consequences of centralized government planning, especially when implemented by largely clueless bureaucrats off on a crusade.  It was written by a fellow at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, and you can find it http://mises.org/daily/3997.

It references a book by von Mises from decades ago called "Planned Chaos."  It's only 100 pages and looks interesting; I may have to track it down.

The point of this post, though, is to pass along that pithy quote, which is the book description given on an ordering page.  It concisely articulates the dangers of centralized planning in the proper historical context.

The title ("Planned Chaos) comes from Mises's description of the reality of central planning and socialism, whether of the national variety (Nazism) or the international variety (communism). Rather than create an orderly society, the attempt to central plan has precisely the opposite effect. By short-circuiting the price mechanism and forcing people into economic lives contrary to their own choosing, central planning destroys the capital base and creates economic randomness that eventually ends in killing prosperity.

A very strong argument could be made that government policy in Maine has been destroying the capital base and killing prosperity for decades.

Want some evidence?  Just look at the statistics on personal income, jobs, public sector vs. private sector income, and other measures of economic well being.  While it's fair to suggest that the national recession of recent months has exacerbated things, anyone with a clear view of the facts knows that Maine's budget, revenue, and jobs crisis has been in the making for a very long time.  The recession simply exposed it more quickly than otherwise might have been the case.

Instead of the more incremental decline we had been experiencing, which became almost "normal," we now find ourselves in the midst of a quantum decline.

Thank goodness we have the likes of Charlie Priest to jump in at the right moment with a grand scale plan to pour more sugar into the gas tank of our coughing and sputtering economic engine.

This is the danger of a society that has transitioned from "Give me liberty or give me death" to "Give me liberty" to "Gimme."  Charlie's just "riding the horse in the direction it's going," I suppose.

Or is it the other way around?