You’ve heard of the “ratchet effect,” the notion that once government has assumed a new set of powers — usually during a crisis — it never surrenders all of those powers once the crisis subsides. Jonah Goldberg tells National Review Online readers that the concept is popular among both conservatives and liberals. But Goldberg doesn’t buy into the notion that the ratchet effect is applicable to Obamacare.
What ratchet-effect proponents on the right and left get wrong is that popularity is overrated. For starters, popularity alone doesn’t justify a program. If Congress passed legislation giving every American a puppy plus $10,000 in cash, the program might be very popular, but that alone wouldn’t make it a good idea.
Many conservatives and liberals talk about the entitlement ratchet as if it’s an iron law of the universe. But there’s precedent for bad ideas — even entitlements — being modified or undone. In the 1990s, for example, Washington reformed welfare. In the 1980s, Congress dropped catastrophic health insurance like a hot rock.
And we shouldn’t assume that a majority of Americans will like Obamacare once they get to know it. Its list of unintended consequences is already long and still growing. (Just ask the administration officials listening to complaints from organized labor.) If the program lives down to the promise of its website — already arguably the biggest IT disaster in American history — then you can be sure it won’t be popular.
But, again, popularity is overrated. The relevant economist on this point isn’t Higgs but Mancur Olson, who argued that modern societies tend to produce interest groups (also known as lobbies) that undermine the public good for private gain. Virtually everyone wants to get rid of mohair subsidies, but almost no one cares about getting rid of them as much as the subsidy’s recipients care about keeping them. Large majorities of Americans oppose racial preferences, but few are willing to take on the activists — and journalists — eager to demonize critics of such policies. Head Start doesn’t work very well, but it’s politically immortal.
The White House hopes that Obamacare will create a coalition of interests — including such diverse groups as people with preexisting conditions and hospital conglomerates — that will defend the law, regardless of the social costs.
No one knows if that strategy will work.