Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Did Rand Get Obama Right?

Not Rand Paul, Ayn Rand.

The current Obamacare mess reminds me of part of Rand's picture of the bad guys in her novels—that they thought that if only they gave sufficiently forceful orders, what they commanded would have to happen, that objective reality was subject to human will. The Obamacare exchanges had to work, Obama told his people to make them work, so it would happen. They didn't work. Obama ordered his people to fix them by the end of November, so that will happen.

My guess is that it won't. 

More important, whether the exchange works or not, I don't think it is possible for the program to work in the way Obama and his supporters predicted, to make better insurance available at lower cost to more people. If I am correct, there are two possible explanations for how the program got passed. 

One is that Obama and his supporters were engaged in a deliberate fraud along lines such as those I described (and rejected) in my previous post. The other is that Rand had it right, that they believed that if only they had sufficient will reality would bend and things would turn out the way they wanted, that all arguments to the contrary were produced by people with either bad motives or insufficient determination. 

What I gather that Thomas Sowell, in a book I haven't read but have read about, referred to as the unconstrained vision.

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