Thursday, September 4, 2008

A Pessimistic Forecast


I'm pretty much tired of politics.

Both parties claim that they're going to make things better for everyone. This is absolutely false. Why? Because there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Essentially, any government policy will have some costs and some benefits. Which means some people will be made better off at the expense of others. No government policy is going to be good for everyone.

If they were really honest with us, they'd be saying, "I promise the 51% of you who vote for me more stuff than I take from you." Look at the tax polices. Hidden in all of the claims and promises will be a different distribution of wealth than we have today. Both candidate are hoping you feel like it redistributes the pie in your favor.

We can only hope that some of the policies a president enacts are at least better for the people they help than they are bad for the people they hurt. Sounds easy enough, but in practice, it's very hard. If you try to give stuff to people they change their behavior so you have to give them more. If you try to take stuff from people then they make sure that they have less to take or spend valuable resources just making sure you can't get it.

Universal health care is great example. It has the capability to help some at the expense of a lot of people. Universal health insurance is not free because we give up all the good things that the market does for innovation in health care. Having universal health care sucks. Not having universal health care sucks.

No president is going to change that. They're just going to change who it sucks worse for.

I hate to burst your bubble on how great the next 4 years are going to be, but it ain't gonna be what you're hoping for. Improvements in just about everything worth having don't get made by governments, especially presidents.

No comments:

Post a Comment