American Collectivism: A Record of Failure

[45nut]

Article here

American Collectivism: A Record of Failure

By Ralph R. Reiland on 3.2.10 @ 6:07AM

The hype is always better than the real thing.

Boston's Big Dig sounded like a half-decent project in the beginning. Approved in 1982 with a price tag $2.6 billion, it was completed, however, more or less, in 2005 at a price of $22 billion.

"More or less" because concrete panels loosened and crashed from the ceiling of a connector tunnel in 2006, the first full year of operation, killing 38-year-old car passenger Milena Del Valle, a mother of three. The family was awarded $28 million.

Medicare, similarly, was optimistically projected in 1967 to have an annual price tag of $12 billion by 1990. The actual 1990 cost? $98 billion.

Just the parking lot at the Kennedy Center (not the center itself or its whole shebang of theaters, lounges, offices, restaurants, etc.) had a cost estimate in 1998 of $28 million, reports Reason magazine in its March 2010 issue. The actual cost of the parking lot, completed in 2003? $88 million.

These estimates and actual costs aren't even close, with final prices running eight and ten times off. But it works, just like fishing -- camouflage the hooks with the right feathers and bangles and a striped bass thinks he's at the Ole Minnie Buffet.

Now we're getting the biggest hype yet, the idea that Obama and his various czarinas and central planners have the expertise to re-work a sixth of the U.S. economy so that we'll somehow end up with universal health coverage, 30 million more people insured, and all done in a way that produces lower costs and higher quality while not adding a dime to the federal deficit.

It's like everyone gets a shiny new Mercedes and somehow, simultaneously, the sticker price goes down, the quality goes up, and there's no red ink.

Plus they're saying that billions can be cut from Medicare without cutting anything that seniors are getting from Medicare.

I get the feeling that we haven't learned much from our previous grand experiments. The list of failures is long.

During World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt distorted the free market by implementing wage and price controls in order to prevent "profiteering" and fight inflation. Employers, in order to attract labor, switched from giving raises to providing health insurance.

Today, we're paying a high price in the global arena for that government-created market distortion that produced the ongoing employer-based health system that consistently harms the ability of U.S. firms to compete against companies from countries that spread the costs of healthcare more broadly.

General Motors reports that healthcare costs add between $1,500 and $2,000 to the sticker price of every vehicle it makes. Bottom line, America's employer-based healthcare is selling Hondas and killing Detroit.

On January 8, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson delivered his first State of the Union address, calling for an "all-out war on human poverty," with special focus on black poverty and inner city revitalization. The following year, Sen. Daniel Moynihan sounded the alarm about the breakdown of the black family in his book The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. At the time, 1965, the black illegitimacy rate was 26 percent.

Today, $10 trillion later in federal spending on anti-poverty programs, the illegitimacy rate among blacks is 70 percent.

Most recently, seeking universal and equitable housing, the Carter and Clinton administrations passed legislation, with well-intended consequences, of course, that forced banks to make loans in lower income areas and to unqualified borrowers. The result was a massive expansion of high-risk subprime loans, a real estate bubble, a worldwide distribution of toxic assets, and the subsequent housing crash, financial panic and bank collapses.

And now, next up on the politicians' fix-it list -- healthcare. Just say No.

[ponycar17]

Absolutely what I keep harping on!.... Government controls in the '40s caused the health care problems of today through the need of companies to hire the best people in an environment where they couldn't increase pay. So, they provided health insurance as a form of compensation. Now days, the health insurance companies negotiate lavish discounts for those covered under their plans and leave the non insured to foot the bill. Private insurance corporations have masked the real cost of services to the average health services customer. As a result, prices have crept up as consumers' demand for services continually increases. Naturally, if a person sees the real costs they will often ride out that cold rather than paying $200 for the doctor's visit and antibiotics. We want everything NOW and EASY, and health insurance has fed that desire. The problem won't be fixed by universal coverage either, as the government will allow the prices to skyrocket just as the private insurers do but on a larger scale. The problem isn't that some people don't have health insurance. The problem is that most people do.

We do need catastrophic coverage to protect us against major illness. We don't need coverage for a dang cold. Put the burden back into the lap of the consumer and see how demand will fall, along with prices.

The housing crisis was caused by government distorting the risk that banks take in providing loans. After being told that they would have to lend to individuals who could not repay the financial institutions created mortgage-derived securities that theoretically could dilute the risk and provide a huge source of income. When the bubble burst happened, the government was standing there with a needle suspiciously in hand.

It really starts to appear as if these things are caused intentionally. Usurping economic realities ALWAYS gets us into trouble, and the government does it all the time while telling us that they're trying to provide more opportunity for the disadvantaged. No, they're screwing us, pure and simple...

[bcj1755]

Ponycar,

There you go making sense and telling facts again. Are you trying to make some poor liberal's head explode?