2011-10-31

Spooky Halloween Socialism

Happy Halloween, everybody. Not to be outdone by even the spookiest ghoul, Barack Obama has moved to further socialize the pharmaceutical industry, as the New York Times reports.

As we have observed time and time again, every move to command-and-control the pharmaceutical industry results in unintended consequences. As such, this latest move represents a twofold failure in the Administration's cognitive time-horizon.

First, the federales can't seem to foresee the obvious consequences of their own actions. Namely, when they move to further increase the cost of pharmaceutical product production, such production becomes far less attractive to companies and their investors, thereby providing a disincentive to produce medicine. (You may remember that I blogged about this before.) As a result, Obama's latest round of despotism will only further exacerbate the problem.

Second, the government keeps making the same mistakes over and over again, implying that their cognitive time-horizon is so short that they cannot even reflect on the effects of the last time they engaged in similar courses of action.

If medicine in abundance is what we want to see, then we should get out of the way and let medicine producers do what they do best: produce medicine!

UPDATE: The incomparable Paul Gregory published a letter to the Obama Administration this morning from a former Soviet health care planner. It is well worth reading!

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