The No Knowhow No-No

Townhall.com ^ | November 10, 2013 | Paul Jacob

[Kaslin]

There is no mystery here. We know why the healthcare.gov website has failed, and why the emerging problems inherent in “ObamaCare” are bound to lead to even greater failure.

Hubris. Pride. Incompetence.

The “incompetence” so far shown, and the lies that so often follow incompetence like so many ducklings following a quacking momma duck, both precede and follow from the pride.

What is that pride?

The pride of a “community organizer” who thinks that, because he has a Harvard Law degree, he can run a country. The pride of progressives in general, who think that going to college gives them all the information they need — and all the skills required — to set up vast business systems through thousands of pages of law and tens of thousands of regulations written in the capital.

Without skin in the game, they lack that ultimate check of the marketplace, the paying for their own mistakes. Perhaps that is why they don’t realize that much of economic life runs on information not found in textbooks or journal articles.

The knowledge required to succeed in a marketplace is knowledge of place and time and value. And alternates. Obscure costs. Things that cannot be simply regurgitated onto a chalkboard or placed into an equation.

Thus, at least half of the economics departments in the country don’t do much to dissuade the pride, the astounding hubris. They stoke it. Pretending that their models — whether arrayed on spreadsheets or entered vast databases or special computer programs, whether written in symbolic logic or managed in the multiple regressions of a statistical study — match reality is their particular delusion. And they end up feeding, not checking, the delusion of progressives, the bulk of whom know nothing of economics, even after several courses.

And so progressives continue to “criticize” business without understanding profit and loss; “regulate” business by mandating high-cost and irrelevant reporting systems; and tax the heck out of those who have succeeded, even as they themselves fail to understand what makes for success.

So of course progressives’ efforts to control the medical insurance industry, and “fix” our admittedly haywire medical-industrial complex, have spun out of control, and put in place even more haywire systems.

They don’t know what they are doing.

Why?

They don’t understand how businesses really work, and why government regulation and market controls backfire.

There’s a vast literature explaining all this. But you won’t see that vast literature of law and economics, property rights economics, etc., etc., cited on the major networks — including Fox. Because media people, like lawyers, tend to be under-educated where education would really count. It’s possible to watch five talking heads argue about important matters and not have one of them ever mention the important principles underlying the contentious matters they discuss.

And the progressives yammer blithely on. Their pride in their credentials, in their intentions, in their ideas, shows through. And that plays well on TV, even better than it did in the papers, when newspapers meant something.

But it doesn’t give them what they want: ability. Set up health care “markets”? Yeah, that’ll work.

For a while, maybe.

The mortgage aftermarkets invented by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac worked, too. For a while. But it was those government-created markets that imploded.

In the old days, your local bank held your mortgage. But economists (and other critics) thought that local mortgage markets were examples of “market failure.” Why not create a large aftermarket of securities? This would free up banks to . . .

Oh, let’s not even finish that thought. The hubris of technical economists, like the hubris of pols and wonks and bureaucrats who call themselves “liberal-progressives” or worse, is such that they think the tacit knowledge that markets rely upon is somehow defective for being both “local” and “hard to articulate.” (The two parts of “tacit” they don’t understand.) It's not just that they confuse the "knowing that" kind of knowledge learnt at college, and the "knowing how" kind of knowledge that comes from participation in a complex system like a real, live market. It gets even worse. There are perfectly smart people who somehow think it’s wrong for lenders to discriminate between people with sound financial practices and less sound finances. So “of course” government should step in and create something wholly new! What could go wrong?

I mean, besides “everything”?

Same with medical insurance. This is an industry utterly perverted by weird tax law and an even stranger history of regulation, including multiple mandates. In many states, ObamaCare’s “innovation” of requiring even old men to be placed in the same risk pool for pregnancy and natal care as young, fertile women is nothing new. The Left Coast states long ago forbade “discrimination” in price between men and fertile women. For medical insurance.

The consequences of this? Information ceases to be relevant. The very nature of insurance, which depends on actuarial risk, has been corrupted for decades. And now progressives want to make the corruption equal across all states. For “equality’s” sake, I guess.

But whatever reason they may give, the basic truth remains: They are the enemies of the information that makes a free society work.

And so they are now stumbling upon the creation of new, state-based “marketplaces.” We shouldn’t be shocked to find people with almost no market experience — that is, no real-world producer experience, botching up the job of concocting new markets . . . markets and services based on heavily regulated standards that reek of “we know best.”

But they don’t know squat. Every assertion of competence is a pretense of knowledge — the most relevant forms of which we are catching them in the very act of repressing.

ObamaCare will not end well for us, unless it ends. Period.

[kitkat]

BUMP

[SAMWolf]

Rodney Dangerfield's First Economics Class

[Flintlock]

naaaaaaaaaaaaaah... My $.02.

Right—these guys ain’t stupid.
So, what’s the deal with the Obamacare/etc. mess?

I think they know PRECISELY what they are doing to us. The systems are designed to FAIL, not succeed. The Medical stuff is intended to produce a “ single payer” in the end game as all other options will be gone.
The “regulation regime” is designed to slowly but effectively put every business OUT of business; see increased minimum wages, obamacare costs, coal industry regs, no pipline, other regulation out the wazoo...............

No—they are not stupid. We are.

[P.O.E.]

Economist F.A. Hayek called it the “Fatal Conceit”

[BenLurkin]

bttt

[Kid Shelleen]

>> The systems are designed to FAIL, not succeed <<

Obama's Great Leap forward is nothing more than a power grab through the redistribution of essential services.

[FatherofFive]

NO source - just came through a stray email--

The percentage of each past president's cabinet who had worked in the private business sector prior to their appointment to the cabinet.....

You know what the private business sector is. A real-life business, not a Government job. Here are the percentages:

T. Roosevelt................... 38%
Taft.................................40%
Wilson .......................... 52%
Harding.......................... 49%
Coolidge........................ 48%
Hoover ..........................42%
F. Roosevelt................... 50%
Truman...........................50%
Eisenhower.................... 57%
Kennedy......................... 30%
Johnson..........................47%
Nixon..............................53%
Ford................................42%
Carter.............................32%
Reagan...........................56%
GH Bush.........................51%
Clinton .........................39%
GW Bush........................55%
Obama............................. 8%

This helps to explain the incompetence of this administration: only 8% of them have ever worked in private business!

That's right! Only eight percent -- the least, by far, of the last 19 presidents! And these people are trying to tell our big Corporations how to run their business?

How can the president of a major nation and society, the one with the most successful economic system in world history, stand and talk about business when he's never worked for one? Or about jobs when he has never really had one? And when it's the same for 92% of his senior staff and closest advisers?

They've spent most of their time in academia, Government and/or non-profit jobs or as "community organizers." They should have been in an employment line.

[AmusedBystander]

Democrats have gone from JFK’s rising tide to lift all boats to Obama’s redistribution to the lowest common denominator. This will not end well.

[Two Kids' Dad]

Most democrats these days would be appalled by JFK (except for his rampant womanizing) and call him a right-wing kook for saying “Ask not what your country can do for you...”

They’d consider him cold and cruel and heartless for expecting the citizenry to step up and work to improve this nation.

[RipSawyer]

Most of us know that in a survival situation of the real SHTF type one redneck auto mechanic or construction worker/hunter-fisherman type would be of more value than all the Obama hangers on that a freight train could haul. In fact the more of those that show up the less they are worth in any situation involving dealing with the real world. One is too many and a million are not enough if you are trying to accomplish something worthwhile.

[RipSawyer]

You are absolutely right, JFK would be far to the right of many if not most current Republicans.

[spokeshave]

I think they know PRECISELY what they are doing to us. The systems are designed to FAIL, not succeed

The problem for the dims is that it failed too fast...in hours not months.

Just wait till their software starts spitting out prescriptions....(wrong drug / dose / patient)....same for doctors instructions....I see not only amputations of the wrong limb....but the wrong limb on the wrong patient.

Try these examples from the UK socialized single player medical system:

and don't expect quick response for a broken arm:

And so you have an acute appendix....?

Mark Wattson, 35, from Swindon may have been the victim of botched surgery after he had to have his appendix removed twice

To his shock, surgeons from the same team told him that not only was his appendix still inside him, but it had ruptured - a potentially fatal complication.

In a second operation it was finally removed, leaving Mr Wattson fearing another organ might have been taken out during the first procedure.

The blunder has left Mr Wattson jobless, as bosses at the shop where he worked did not believe his story and sacked him.

Mr Wattson told of the moment he realised there had been a serious mistake.

'I was lying on a stretcher in terrible pain and a doctor came up to me and said that my appendix had burst,' he said.

'I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I told these people I had my appendix out just four weeks earlier but there it was on the scanner screen for all to see.

'I thought, "What the hell did they slice me open for in the first place?"

'I feel that if the surgery had been done correctly in the first place I wouldn't be in the mess I am today. I'm disgusted by the whole experience.'

Mr Wattson first went under the knife on July 7 after experiencing severe abdominal pain for several weeks. He was discharged but exactly a month later he had to dial 999 after collapsing in agony. Mr Wattson

Mr Wattson was readmitted to the Great Western Hospital in Swindon after his appendix ruptured.

Nurse will see you now

Sit back and enjoy your Obamacare.