Thursday - October 30, 2003
Medicare Blimps? Hayek is Proven Right Again.
Medicare has been spending $600,000 on a blimp to
advertise a phone number. This is the sickness of socialist government
programs. Not only is it absurd to advertise a number that is easily found in
the phone book and a waste of money, but it is symptomatic of government
agencies with a sick sense of their own
importance.
Clearly a blimp is
ridiculously over the line of what should be spent. But where is the line? Of
course, as F. A. Hayek demonstrated in "The Road to Serfdom," that is the whole
problem.
Some Medicare executive might think that putting
an ad in the Yellow Pages might be acceptable. What does he care if he spends
money on a blimp? It doesn't affect his bottom line. In fact, he might see it
as increasing visibility to the government subsidies that he is authorized to
dispense. Increased visibility might in his sick mind be the justification for
this waste of our money, but I'll bet his real goal is to use that increased
visibility to get more money for next year's budget. Advertising may convince
some legislators to grow the Medicare program more and more.
Hayek's brilliant point was that
whenever you have a program that forcibly takes money from people and
redistributes it, you will end up with corruption, and eventually despots.
Let's take welfare as a quick and easy example. Someone has to decide how much
to take from the people, and someone has to decide who to redistribute it to.
When a program is first implemented, it's entirely possible that the intent is
honest and well intended (the realist in me knows better, but let's just pretend
for now that politicians are capable of honesty), and that only the truly
indigent are intended to be helped.
But here's the problem. What does
indigent mean? Does it mean living on the street over a grate? Or does it mean
only having two televisions? This has to be decided, and it also means that
someone has to make that decision. And as Hayek showed, when someone has to
make this decision, you tend to get people in charge who like to make that
decision, and who like to use that decision to further their own
aims.
It's been the same throughout
time. The Romans had their "bread and circuses." Hayek, when he wrote this,
had just escaped from the early years of Hitler's Naziism and had this example
most clearly in mind. As both examples show, the larger the amount of people
you give free things to, the more power you can attain.
What we're seeing in this particular
example of blimpish excess, is a government agency being run by a political
power seeker. Well, let's be honest. It is being run directly by a lackey, but
there are real power seekers whose bidding he is doing. They are using funding
that most Americans assume is being used to help people in order to increase
their ability to take our money from us and grant it to those that they think
will help them achieve power.
Make no
mistake. This blimp may seem nothing more than a bit of excessive ego or maybe
even just a silly expense, but it is a symptom of the brazeness of the socialist
state that we have become. It is nearly impossible to end socialism once it
starts because the people want their bread and circuses, and they will elect
those that give it to them. Only one thing can help us, and that is if the
courts rule that the federal government has no legal role to redistribute
wealth, but that isn't about to happen. We're doomed for a long time to come to
undergo growing socialism. Let's hope that someday it will be ended and we
return to freedom before we end up under the boot of some despot.
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