Francis Cianfrocca writes in the New Ledger that the passage of Obamacare is a fundamental shift away from American principles:
I’ve always felt that America is the one place where a small number of oligarchs can’t control society, because of the powerful buffer created by popular sovereignty. Government can’t act arbitrarily as long as they feel constrained to act as the people wish. Tonight, a totally different governing philosophy, and one new to Americans, had its first major success: “We’ll give you what WE want, not what YOU want.”
In a way, this is a perfectly natural extension of the progressive impulse which seeks to establish an ordered society by applying rational principles. Throughout the Twentieth century, this idea has maintained an uneasy truce with a different and considerably older one: Adam Smith’s idea that a society of well-intentioned people pursuing their own interests spontaneously produces satisfactory outcomes.
In short, the tension is between planning society, and allowing it to muddle through. It’s been said by many that the Reagan presidency established a golden age of muddling through (or in other words, of relative freedom in the social and the economic spheres). It’s also been said that the financial crisis proved the inadequacy of letting society more or less run itself. We’ve entered a golden age of planning, in no small part as a reaction to the market failures of 2007-08.
Let me tell you what the great risk of this is. We’ve been letting 300 million people freely pursue their own interests, make their own investments and their own decisions about life, and letting other people form businesses to serve those freely-expressed wants and needs. Along the way, everyone makes mistakes. Some are bigger than others, and some produce societal injustices that can and should be ameliorated by government.
But the mistakes made by a free society generally tend to be recognized and corrected rapidly, and in any case they’re buffered by the rest of society.
When we place our faith rather in the ability of experts to plan and control our society and economy according to rational principles, their inevitable mistakes are nearly impossible to correct. That’s because they’re applied broadly across the whole of society. A poorly-chosen investment can only do so much damage. Its scope is limited after all by the size of its capital input. But a bad government policy faces no natural limits, so it can do damage to everyone’s life.
{ 2 trackbacks }