The Health Czar Can't Calculate

Mises Daily by Edgardo Tenreiro | Posted on 4/30/2009 12:00:00 AM

Experts agree that our healthcare system is unsustainable and in need of reform to promote better coordination, accountability, outcomes, and cost effectiveness.[1] Regrettably, they also seem to agree that we need a robust central-planning authority — a health czar — to make this coordination happen.

But as economist Ludwig von Mises proved in his 1920 treatise "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,"[2] under central planning any rational economic calculation, that is, any method to efficiently allocate resources, is practically and theoretically impossible — not just of higher cost, lower quality, and reduced innovation; not just uncoordinated, inefficient, and ineffective; but literally impossible. FULL STORY.