Rush's color commentary on Obama's health care address: "It's like being in the Nuremberg trials"
March 03, 2010 3:12 pm ET
From the March 3 edition of Premiere Radio Networks' The Rush Limbaugh Show:
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I can't tell if he's being sarcastic and "funny" or if he's serious.
(be advised, if you Google "high hitler" most results will be BitTorrent downloads)
Have you ever seen Rush and Hermann Goering together in the same room? Didn't think so.
Made me laugh.
[apologies to Best Brains and the other MiSTies...]
What is competition? Let's start with what it is not. As the two great economists of the 20th century, Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, explained, competition is valuable not primarily as a contest among producers of known goods and services using known methods of production and business practice. Rather, to use Hayek's phrase, competition is a discovery procedure. (Perhaps process is the better word.) What it does is teach us things we didn't know before the competition took place and might not learn otherwise. What kind of things? Things such as: which hitherto unknown products best serve consumers' interests as they see them, at what price, and through which low-cost methods. Such things can't be known in advance; computers can't give us the answer after data entry. The relevant "data" do not exist as such! The information is decentralized and much of it, such as nuanced consumer preferences, is rarely even articulated. Rather, it is revealed, or, better yet, it is created as producers and consumers go about their business, improvising on the spot and facing unanticipated alternatives in their efforts to improve their conditions. The state lacks these mechanisms to sort and can never duplicate this dynamic process. The information certainly is not available to a bureaucracy or panel of "experts."
Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan has discussed this last point:
Individuals do not act so as to maximize utilities in independently existing functions. They confront genuine choices, and the sequence of decisions taken may be conceptualized, ex post [ after the choices], in terms of "as if" functions that are maximized. But these "as if" functions are, themselves, generated in the choosing process, not separately from such processes. If viewed in this perspective, there is no means by which even the most idealized omniscient designer could duplicate the results of voluntary interchange. The potential participants do not know until they enter the process what their own choices will be....
So: how can central planners decide value for even 1 person much less millions? They can't--at least not with good results.
To sum up briefly, consumers, as much as producers, are entrepreneurs.
The value of this discovery process should be clear for any good or service, but so much more so for medical services, where the potential variation in individual needs and preferences is virtually infinite!
The public option shows no understanding of competition as a discovery process. Obama and his experts claimed already to know what insurance products should be offered and what business practices should be used. The leading bills permitted no variation--that is--no competition. The free market's entrepreneurial trial and error, in which firms offer competitive products and consumers render verdicts, would be outlawed. (It isn't as if we have a free market now anyway; it is a state managed care system that is already 1 part socialism, 1 part corporatism, and 1 part free market. I am always surprised when any efficiency comes out of this current structure.)
To understand this, all one has to do is read the bills.( I realize this is no easy task given that they are intentionally made difficult to understand.) There one would have seen virtually every detail of the "qualified" health-insurance plans we will be mandated to buy--from what services must be covered to how prices are to be structured. Details not specified in the legislation were left to the secretary of Heath and Human Services or other officials and commissions. The powers left undefined are more threatening than those that are defined.
Now a question: Is being forced to "choose" among an "array" of virtually identical health plans offered by fully regulated companies, operating under a rigid structure designed by our glorious overlords, really worthy of being called competition and choice? Those things aren't possible under such a structure; they're barely even possible now in some areas under the current socialist/corporatist structure.
Instead of competition the bills will create a newer, bigger insurance cartel, directed form Washington. This new structure will be nothing more than a half-way house for the statists's end goal anyway. The end goal is a single-payer system that will create a monopoly position in health care for the central government. This is the central government's competition that they have in store for us.
Given this comprehensive regulation--which the insurance companies (at least the large ones) embraced in return for a guarantee of customers--it really doesn't matter whether the government offered its own plan through a so-called public option. What is revealing about the public option, however, is the attitude that public officials have toward profit. The statists emphasize that the public option will not be motivated by profit, showing still further their ignorance of the nature of competition. In fact profit doesn't merely reward past business success. As the essential element of the competitive discovery process, profit signals to entrepreneurs where consumers want scarce resources (that have alternative uses) invested in the future; losses do the opposite. Profits (so long as they are attained by competition and not government grant, favor, or subsidy) are crucial for efficiency and the wealth creation process. An absence of freely floating prices and a profit/loss test is the source of the abysmally low standards of living in communist countries.
So: How exactly would the public option know whether it was being responsive to consumers? That's a rhetorically silly question. It wouldn't exist to serve the consumers but to dictate to them. Like Fannie Mae, the public option would have an implicit government guarantee along with the ability to set prices. When it under-reimbursed doctors and hospitals, they would shift the costs, as they do now under Medicare, to private policy holders, making private plans more expensive than the public option. This is the intent. As "uncompetitive" private companies left the market, only the public option would remain. Single-payer "insurance" would be here. If it seriously tried to reduce medical costs and avoid bankruptcy the central government's system would inevitably lead to shortages,lines, and rationing. There is no other way under this proposed new system.
Little of merit, anyway>