Per the N&O today:
State Insurance Commissioner Jim Long today rebuffed an industry request for a hefty hike in auto insurance rates — and ordered a whopping 16.1 percent decrease instead. …
The ruling by Long, who isn’t seeking re-election after 24 years as commissioner, comes after a hearing in which the department’s staff and the N.C. Rate Bureau, which represents insurers, squared off. The hearing was necessitated by the two sides’ failure to see eye-to-eye on rates.
The Bureau requested a 12.9 percent increase, the largest hike sought since 1994.
Does this sound like a good way for prices to be determined in a free society? Haggling between a state bureaucrat and a state bureau to “represent” industry?
Where is the consumer in this? Oh, right, the consumer has no choice in whether to purchase insurance for his automobie ? that decision has been forced upon him by the state.
We are supposed to be grateful to Commissioner Long for looking out for us, and as far as that goes, I am. After all, Long didn’t set up this Soviet-styled system. The paper reports:
The Insurance Department estimates that the ruling represents a potential savings of more than $1 billion in premiums for the state’s motorists.
Nevertheless, even becoming the beneficiary of the arbitrary use of state power cannot cause me to forget my Hazlitt; there are winners and losers in every policy change:
… the whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.
