Memo To Obamacare Architects, You Aren’t Better Than Mancur Olson

My colleague Pat Lynch alerts me to some of the best analysis yet on the pick your metaphor unraveling of Obamacare. It comes from Sven Wilson, Director of BYU’s Public Policy program. I can do no better than send you to Wilson’s post that argues Obamacare has fundamentally transgressed the primal law of activist government, that is, instead of concentrating benefits and dispersing costs it has, well, done the opposite. Mancur Olson’s work prominently figures into Wilson’s analysis.

Such arrogance, such belief in the power of behavioral economics, rational planning, progressive ideals, egalitarian dreams, who knows what lead them to believe that millenials, millenials of all groups would subscribe to Obamacare and provide a crucial pool of revenues to fund the sick and aging. And then there is the additional concentration of costs in the cannibilization of the individual insurance market, and the belief that this would go happily unnoticed as productive middle-class Americans now are forced into more expensive plans they never sought. It is enough to make a fellow realize that ideological fads come and go but dispersed knowledge and local decision-making are forever.