In health care communism news today, Congressman Dennis Kucinich wants to completely overhaul health care in the United States. And by “completely overhaul,” I really mean “expropriate.” He first creates a straw-man of a two-tiered system, clothed in a rights-based argument:
“Is health care a right or is it a privilege?” he said. “If it’s a right then it’s appropriate for the government to have a role. If it’s a privilege, then we’re left to the predations of the market – if you can’t pay for it, you’re out of luck.”
If health care is a “right” then one ought to be able to deduce it from natural rights. I submit that you cannot, and therefore, it is not. But let’s play the game: certainly if health care is a “right”, then so is “food,” without which, we wouldn’t be worrying about health care — because we’d all starve to death. But the “predations of the market” leave practically nobody in developed nations hungry. As for the lesser-developed countries, examine the agricultural politics of the developed countries, and you’ll find your hobgoblin. Kucinich falls into the trap of assuming that the system we’ve got, which is heavily bureaucratized, is anything close to resembling a free market in health care. It is not — from top to bottom, it is managed by bureaucrats and rent-seeking agencies like the AMA and big pharma; protected by licensure laws, lengthy approval processes, subtleties in the tax codes, etc. The system we have is currently broken, to be sure, but the solution is not “more system,” where every employee in the industry becomes a de facto public servant, and every citizen in the realm becomes that much further dependent upon the Government.
Left to his own devices, Kucinich would transform the bastardized system that we have at present, into a completely government run bureaucracy:
“Where there is a conversion of a for-profit institution to not-for-profit, there would be a market-value compensation,” he said. “You’re not going to have an expropriation here of resources.” He didn’t say how much that would cost, but said it would be funded with Treasury bonds [and higher taxes].
Ahh, command and control. These are the people who bring you the DMV. Public schools. FEMA. Crop subsidies. Inflation. And Kucinich wants them to take over the health care market. Ludwig von Mises long ago demonstrated the superiority of markets in the allocation of scarce goods and resources (namely: all of them) to a command and control “economy.” Absent market prices and signals, there is simply no way for a bureaucrat — benevolent or otherwise — to “play market.” Even if his allocations are “right,” there are no means by which the correctness thereof can be determined. Either goods, services, and resources when scarce will be rationed by the market via the price mechanism, or they’ll be rationed by bureaucracy and shortages. There is no third solution.
Make no mistakes here – where a transaction is not voluntarily agreed upon, there is no such thing as “market-value compensation.” There is only the full force of law backed by government guns. Kucinich’s idea, contrary to his misstatement, is nothing short of wholesale expropriation with a cherry on top.
