We hated it then, so why are Progressive Democrats cramming this down our throats? - Granite Grok

We hated it then, so why are Progressive Democrats cramming this down our throats?

Simple answer: F. A. Hayek came up with the idea of Fatal Conceit, that it is impossible for a few people to have sufficient knowledge to run an economy – at all.  There are just too many inputs for too many decisions for any central planners to know exactly what has to be done correctly.  It can only be done by the those in that economy acting upon their own best interest and cooperating with their “trading partners” for best value.  In short, a free marketplace.  A perfect example is this video from Fox News with the host asking Kirstin Powers this about Obamacare (Video after the jump – the question is around 2:26):

“The people that are backing this plan now versus back in the 1990s are saying the differences, that people care more about cost than they do about the amount of doctors and the number of facilities that they can go to – do you believe that to be true?”

The Conceit?  That the Obamacare planners have decided that consumers only have one important factor: cost.  Nothing else matters as much, so that’s how they’ve structured the entire takeover of the US’s healthcare system.  Yet, Kirstin Powers skewers that right away:

Some people care about that and some people don’t. I think everyone sort of makes that decision for themselves…Some people believe this decision has been taken away from them.

Unless one is rich enough to spend as they want, the choice to choose among alternatives HAS been taken away from us all – and as Hayek foresaw by looking backwards at history, nothing but ruin awaits us.  Progressives’s Conceit is that they know what the rest of us want – and that we will be happy with their decisions once we “get familiar” with them.  In this, they treat us like children, content in their conceit that they are taking care of us as best as we need.  It is the same with MPG requirements that they (the Progressives and Environmentalists now running the EPA) arbitrarily raised, thinking that consumers are only concerned with a lowered incremental cost of that next mile, as in “of COURSE you would rather have a car that goes 50 miles per gallon and spews less pollution than one that only gets 18 MPG”.  They dismiss entirely that people buy cars for many varied reasons – and purposes.  And those purposes collide with their conceit of what they know – and the bottomless pit of what they don’t know.  After all, how well is one of their favorite choices, a FIAT 500 (after all, Obama sold Chrysler to FIAT for a buck, remember?), or a Chevy Volt going to handle a snowplow?  Yet, for wanting to less stress my back and go back to using a plow, I will be penalized for getting a larger vehicle.  Unfortunately, we will see more and more of this as the Regulatory Czars embedded in the Obama Administration throw up more and more pages of their ideas of ‘what’s best for us”.

And what happens as one misstep begats another as Obamacare lurches, well, sideways?  The lawlessness with respect to the actual Obamacare Law that we have seen so far is just the beginning of the meltdown of the healthcare economy as a result of incomplete knowledge – it will continue to get worse as they continue to play the politics against policy against failure.   One only has to look at the Chavez / Maduro Venezuela economy to see it writ large.  But like the Socialists they are, the very idea that we, a Free People, should be able to decide for ourselves, is absolutely foreign and anathema to to this pile of Progressives.

For if we “could”, then we wouldn’t need them – a tremendous blow to their sense of self-esteem and self-importance.

(H/T: The Corner)

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