This month’s rollout of Obamacare implementation has been an epic disaster by any metric. This is not only the judgment of the law’s opponents, but also of a growing number of its supporters and cheerleaders. Sadly, this disaster was not only foreseeable, but widely foreseen and loudly warned about.
Now that we are all agreed that Obamacare is a disaster (and I leave the reader to peruse the provided links to get a sense of the juicy details) the question is one of scale. To what do we compare this monumental failure of central planning and government intervention? What other federal boondoggle does this compare to? The War on Poverty? The War on Drugs? While those failures cost many billions of dollars over the course of decades before being revealed as failures, Obamacare has been revealed as such within its first couple weeks and is on pace to compete well with the other programs on price.
I will leave the question open because I am still searching for an answer. When was the last time a federal program failed so fully, so quickly, and so publicly as the October 2013 implementation of the Obamacare exchanges?
Exit quote from Hayek:
What is promised to us as the Road to Freedom is in fact the Highroad to Servitude. For it is not difficult to see what must be the consequences when democracy embarks upon a course of planning. The goal of the planning will be described by some such vague term as “the general welfare.” There will be no real agreement as to the ends to be attained, and the effect of the people’s agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go: with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all.
All is proceeding as Hayek foresaw.