THE POTEMKIN PRESIDENCY

With respect to healthcare, Roger Kimball calls it the Potemkin Presidency – “It has an impressive façade, propped up by some high-gloss rhetoric and a formidable public relations machine. But at bottom, President Obama and his ideological confrères are totally out of their depth.”

If only, they reason, they can turn over enough of the productive capacity of the country to the government, then (so they think) they will be in a position to eradicate the age-old irrationalities and inequities that have beset our capitalist society from the beginning.

In his assessment of President Obama’s “public option” for health insurance, Kimball quotes Greg Mankiw, an economist and former Bush adviser:

An important question about any public provider of health insurance is whether it would have access to taxpayer funds. If not, the public plan would have to stand on its own financially, as private plans do, covering all expenses with premiums from those who signed up for it.

But if such a plan were desirable and feasible, nothing would stop someone from setting it up right now. In essence, a public plan without taxpayer support would be yet another nonprofit company offering health insurance. The fundamental viability of the enterprise does not depend on whether the employees are called “nonprofit administrators” or “civil servants.”

What leads anyone to believe that the U.S. government (in Kimball’s words,”the granddaddy of all insurance companies”) would be more honest, or efficient, than the 1300 or so companies that now compete for your business?

Like so many “community organizers” before him, Obama is a friend of humanity. He wants to make the world a “better place” — better, that is, according to his lights. The problem is, he knows almost nothing about the way the world actually works.

Continuing to quote Kimball, “It may sound noble to say, ‘Damn economics, let us build up a decent world’ — but it is, in fact, merely irresponsible.”