El "Obamacare" visto por el Ludwig von Mises Institute

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Algunos extractos:

1. "The prospect and reality of Obamacare have woken up many people to the need to stop the socialization of medical care in America. It will produce here what it has produced everywhere: stagnation, overutilization, rationing, and the sacrifice of individual well-being in the name of collective justice.

This is the result not only of every experiment in socialized medicine but of every experiment in socialism generally. The reasons were spelled out by Mises in 1922. He explained that, without property and market prices, economic rationality disappears. The result is unworkable, chaotic, and impoverishing."

2. "In all the debate over this legislation, this longer-term perspective is being lost. We need to grasp the political dynamic under which this legislation is being passed. It seeks to address genuine problems that were generated by the present system, which mixed private enterprise with a ghastly regulatory apparatus of government subsidies, licenses and controls, patents and monopolies, consumption controls, outright welfare, and fascistic impositions on every sector.

The current system cries out for fixing. And how does the state propose to fix it? Never through more freedom, never by rolling back the real problem. Instead, it proposes more power. This has been the systematic trajectory during every presidential administration for many decades."

3. "One of the worst problems concerns the wedge that the state drove between the payer and the healthcare provider. Businesses became the wedge. When? During World War II wage controls. Businesses scrambled to find ways to pay their employees without running afoul of the law. They turned to providing medical care. This is no different from how banks offered toasters to depositors when interest rates were controlled in the 1970s. It is the market desperately trying to get around a problem created by the state. But once this happens, if the controls are not repealed, the escape hatch becomes the norm. And this is precisely what happened."

4. "There is another factor that hardly anyone mentions. How is all of this free government medical service going to be paid for? If the government were going to tax everyone, it could never work. The citizens wouldn't stand for it over the long term. The national debt is already beyond belief. Where are the resources to pay for this glorious utopia of perfect health equality?

It seems like an inauspicious place to look, but we must look to the marble palace on Constitution Avenue: the Federal Reserve. Here is the institution that runs the moneymaking machines that guarantee all the debt and that will create the phony money to pay for these insane dreams of universal happiness. Without the Fed, I can promise you, no one in Washington would be in a position to promise such absurdities.

If you think about it, then, the real problem is not that politicians dream impossible dreams. They've been doing that for a hundred years, a thousand years, and even back to the ancient world. The real problem is structural and institutional: it is the central bank that leads politicians to imagine that their visions can be achieved. It is the central bank that unhinges them — at our expense."

5. "Another book we need to reread is by Henry Hazlitt. It is called Time Will Run Back. It tells the story of a despot who inherits a decrepit, burned out, totalitarian society, and he is inspired to rethink the logic of the system. With the aid of some reading, he and his aides systematically unravel the interventions. The same logic that led the state to ramp up its control led it to retreat and allowed freedom to flower.

I believe this is in our future. But we can't have that future without the right intellectual resources. This is why I'm so grateful to the Mises Institute, the source for nearly every important book on socialism, regulation, central banking, and intervention. The Mises Institute is the intellectual source for an enlightened future."