That's not how we do things in America

President Obama had this to say today.

Consider that just a couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system, and within days, they found a glitch, so they fixed it. I don't remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads or threatening to shut down the company if they didn't. That's not how we do things in America. 

I can't think of anything that is more revealing of the President's utter economic ignorance as to how market choices are made among products (as opposed to government products where you have no choices). 

First of all, Mr. President. When Apple released OS7, 99.9% of it actually worked.  More importantly it was something people voluntarily chose to do. Nobody forced them to use OS7 -- or even an Apple phone. There weren't any fines levied if you didn't buy an Apple.  In fact you have other choices in phones, and, Mr. President, if Apple phones worked as well as the government does, people would run to those other phones in droves and Apple would be out of business. Apple cannot simply tax their customers to make up for their incompetence. 

Mr. President, with all due respect, on what planet did you learn about economics? 

You're right about one thing, though.  That's not how we do things in America. At least the part of America that continually produces things that people want at lower and lower costs every year. 

Misinterpreting the Failures of Obamacare

With weekly revelations of new failures of Obamacare, it is tempting to join the chorus of "I told you so", but that would obscure the much broader and more important "I told you so" involved. To wit:

Obamacare did not fail entirely because it was a bad plan (though it was). It failed because no group of men and women sitting in Washington  -- no matter how smart they are (or think they are in the case of Pelosi and Reid), no matter how many MDs, PhDs or LLDs follow their names, no matter whether a D or R is appended-- can design something that will work better in complex markets than what the markets themselves evolve.

A critical adjunct to this understanding is that markets themselves do not always work well in Version 1.0 (ask anyone who tried to run Windows prior to 1998). It takes constant iteration to approach a well-functioning system. And those iterations are not without casualties. In fact it is failure itself that is the essence of the process and why government will always produce inferior results. In government, iterative failure (and associated learning) is not allowed to happen. Systems are rarely adapted to meet people's needs and desires. People must be manipulated and coerced to fit the system that has been designed.  Government's motto is:

When you try to put a square peg in a round hole, it is the responsibility of the hole to change.