When I beat up on subsidy-suckling bailed-out banks or tell readers to chastise regulatory robber barons like Wal-Mart, I get plenty of conservative/libertarian responses along the lines of: “Don’t hate business for rationally pursuing profits. Hate politcians who create the subsidies, bailouts, and regulations.”
I’ve got a long response to that, but for now I wanted to point out one reason why I think subsidy sucklers and regulatory robber barons deserve blame: they sound like Michael Moore and Thomas Frank. By that, I mean they apply the language of free markets to cases of government intervention.
Peter Suderman at Reason magazine today drags up “everything wrong with Romneycare in one quote.” Here’s the passage:
“People say we didn’t do cost controls,” said Murphy, who is now president and CEO of Beacon Health Strategies, a managed behavioral health care company. “I would never do that in a million years. … We didn’t think it was the proper role of government.”
That’s my favorite thing in the world: a public servant expands government’s role in the health-care sector, then he cashes out to work for this industry. But more to the point, he expanded subsidies and mandates driving business towards the industry, and then says of attaching any strings to those subsidies: “we didn’t think it was the proper role of government.”
Gotta love that libertarian sentiment in discussing how to administer subsidies. I call it “Keep Your Government Hands Off My Subsidies.”
We got this same attitude from government contractors complaining about a witholding tax placed on federal contracts. The Hill’s Kevin Bogardus reports:
“Taxpayers” are being burdened by something that effectively shrinks the cost of federal contracts? And it’s “government overreach” to manage payments of federal contracts?
Again, it’s business using capitalist talk where it doesn’t belong.
