General Motors: Your Automotive Public Option
Ayn Rand couldn't have imagined it any better: a government with a majority ownership stake in a car maker lobbing sound bites that damage the "competition."
While it's not Ray LaHood's fault that the U.S. government got into the car business, his comments suggesting that Toyota drivers should stop driving their cars did a nice job of underscoring the folly of this type of government intervention.
Now, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that congressional investigators are questioning Toyota's fix to their safety problem. Just imagine the board of Pepsi presiding over hearings to decide if Coke is really "it."
Obviously, the government should have the authority to ensure that vehicles sold in the U.S. are safe to drive. What it should not have is the authority to buy car companies.
All of this really shines a bright light on the insanity of the health care "public option" that congressional democrats and others on the left want so badly. It is crystal clear to me that the same conflicts of interest would arise on a regular basis. The idea that it would "increase competition" and "keep the insurance companies honest" is laughable. Our health care system needs fixing, but the answer is a market-based solution, not public health care. This piece by John Stossel still holds up very nicely on the topic.
It's pretty simple. The government should stay out of business, out of the way of business and out of my business.
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2 comments:
I think the Obama Administration was trying to keep us out of a Great Depression . . . and it worked.
Many people seem to have already forgotten how close we were to the tipping point. Unemployment creates profound economic ripples. Consider the multiplier effect and sudden economic shock from losing all those GM jobs, on top of the frozen credit markets of the time.
I'd be surprised if you could name a single person in gov't who really wanted public ownership of GM. But so far it (and the Keynesian stimulus) are proving to have been the best choice among a very poor set of options.
The economy is far from recovered, but it is clearly recovering.
The "hands-off" approach you advocate is what brought us so close to economic collapse. Obama, like Roosevelt before him, may have saved capitalism from its own excesses.
As for the public option you fear, it seems to be working quite nicely among our allies. The cost of health care in every other advanced nation is far lower than in the United States, whether measured in total dollars spent, as a percentage of the economy, or on a per capita basis. And the extra cost of the current US system does not yield superior results in common outcome or mortality basis quality measures.
In the past five years most independent studies of the politically maligned Canadian system, for example, have found outcomes are as good as the US (and it produces better outcomes for some conditions) while costing 47% less per person.
The US system is still often superior when it comes to new technology and innovative procedures, but these generally are very expensive and serve only a small segment of the population who have access. For cumulative healthcare outcome bang for the buck, the US lags far behind . . . and this is hurting the global competitiveness of our businesses.
The Obama plan relies more on free market mechanisms than Nixon’s healthcare proposal in the 1970s.
So I ask you: are you an ideologue or a pragmatist?
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