Tag: friedrich hayek

Yay Authoritarianism!

By
Michael F. Cannon

Cato-at-Liberty readers who are enjoying—or, at least, chronicling—our nation’s slide down The Road to Serfdom will have to add Neil Irwin’s Washington Post Outlook piece, “Why the financial crisis was bad for democracy,” to their travelogue:

In a democratic society, there will always be tension over which decisions should be made by expert appointees, and which by those with the legitimacy and accountability that come with competing for citizens’ votes. The technocrats can make complex decisions quickly, quietly and efficiently. The words “quick, “quiet” and “efficient” are rarely applied to the U.S. Senate or the Italian Parliament — but these institutions are imbued with an authority that comes directly from the people, the explicit consent of the governed.

So, in a crisis, which do you want: unaccountable decisiveness or inefficient accountability?

Consciously or not, we’ve made our choice: The financial crisis and its long, ugly aftermath have marked the triumph of the technocrats…

None of this is a great way to run a society. Like most journalists, I believe in transparency and accountability. I wish the Federal Reserve’s policy meetings were broadcast on C-SPAN. Instead, we get written transcripts five years later. (That still beats Europe, where such information is under lock and key for 30 years.)

Yet, when the world is on the brink, decisive problem-solving trumps the niceties of democratic process. I won’t like it much — but I’ll take it.

Authoritarianism cannot take hold without intellectual support, and Friedrich Hayek couldn’t have described the rationale better himself. Just equally well. Almost verbatim, actually.

For more, see my paper (with Diane Cohen) on IPAB and this Cato policy forum on IPAB and Dodd-Frank. And of course, read Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom while it’s still legal.

Topics: 
Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy, General, Government and Politics, Health Care, Law and Civil Liberties, Political Philosophy

Shades of Nixon

By
Michael F. Cannon

Reason magazine has a characteristically excellent video about the gas shortages in New York and New Jersey. Which is to say, the video is really about the insane responses of officials in those states to the scarcity of gas. Reason’s Jim Epstein writes: “Govs. Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo…threatened to prosecute any station owners caught raising prices, thus removing any incentive to truck more gas in from other parts of the country.” Here’s the video:

The Washington Post reports Christie responded with an age-old government-rationing scheme:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie ordered…drivers with even-numbered license plates being allowed to fill up on even-numbered dates and odd-numbered cars on the other days. But several motorists said they hadn’t heard the news because they had no power at home, and gas station managers said they didn’t bother to look at the plates.

“I don’t have any time to check plates,” David Singh said as he pumped gas into a car at the Delta station he manages on McCarter Highway in Newark.

So not everyone heard about the government’s rationing scheme, and even fewer people cared. You know what conveys information a lot better than tired government edicts? Market prices.

Fortunately, market prices are still breaking through:

Shauron Sears, 37, a waitress, said she spent 12 hours vainly waiting for gas on Friday and another hour waiting Saturday at a Sunoco station on McCarter Highway. Just as she got to the front of the line, a manager started waving his arms and shouting, “No more gas!”

Sears said…since her house flooded she and her family have been camping at her sister’s house in Orange, N.J. Nine people are in the house, including a baby, and Sears is eager to return to her own home. But her first priority is to get gas.

“There are people who are buying gas and selling it for $8 a gallon,” she said. “Maybe I can buy some from them.”

The entrepreneurs selling gas at illegal mark-ups might affect Sears in a manner the government’s price controls won’t. By helping her.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Regulatory Studies

The Decision Is Whether We Will Reform Health Care with Our Eyes Open

By
Michael F. Cannon

Donald Berwick may have mastered the science of health care management and delivery. (I for one would jump at the chance to enroll my family in the Berwick Health Plan.) But his recent oped in the Washington Post shows he has yet to absorb the lessons that economics teaches about government planning of the economy, such as through ObamaCare.

Berwick, whom President Obama recess-appointed to be administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), sets out to defend ObamaCare from a fairly devastating critique by Robert Samuelson a few days earlier. Berwick responds, in essence, nuh-uh:

I saw how this law is helping tens of millions of families and is finally putting our health-care system on the right track…I have seen how improving care can reduce costs dramatically.

Berwick fails to see the world of difference between those two statements. Yes, in his private-sector work, Berwick has helped hospitals save more lives, kill fewer people, and save money in the process. I’m pretty sure he has saved more lives than I ever will.

But all he saw from his perch at Medicare’s helm was people happy to receive checks from the government, and a bunch of well-meaning bureaucrats setting goals. He did not see the costs imposed by those subsidies. As for goal-setting, this one sentence captures it all:

The CMS, for example, has set ambitious goals to reduce complications that, if met, would save 60,000 lives and $35 billion in just three years.

If. Met. A recent Congressional Budget Office review of Medicare pilot programs showed that Medicare bureaucrats set goals all the time. They never achieve them.

Berwick’s claim that ObamaCare “cracks down hard on waste and fraud” because “Last year the government recaptured a record $4 billion” is even more ridiculous. The official (read: low-ball) estimates are that CMS loses $70 billion per year to fraud and improper payments. The best evidence suggests that wasteful spending approaches $200 billion per year in Medicare alone. All that money that comes from you, John Q. Taxpayer. Berwick knows all these things. Yet he thinks you should be impressed that recovering a measly $4 billion is the best the government has ever done.

Berwick would never tolerate such willful blindness, shoddy reasoning, and (surprise!) poor results if it were his own money on the line. Which is exactly the point. In a free market, people spend their own money. At Medicare, Berwick spent, and ObamaCare continues to spend, other people’s money.

That is the main reason why markets are smart and government is stupid. And why otherwise smart people like Berwick can afford to keep their eyes shut.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Health Care, Regulatory Studies

NRO Op-ed: IPAB, ObamaCare’s Super-Legislature

By
Michael F. Cannon

Yesterday, Cato released “The Independent Payment Advisory Board: PPACA’s Anti-Constitutional and Authoritarian Super-Legislature,” by the Goldwater Institute’s Diane Cohen and me.

Today, National Review Online publishes our op-ed based on that study. An excerpt:

[U]nder the statute as written, if Congress fails to repeal IPAB in 2017, the secretary must implement IPAB’s edicts even if Congress votes to block them. Nancy Pelosi was right: We needed to pass ObamaCare to find out what was in it. We’re still finding out.

ObamaCare is so unconstitutional, it’s absurd. It delegates legislative powers that Congress cannot delegate. It creates a permanent super-legislature to supplement—and when conflicts arise, to supplant—Congress. It tries to amend the Constitution via statute rather than the amendment procedure of Article V.

ObamaCare proves economist Friedrich Hayek’s axiom that government direction of the economy threatens both democracy and freedom. After decades of failing to deliver high-quality, low-cost health care through Medicare, Congress struck upon the “solution” of creating a permanent super-legislature—or worse, an economic dictator—with the power to impose taxes and other laws that the people would reject.

Fortunately, one Congress cannot bind future Congresses by statute. If the Supreme Court fails to strike down ObamaCare, Congress should exercise its power to repeal IPAB—and the rest of ObamaCare with it.

Cohen is also the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in Coons v. Geithner, which challenges the constitutionality of IPAB and which a federal court has put on hold pending the Supreme Court’s ruling in the individual-mandate and Medicaid-mandate cases.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Health Care

Cato Study: Heretofore Unreported ObamaCare ‘Bug’ Puts IPAB Completely beyond Congress’ Reach

By
Michael F. Cannon

Today, the Cato Institute releases a new study by Diane Cohen and me titled, “The Independent Payment Advisory Board: PPACA’s Anti-Constitutional and Authoritarian Super-Legislature.” Cohen is a senior attorney at the Goldwater Institute and lead counsel in the Coons v. Geithner lawsuit challenging IPAB and other aspects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. ObamaCare.

From the executive summary:

When the unelected government officials on this board submit a legislative proposal to Congress, it automatically becomes law: PPACA requires the Secretary of Health and Human Services to implement it. Blocking an IPAB “proposal” requires at a minimum that the House and the Senate and the president agree on a substitute. The Board’s edicts therefore can become law without congressional action, congressional approval, meaningful congressional oversight, or being subject to a presidential veto. Citizens will have no power to challenge IPAB’s edicts in court.

Worse, PPACA forbids Congress from repealing IPAB outside of a seven-month window in the year 2017, and even then requires a three-fifths majority in both chambers…

IPAB’s unelected members will have effectively unfettered power to impose taxes and ration care for all Americans, whether the government pays their medical bills or not. In some circumstances, just one political party or even one individual would have full command of IPAB’s lawmaking powers. IPAB truly is independent, but in the worst sense of the word. It wields power independent of Congress, independent of the president, independent of the judiciary, and independent of the will of the people.

The creation of IPAB is an admission that the federal government’s efforts to plan America’s health care sector have failed. It is proof of the axiom that government control of the economy threatens democracy.

Importantly, this study reveals a heretofore unreported feature that makes this super-legislature even more authoritarian and unconstitutional:

[I]f Congress misses that repeal window, PPACA prohibits Congress from ever altering an IPAB “proposal.”

You read that right.

The Congressional Research Service and others have reported that even if Congress fails to repeal this super-legislature in 2017, Congress will still be able to use the weak tools that ObamaCare allows for restraining IPAB. Unfortunately, that interpretation rests on a misreading of a crucial part of the law. These experts thought they saw the word “or” where the statute actually says “and.”

How much difference can one little conjunction make?

Under the statute as written, if Congress fails to repeal IPAB in 2017, then as of 2020 Congress will have absolutely zero ability to block or amend the laws that IPAB writes, and zero power to affect the Secretary’s implementation of those laws. IPAB will become a permanent super-legislature, with the Secretary as its executive. And if the president fails to appoint any IPAB members, the Secretary will unilaterally wield all of IPAB’s legislative and executive powers, including the power to appropriate funds for her own department. It’s completely nutty, yet completely consistent with the desire of ObamaCare’s authors to protect IPAB from congressional interference.

It’s also completely consistent with Friedrich Hayek’s prediction that government planning of the economy paves the way for authoritarianism.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Health Care, Law and Civil Liberties

Clinton, Obama, and Hayek

By
David Boaz

President Obama has been saying that if the United States government can find and eliminate Osama bin Laden after ten years of searching, it can do anything:

Already, in several appearances since the raid, Obama has described it as a reminder that “as a nation there is nothing that we can’t do,” as he put it during an unrelated White House ceremony Monday. On Sunday night, during his first comments about the operation, he linked it to American values, saying the country is “once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to.”

This is, of course, nonsense. Finding bin Laden, difficult as it proved to be, was an incomparably simple task compared to using coercion and central planning to bring about desired results in defiance of economic reality. You can’t deliver better health care to more people for less money by reducing the role of incentives and markets, even if you set your mind to it. As Russell Roberts said about a similar concept, “If we can put a man on the moon, then…”:

Putting a man on the moon is an engineering problem. It yields to a sufficient application of reason and resources. Eliminating poverty is an economic problem (and by the word “economic” I do not mean financial or related to money), a challenge that involves emergent results. In such a setting, money alone—in the amounts that a non-economic approach might suggest, one that ignores the impact of incentives and markets—is unlikely to be successful.

Obama should listen to Bill Clinton, who last fall seemed to be channeling Hayek:

Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

Bill Clinton, 9/21: “Do you know how many political and economic decisions are made in this world by people who don’t know what in the living daylights they are talking about?”

Topics: 
Government and Politics

Austrian Economics in the News

By
David Boaz

The financial crisis of 2008 led to a lot of unfortunate Keynesian and corporatist policymaking, but also to a renewed interest in Austrian economics and particularly to the Austrian theory of the business cycle and the role of the Federal Reserve in creating bubbles and busts. Austrian ideas are most recently examined on BBC and in the Washington Post.

Sales of F. A. Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom have soared in the past three years, actually hitting no. 1 on Amazon last summer. The New York Times complained that Tea Party activists had “reached back to dusty bookshelves for long-dormant ideas [in] once-obscure texts by dead writers” such as Hayek, even as its reporters continually urged policymakers to Read. More. Keynes. A rap video on the intellectual battle between Hayek and Keynes, created by economist Russell Roberts and filmmaker John Papola, has been viewed almost 2 million times. A YouTube cartoon video on “quantitative easing” has done even better, with more than 4 million views.

And now Rep. Ron Paul’s appointment as chairman of the House subcommittee on monetary policy has brought new attention to the Austrian critique of orthodox economics and economic policy. A long article on Paul’s ideas and his plans for the committee by Annie Lowrey filled a full page of the Sunday Washington Post:

But Paul’s adversary is not only the Federal Reserve. It is also mainstream monetary economics itself. As a devotee of the Austrian school, whose luminaries include Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, Paul stands firmly outside policymaking and academic circles, a point he enthusiastically admits. (The Austrian economists also often quibble with other libertarians, such as those at Cato.) His beef is not with how central bankers do their jobs; it’s with central banking itself.

“The Fed, rightly so, criticizes Congress for spending too much - but they make the money available to us!” he said. “It buys debt, keeps interest rates low, and sticks it to the people who want to save and make money. It is so unfair. And I think it is the first time in the history of the Fed that people realize it is not their friend. It just gives us booms and busts.”

The line about Cato is a little misleading. At our 28 annual monetary conferences and in our publications, we’ve presented the ideas of many Austrian economists, from our 1979 publication of two classic manuscripts by Hayek, A Tiger by the Tail: The Keynesian Legacy of Inflation and Unemployment and Monetary Policy: Government as Generator of the “Business Cycle” and our first monetary conference in 1982 featuring Fritz Machlup and Gottfried Haberler, to a 1999 issue of the Cato Journal featuring studies of Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, to a new Working Paper, “Has the Fed Been a Failure?” by George Selgin, William Lastrapes, and Lawrence H. White.

And don’t miss a recent BBC program, “Radical Economics: Yo Hayek!” Jamie Whyte spends 30 thoughtful minutes looking at Austrian views of boom and bust, with such guests as White, Papola, Steven Horwitz, Robert Higgs, and Robert Skidelsky.

It took the biggest bubble and crash since 1929 to revive the interest in Austrian economics, but at least now more people are studying the real problems with central planning, government intervention, and money manipulation.

Topics: 
Finance, Banking & Monetary Policy, Political Philosophy

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