Liberal failures always trace back to having glossed over the biggest problems, the showstoppers that should kill bad ideas before they get out of committee. Instead, an unfounded trust in the power of technology, the future, or in the sense of being on the cutting edge of everything gets these manic ideas passed and signed.
During the Bush era, I heard plenty of appeals to a futuristic savior as a means for avoiding war:
Dude, it’s 2005. You’re telling me they can’t come up with a better strategy for Iraq than shooting the bad guys some more?
Yes. I was correct; our shiny new 2005 thinking could not halt the advancement of al-Qaeda on its own.
C’mon. It’s 2014. Our cars should be electric.
Yet the Chevy Volt, known to be unaffordable and requiring of a subsidy prior to construction, did not become either economical or desirable in practice. The Tesla, considered a viable product, actually is sustained by subsidy. No, “2014” was not a rational argument for manufacturing electric cars.
Then we have the most damaging current appeal to futurism, an idea which has managed to retain its cutting-edge persona despite being a near-century old:
C’mon. The richest country in the world can get everyone health insurance.
Back in 2008 — and also back during the working years of Adam Smith — rational folks knew the showstopper flaw with such a statement: artificially lowering a price means that someone not party to the transaction has to pay for the alteration. Besides the alteration being immoral and illegal, the price point arrived upon in transactions between Party A and Party B cannot be altered without requiring a Party C to make A or B whole again.
Now, four years into the problem created by the “Cmon, man” crowd, the Obama administration is hysterically begging America’s young to register for Obamacare, the people statistically likely to lose money on the deal. They’re treating it as a messaging problem, or as a “maturity” issue; as anything but the humiliating truth: after thousands of pages written and calculations tortured out by the cleverest, most-credentialed folks in the country, after rewriting the law 35 times after passage, the liberals in charge couldn’t lower the price point between Parties A and B without needing a bystander C to provide glorified charity.
For centuries, we’ve been trying to frame the reality of redistributionism in a language the liberal side can understand; nothing gets through. Maggie Thatcher did a bang-up job — “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money” — but even that elegant gem didn’t take. Can anything ever work? How much simpler can we make this?
Person A wants a good produced by Person B. If the price is too high, Person A cannot afford it. If the price is too low, Person B cannot continue to sell it. If either party is made whole to rectify an inefficient fixed price, that money has to come from a Party C. Person C runs out of money just like Person A or B would have. In a from-scratch socialist society, Party C never exists.
Redistribution has an unsolvable “No C(apital)” problem.
They say that the “bros” are not buying health insurance in numbers needed to sustain the project, and perhaps this can be fixed with marketing. We have consistently pointed out that the young will not purchase enough plans because on average the demographic gets cleaned out on the deal, but we haven’t forced the liberals to answer the bigger questions:
Why did Obamacare need the young? Why did it need a Party C to survive? If Party C is losing money on the deal — as they do by definition, otherwise they would be indistinguishable from Party A — they can’t be the source for long. So why did you proceed with a plan without addressing its built-in death sentence?
Seems too simplistic and past-tense, so the liberals glossed over the only questions that mattered again.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member