What Is The "Plan" To Replace Obamacare?

The official prediction here is that Obamacare will inevitably fail because it is based on the flawed premise of attempting to compel people to behave contrary to their own economic self-interest.  Of course, what we don't know is whether Obamacare will fail quickly or slowly.  Medicare and Medicaid are failing slowly, and the only respect in which they ask people to behave against their own economic interest is by paying taxes.  By contrast Obamacare asks people to go through enormous effort to purchase a hugely complicated product often priced at double or triple fair value.  There are lots of ways for a citizen to take evasive action.  So I'm predicting much quicker failure.  In any event, it's not too early to start asking the next relevant question, namely, what next? 

A frequent talking point of the Obama house media is that the opponents of Obamacare "have no plan" for what to replace it with.  For example, from Think Progress on June 29 we have:

More than two years after Obamacare passed, a longtime Republican congressman admits that his party has “no” plan to replace it if they succeed in getting rid of the landmark health law.

Or this from Talking Points Memo on November 18:

More than four years after initiating an all-out war to block -- and then destroy -- what they derisively labeled "Obamacare," Republican leaders remain at a loss on how they'd replace the law if their dream of repealing it should ever come true.

The implicit idea here is that it is the legitimate, and indeed necessary, function of the federal government to solve all human problems with the infinite credit card.   The government must have a plan!  As phrased in an article I linked a few days ago by Jonathan Capehart in the Washington Post, nothing short of grand government solutions to every human problem can constitute "viable alternative proposals worthy of national debate."

Well, Jonathan, my response is that grand government solutions to every human problem are themselves inevitably so deficient that they are not "worthy of national debate."  Due to fundamental limitations of human knowledge, any significant human problem can only be solved by a long-term process of trial and error involving millions of people acting in their own economic self interest, where knowledge is shared among the entire population through the process of market exchange.  If you think you can cut off the ongoing trial and error process and have a few specially smart people impose the final solution to a major problem, well, you just don't understand the first thing about how the world works.

In fact our government does not have a "plan" for producing food, or buildings, or computers, or almost any of the things you find in stores.  The processes for producing these things work fine.  The government does have at least a partial "plan" for education; and that field is screwed up.  It has a partial "plan" for financing residential housing; and that field is screwed up.  And it has a "plan" in a big way for health care; that field is really screwed up.  "Plans" are what Stalin did.  They all failed.

So as an opponent of Obamacare, I say that reversion to the market exchange system is the plan, and it's the only plan.  That system will never be perfect, but it will always be better than any grand scheme that the government comes up with.

Now we have to consider a few things that inevitably follow.  First, the demise of Obamacare is going to be messy.  What we had before Obamacare was an imperfect system badly hobbled by various sorts of government meddling, but it did solve a lot of problems (although of course far from all).  It had developed over many decades through the spontaneous processes of the market, as modified of course by the government meddling.  Now that system has been substantially destroyed.  When Obamacare fails or is repealed, the pre-existing system will not magically reappear in one day.  Something else will develop over time, but it may be years or decades.  It is critically important that the government resist the temptation, the hubris, to think it can step in and solve all the problems in one day with a grand solution.  Whatever that supposed grand solution is, it can't and won't work.

Second, if there's something useful the government might do it's to reduce or eliminate its other meddling in health care that's separate from Obamacare.  For example, get rid of the rules that prevent sale of health insurance across state lines.  Also, change the tax treatment that makes it appear advantageous for high income people to have routine health expenses paid with before tax dollars.  Outside medical care, nobody thinks it makes any sense to pay for routine expenses with "insurance," and this is the one thing that has most driven the spiraling cost of medical care.

Finally, a word about pre-existing conditions.  Sadly, it is not possible to insure against pre-existing medical conditions, any more than it is possible to insure your house against fire after it has already burned down.  Part of the fundamental deception of Obamacare is its pretension that pre-existing conditions must be "covered" and then continuing to call the product that covers them "insurance."  If the condition is pre-existing, then the product is not insurance; instead, it is income redistribution.  You may think that income redistribution is a good idea generally, or you may think it's a good idea in this particular instance, but that doesn't make this product "insurance."

Once you realize that coverage for pre-existing conditions is income redistribution rather than insurance, you will look at this problem differently.  For example, some people with pre-existing conditions are wealthy.  Why is it the problem of taxpayers, or alternatively of healthy holders of healthcare policies, to "cover" the pre-existing conditions of people wealthier than themselves?  Obamacare overall is a massive income redistribution scheme, but where the winners and losers are not the poor and the rich, but rather almost randomly selected politically favored and disfavored groups.   The young and healthy are disfavored, even though most of them are relatively low on the income scale.  Those with pre-existing conditions are favored, even though some of them are wealthy.  If there is to be an income redistribution scheme, shouldn't it be only  from the rich to the poor? 

You have a million dollar house and you decide not to buy fire insurance to save a buck.  One day, it burns down.  You just lost the million dollars.  At least as of now, the taxpayers aren't going to step in to help you.  Now say you own the same million dollar house and you decline to buy health insurance to save a buck.  One day, you find out you have a severe heart condition that will cost a million dollars to treat.  At this point you can't buy health insurance.  You are in the exact some position -- essentially, an uninsured loss has cost the value of the house.  The fundamental question is, do you have to expend the value of that house before the taxpayers are on the hook for your treatment?  If not, why should the health problem be treated different from the problem of the destruction of the property?  Under Obamacare, you get to have your medical problem paid for by young healthy people at the bottom of the income scale who can't afford any house while you keep the million dollar house.

Here's my fundamental proposition:  any government-orchestrated income redistribution should be a safety net only, should be on budget and in cash, and should go only to those who clearly demonstrate a need and for only so long as they demonstrate the need.  So-called compulsory "insurance" for pre-existing conditions violates all of these principles.    

Thanksgiving Weekend Hubris Watch

It's Thanksgiving weekend.  And while we give thanks for the great success and wealth that freedom and republican government have brought to this country, perhaps it is also time to consider the hubris that has come along as well.   It has now become fashionable to believe that a few, or perhaps just one, specially intelligent person, with a degree from the right elite institution, and with access to the infinite spending power and infinite police power of the U.S. federal government, can cure all the personal problems of the people of the U.S., and indeed of all humanity.  If you don't believe this can actually work, well then, you are just immoral; you must want to see the poor and the afflicted suffer and die.

For a good example of this mindset, check out Colbert King in yesterday's Washington Post, characterizing the ongoing battle over Obamacare as a simple morality play:

Drawn into sharp relief is the struggle taking place in this country between doing what is right and good and an unashamed indulgence in the immorality of indifference.  The issue couldn’t be put more simply.  Forty-nine million Americans do not have health insurance. For many of them, the ability to deal with their illnesses and injuries depends on their ability to pay.

It's just good versus evil!  And since we have infinite resources, why stop at health insurance -- while they're at it, shouldn't our masters just fix everything with the infinite checkbook?  After all, leaving any human problem unaddressed by the all-knowing government is "unashamed indulgence in the immorality of indifference."  Right?

So the Manhattan Contrarian thinks that it's time for nominations for the person or institution that best exemplifies hubris in today's world.  I have three nominations for starters.  Additional nominations from readers are welcome.

First up, of course, is President Obama.   Margaret Carlson, writing at Bloomberg on November 26, puts together in one place two of the most illustrative items about our leader.  The first is his prediction, made in 2008 at the end of the primary season, that future generations would look back on his nomination as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”  Now there's some hubris!  And then there are the remarks made about Obama by his close aide Valerie Jarrett to biographer David Remnick:

“He knows exactly how smart he is,” she told Obama biographer David Remnick. “And he knows that he has the ability -- the extraordinary, uncanny ability -- to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them.”  Obama “has never really been challenged intellectually,” she went on. “He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”  

Don't you have to wonder what kind of president thinks it's OK to surround himself with abject worshipers like Valerie Jarrett?  If you had that job, wouldn't you want some advisers with at least a bit of skepticism?  Anyway, after many years of adulation from Valerie and her cohorts, I have no doubt that Obama actually believes that with the powers of the federal government he can control the oceans.

OK that nomination is very, very hard to top.  But I have two more.  Nomination number two is the Federal Reserve.  The governors of that institution have come to think that they have some kind of direct control over the unemployment rate, and that they can fix high unemployment through "monetary stimulus" without any risk of inflation.  Here's their recent guidance from their very own website:

Following their December 2012 meeting, Federal Reserve policymakers indicated that they anticipated that a target range for the federal funds rate of 0 to 1/4 percent will be appropriate at least as long as

• the unemployment rate remains above 6-1/2 percent,
• inflation between one and two years ahead is projected to be no more than 1/2 percentage point above the Committee's 2 percent longer-run goal, and
• longer-term inflation expectations continue to be well anchored.

So after a few years of this and building up several trillion dollars of excess reserves in the banking system, and unemployment barely budging (even worse if measured by labor force participation), has it occurred to them that monetary policy does not directly affect unemployment?  And if there is an indirect effect, do they even know the sign of it?  And these trillions of dollars of excess reserves in the banking system -- is there any danger there?  As far as I can tell, not one of them seems to be aware that this could ever be a problem.

And for the third nomination we have the UN IPCC and the warmist scientists who stand behind them.  These are the people who believe that bad weather is caused by your sinful use of electricity and driving an SUV, and that they can control the weather by keeping the world's poor in poverty forever, and by tripling your price of energy.  Here's the way they put it in their recent press release that went along with their massive "Fifth Assessment Report" on the state of the climate:

It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.  The evidence for this has grown, thanks to more and better observations, an improved understanding of the climate system response and improved climate models.

In case you were just starting to feel comfortable on this cold late November day, that "human influence" they are talking about means you heating your house.  But don't worry, once they take that away from you they are just really, really positive that the world temperature is going to go back down by maybe a tenth of a degree or so, if you believe that such a thing can be measured with sufficient accuracy to tell that it has happened.

Today's Wall Street Journal, in the Notable & Quotable feature, has an excerpt from the Nobel Prize acceptance speech of Friedrich Hayek.   Here's a paragraph:

There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, “dizzy with success,” to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society—a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.  

There's no chance that anyone in Washington or in the UN has any understanding of these ideas.  So there should be lots of nominations for the hubris award!

Blaming The Evil Capitalists For The Failures Of Statism

Venezuela continues to seek world leadership in terrible economic policy, and of course its economy is falling apart more and more rapidly.  To me a remarkable corollary is that when things start to get bad the government and its press enablers push a narrative that the economy's failure is the fault of greedy hoarders and speculators.  And even worse, many people fall for it.

How bad is the economic policy?  According to this article from CNBC yesterday, the public sector deficit is running about 15% of gdp, inflation hit 58.5% for just the month of October (that's about 10,000% on an annual basis), and of course the state oil company has been used as a personal piggy bank by the leaders for a decade and a half.  Oil production -- which is about the only source of wealth -- is barely over two-thirds of what it was in 2000, and of course oil prices have been dropping recently.  Earlier this month the government decreed that prices of many goods must be cut in half, setting off a stampede of legalized looting that effectively emptied out many stores.

It's getting more and more difficult for the government to cover up the results.  Official gdp numbers purport to show impressive growth over the last decade (from $83 billion in 2004 to over $300 billion today), but those numbers are highly suspect.   Besides likely outright falsification, there are two huge problems:  counting rapidly increasing government spending at 100 cents on the dollar, and valuing the whole enterprise at a phony "official exchange rate" of 6.3 bolivars to the dollar.   The free (black) market exchange rate is more like 50, and if you just apply that conversion suddenly the gdp is valued at only about $40 billion, half of where it was 10 years ago.  Admittedly that measure also has problems, and indeed the entire game of measuring gdp falls apart when free market exchange becomes illegal, since free exchange is a basic assumption behind the measurement metrics.  But highly relevant is that shortages are appearing throughout the economy, including things as basic as food, and the people's time is being diverted from formerly productive activities into gaming handout programs and waiting in lines.  You can't even honestly try to come up with a "purchasing power parity" measure of gdp when the goods are not available at the official prices. 

So, time to blame the greedy capitalists!  venezuelanalysis.com is a left-wing web site that can be reliably counted on to present the government's party line.  Here is their report of President Maduro's speech on November 7 announcing the latest programs:

Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro has announced a slew of policy reforms aimed at combating speculation and hoarding, along with the creation of new government institutions to regulate trade and oversee foreign currency exchange.  “We have to make real decisions for the benefit of the economy and society, whatever the cost and whatever happens,” Maduro stated from Miraflores Palace yesterday afternoon.  Describing the package of reforms as an “economic offensive”, Maduro pledged to “strike hard” at speculators and hoarders.

His support is dropping rather rapidly, but there are still remarkable numbers of people who buy this narrative.  And I suppose, if you are in the midst of things in Venezuela, it's very hard to perceive the root of the problem using your own five senses.  The only way really to understand the causes is to compare Venezuela to the places of competent economic policy, such as Switzerland or Singapore. 

Meanwhile back here in the U.S., we of course have our own adventure in the banning of free market exchange for a large part of the economy, otherwise known as Obamacare.  Its website problems have dominated the news for the past month, but those can be fixed.  What cannot be fixed is the need for people to behave against their own economic self-interest to make this thing work.  So, it's not going to work.  Will they blame the greedy capitalists?  I haven't seen that one yet, but Obama himself got things rolling about a week ago by starting to blame the evil Republicans:

  “One of the problems we’ve had is one side of Capitol Hill is invested in failure,” Obama said at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council meeting in Washington.

I predict it's only the beginning.  And remarkable numbers of people will believe it.

Understanding The Mysteries Of "Affordable Housing"

Our incoming mayor thinks that New York City has a "crisis" of not enough "affordable housing."   And certainly if you try to rent or buy an apartment in the private market, you will find that in Manhattan and the trendy areas of Brooklyn there is no such thing as a place you can afford with a middle class income.  Should the government try to fix this problem?  Any such effort is doomed to be a very expensive failure.

The old real estate cliche is that there are three important things:  location, location, and location.  It's an exaggeration, but contains a huge element of truth.  In housing, the bricks and mortar are generic, and the thing above all others that makes a home special (or not) is the location.  A place in bad condition but a good location can be fixed up; a place in a bad location is always going to remain in the same location.  For better or worse, in Manhattan you could have the smallest, most broken down one-room studio apartment and it would still be worth around $500,000.  Two bedroom apartments start at close to $1 million.  Meanwhile, in Detroit you can buy mansions for about $10,000 -- and if you have one of those to sell, you may not even get the $10,000.

And it's not just Detroit.  Many cities in the U.S. are losing population, and in those cities the price of housing falls way below the cost of new construction.  A good way to look at it is that if new construction is allowed and essentially unlimited, then the cost of new construction puts a cap on the price of housing  -- if you don't want to pay what someone is asking for an existing home, you can just build a new one.  But if a city is shrinking, then there is no reason to build new houses, and the price of existing ones can just keep falling.  Detroit is one example, but there are many others,  In upstate New York, cities like Utica, Syracuse and Buffalo have long had declining populations and extremely inexpensive housing.  In Buffalo there are hundreds of houses for sale for under $100,000.  Syracuse and Utica are smaller cities, but the situation is comparable.

Closer to home, we have Philadelphia.  Take Amtrak through there and you will see vast tracts of abandoned houses that could be bought up for a song.  But nobody wants them.  And still closer, we have New Haven, Bridgeport and Norwalk, Connecticut.  Bridgeport is the sorriest of that sorry group, although not so down and out as Buffalo.  Lots of houses in Bridgeport are available for under $100,000.  They also have excellent train service into New York.  You could buy a family a house in Bridgeport for approximately the one-year cost of subsidizing them to live in Manhattan.  Does the breadwinner need to get into the City to work?  The annual cost of an unlimited Metro-North ticket from Bridgeport to Grand Central is about $4500 -- a small fraction (about 5%) of the cost of subsidizing this family to live in Manhattan for that year.

But can the price of housing rise way up above the cost of new construction?  Easy -- just restrict how much can be built in a high demand area.  Here in New York, we have endless ways of doing that, from rent regulation (making it extremely difficult to remove existing tenants) to landmarking to zoning to Community Board approval for any significant change to anything.  And then, of course, there's the reservation of a substantial portion of the very limited land for affordable and low income housing.  I'm not saying I'm necessarily against all of that (just most of it), but at least we should be honest with ourselves and admit that the "crisis" of affordable housing is largely artificially created, an unintended consequence of pursuing other seemingly desirable goals. 

When the demand for housing is so strong that it drives the price well above the cost of new construction, then the price of the land will rise to make up the difference.  So existing landowners are huge beneficiaries of Manhattan's restrictive development policies.   That would be some small fraction of the hated top 1%.  I wonder if de Blasio realizes the extent to which policies he favors benefit this group?  Very unlikely.

In the very restricted private development market in Manhattan, we now have super-expensive projects setting price records and competing on the basis of luxury amenities and special finishes.  But how's it going in the government-controlled subsidized sector?  Not so good.  It seems that, despite many good locations that would be highly valuable in today's marketplace, the New York City Housing Authority is running out of money and the buildings are falling apart.  From Nicole Gelinas in the New York Post on October 21:

Gotham’s public housing, more than half a century old, is crumbling.  Fred Harris, real-estate chief at the New York City Housing Authority, told the Municipal Art Society last week it would cost NYCHA $17 billion to get its 2,596 buildings into a “state of good repair.”

With about 170,000 apartments in its buildings, that $17 billion repair bill would be $100,000 per family -- enough to buy every one of them a house in Bridgeport.  (OK, there aren't enough houses in Bridgeport to take them all.  But if you're willing to consider places like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Buffalo and Detroit, there are plenty.)

And the $17 billion is going to come from where exactly?  Many NYCHA projects have substantial amounts of unused land -- they are of the "towers in the park" architecture style that became trendy back in the 50s.  NYCHA came up with a proposal to generate some real money by selling or leasing some of that land to private developers to build market-rate buildings.  Of course the public housing tenants protested -- it would block their views!  Their champion was of course de Blasio.  For now, it looks like that proposal is dead.  However, it's unlikely that the Feds are going to be coming up with the repair money, so good question, what is de Blasio's next move.  

We have in plain view all over the city the results of failed socialist housing theories, and we have just voted to double down on more of same.   It's just one of the mysteries of "affordable housing."

Obamacare And The Third World Mindset

Do you ever wonder why rich countries get rich, and at least sometimes continue getting richer, while poor countries seem to remain mired in poverty?  Actually it's not all that complicated.  Essentially all wealth and economic betterment comes about by the exchange of privately-owned property via markets.  Think about how to make any life-enhancing product and you quickly realize that no one is smart enough to come up with this thing on his own within the short span of a human lifetime.  Even Apple contributes relatively little to the smartphone -- it buys from others everything from the chips to much of the programming to the metal case to the special glass to the apps.  Starting from scratch, you couldn't make something as simple as a pencil, and neither could a pencil manufacturer.  The generation of wealth is completely dependent on the ability to buy lots of things from others, and on the freedom of individuals to seek to act in their own economic self-interest by buying and selling things in markets.

Since markets tend to arise spontaneously in human affairs, it actually takes some work to maintain your status as an impoverished third world country.  But, to take just one example, Venezuela literally every day teaches new lessons on how a country can impoverish its people by making freedom of market exchange illegal.  Today's Wall Street Journal has a roundup of the latest actions of new strongman Nicolas Maduro.  Maduro has just been granted by his legislature the right to rule by decree for 12 months.  Maduro has said that he needs these new powers to counter what he calls an "economic war" against Venezuela.  The so-called "economic war" consists of people seeking to enhance their well-being by buying and selling things in markets.  Maduro is completely oblivious to the fact that this is where all wealth comes from.

Thus at the top of Maduro's list is the plan to go after everyone who publishes the black market price of the tightly-controlled Venezuelan currency:

Venezuela's telecommunications regulatory agency, Conatel, said on Tuesday that it sent a letter to the San Francisco headquarters of Twitter,  requesting that the social-media company take down accounts that publish the currency's black-market rate. Twitter didn't respond to a request to comment.  On orders from the president, Conatel previously blocked some 50 websites that distribute the underground exchange rate and opened administrative proceeding against several Internet service providers.

Then there are the periodic army-enforced orders that stores must cut prices by half:

This month, Mr. Maduro ordered home appliance stores to slash prices by half and sent soldiers to take over the operations of one retailer. He has vowed to next tackle businesses that sell textiles, toys, shoes, cars, food and hardware stores. Crowds of bargain hunters and long lines of shoppers formed last week in anticipation of further government-imposed discounts.

Multiple other examples are discussed in the article.  These measures are supposedly designed to address the "shortages of basic goods" that have been appearing throughout the Venezuelan economy.  Well, the betting here is that the shortages are about to get a lot worse.  In the process, I'm also betting that the Venezuelan people will become much poorer, while Maduro will become extremely wealthy.  Probably, he will become the richest man in Venezuela.

The United States, of course, would never be so stupid as to try to undo basic human behavior, restrict the free buying and selling of stuff and make it illegal for people to behave in their own economic self-interest and for companies to sell them what they want to buy.  Well, actually that is the very essence of Obamacare.  Left to their own devices, people act in their own economic self-interest by buying the cheapest health insurance that can meet their expected needs, or, in some cases, no medical insurance.  Those beyond child-bearing age skip maternity coverage; men skip birth-control coverage; teetotalers skip substance-abuse coverage; the childless skip pediatric dental coverage; almost everybody skips "preventive and wellness" coverage.  And insurance companies know that they must price policies for healthy young people cheaply or otherwise they won't sell any policies.

The architects of Obamacare can't see it in themselves, but they have exactly the third world mindset.  Don't let people behave in their own economic self-interest by buying and selling freely, but instead order them to behave in a way to achieve a result that the masters deem "fair"!  This of course has never worked and won't work, but it did take the Soviet Union 70 years to fall apart.

Looking for someone who articulates the third world mindset without realizing it, I find today in the Washington Post PostPartisan feature an article by Jonathan Capehart titled "The GOP is out to destroy the country."  Turns out that by "destroying the country" Capehart means any and all opposition to massive government programs that restrict economic freedom.   Among the issues facing the country that Capehart lists as needing prompt solution are (of course) healthcare, as well as climate change, income inequality, and "stimulating job growth."  And where are those evil Republicans on these issues?

[T]he GOP is grinding just about every sector of the federal government to a halt. And it is doing it through a cynical combination of obstruction, saying no and failing to have viable alternative proposals worthy of national debate.

In other words, in Capehart world the only acceptable "solution" to any of the above problems, or others, must come via a big program from the federal government.  How about as a solution to all the so-called problems: get the government out of it and let the people improve their economic positions by market exchange?  According to Capehart, that's not "worthy of national debate."  He has no idea that enabling market exchange is what creates wealth, or that cutting off market exchange prevents further wealth creation and puts the economy (or here, its healthcare sector) into stasis.

As particularly relevant to Obamacare, the good news is that the scheme's own self-destruction may be teaching people a lesson that could never have been learned in any amount of classroom time: that ordering people to behave against their own economic self-interest will not work.  That means that there are limits to what the government can or should do.  If there is any subject "worthy of national debate" in my view, that's the big one.