Hayek's decades old comments as applied to Obamacare

See here for a posting on John Goodman's blog which features comments by Ed Feulner on how appropriate are FA Hayek's comments from Road to Serfdom are to how Obamacare is working.

Read the entire commentary but here is a flavor:

Hayek :"the legislative body will be reduced to choosing the persons who are to have practically absolute power."

Feulner :"Sound a bit like the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) of 15 unelected bureaucrats who will arbitrarily determine Medicare payment rates?"

Remember IPAB? See here to refresh memory of the power that this board of presidential appointees will have.

What could possibly go wrong with the IPAB? For those who seem to believe that government officials typically act in some nebulous "public interest"- nothing. For those who cynically think that people tend to respond to incentives and act in their own interests and believe that "regulatory capture" is real-a lot.

Obamacare is the prototypical progressive legislation.The progressive mindset is what Hayek talked about with his notion of the "fatal conceit".This is the belief that government will and should make the world better by social and economic planning and not by letting people free to coordinate their private plans.