Few here have had exposure to the reasons why the Soviets collapsed, starting with the dimwits who report the "news"
A few weeks ago the main story featured on my hospital's homepage was a university-wide lecture called "A Roadmap to Creating a Real Healthcare System." I had to laugh — central planning and the economics of bureaucracy are always amusing.
Over the years of my medical training I have become accustomed to this sort of hubris displayed by the head of some department or, better yet, a renowned "expert" in the field of health policy. The theme is always the same; America's healthcare system is broken due to market failure that was inevitably the result of waste, fraud, abuse, profit seeking, medical innovation, etc. The solutions are always predictable; government must apply more coercion here, a little price fixing there, subsidize this better, restrict that more, and, well, you get the picture.
It brings to mind the classic quotation from Friedrich Hölderlin: "What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven."
There are a multitude of reasons why government planning always fails. These reasons include, but are not limited to, the denial of consumer sovereignty, the ineptitude of central planners and their inability to account for the actions of millions of individuals living in different situations and responding to different incentives, and the willingness of policymakers to sacrifice honesty and prudence for expedience and power.
The Road to Serfdom
Hayek's The Road to Serfdom provided my introduction to the Austrian School and I have since tried to immerse myself in his work as much as possible — if only our supposed "experts" would do the same. Not that this is likely to occur; it is not in the best interest of our experts to learn how free markets work and government-planned institutions fail, unless they want to put themselves out of a job.
In Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty, he warned, "The institutional expert … is unhesitatingly in favor of the institutions on which he is expert." After all, it would hardly be worth the time and energy of one who is not in favor of the institution to become an "expert." Hence, "the views of anybody who is not prepared to accept the principles of the existing institution are not likely to be taken seriously and will carry no weight in the discussions determining current policy."
continues at mises.org |
