Here's how you run health care if you're Mitt Romney. You know there just has to be a system. You also know you aren't smart enough to manage it yourself. So you call together experts from all the stakeholders -- a word that always makes me think of vampire hunters -- you lock them in a room, and you get behind whatever plan comes out of the room.
Of course, all the experts work for Big Health Care, including hospitals, insurance companies, and the regulators -- vampires trying to buy up all the stakes and garlic maybe -- so what you get is a collectivist/corporatist result. Those big interest groups at the table get what they want. Individual consumers get little or nothing but higher health care costs.
When this happened in Massachusetts, and the plan passed the legislature with a few statist twists added, Romney signed it. It was the best he could get, he said. Now, his Mass plan needs to be scrapped.
Where did he go wrong? At step 1. He just knew there had to be a system. And at step 3. He called together all the "experts."
One problem with government-based market management is that whenever possible the big players buy the regulators and make the system work in their favor (e.g., Solyndra), something the collectivists are generally willing to ignore, since it's what they want anyway: a few big companies are easier to control than a lot of little ones.
But the biggest problem is that management by experts fails because of Freidrich Hayek's calculation problem: no committee of wise men can beat the market as an efficient allocator of resources, since the market has millions of independent decision makers acting on almost instantaneous messages from the price system.
It seems like Mitt never read Hayek, or at least if he did he never accepted the notion that allowing individuals the freedom to make their own decisions is the best plan.
So Mitt's a confirmed believer in social technocracy. If the problem were a bit closer to his own expertise, assuming he had one, he'd happily sit in the room and attempt a top down solution.
He's a technocrat and generally opposed to individual liberty, so he should never be President. Unless, of course, the only choice is a progressivist Democrat.
