I have been rather busy over the past week with work and other things so to ease the inactivity I thought I would simply quote from Hazlitt (quoting Sumner) about the Forgotten Man. It is important to always think about the Forgotten Man when considering whatever the latest political ideal floating around is...as Bastiat would say, to see what is not seen, to understand the full effects of a policy, not just the immediate.

In the course of our study, also, we have rediscovered an old friend. He is the Forgotten Man of William Graham Sumner. The reader will remember that in Sumner’s essay, which appeared in 1883:

As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X or, in the better case, what A, B and C shall do for ... .. What I want to do is to look up C.... I call him the Forgotten Man.... He is the man who never is thought of. He is the victim of the reformer, social speculator and philanthropist, and I hope to show you before I get through that he deserves your notice both for his character and for the many burdens which are laid upon him.

It is a historic irony that when this phrase, the Forgotten Man, was revived in the 1930s, it was applied, not to C, but to X; and C, who was then being asked to support still more Xs, was more completely forgotten than ever. It is C, the Forgotten Man, who is always called upon to stanch the politician’s bleeding heart by paying for his vicarious generosity.

I would also like to quote from Friedman's 1991 discussion of Gammon's law and healthcare as it seems relevant - there is no doubt in my mind that Rudd is going to come out soon, whether as an election promise or a radical pre-election move, and propose to drastically increase federal involvement in healthcare.

"[Gammon] was led to enunciate what he called "the theory of bureaucratic displacement." In his words, in "a bureaucratic system . . . increase in expenditure will be matched by fall in production. . . . Such systems will act rather like `black holes,' in the economic universe, simultaneously sucking in resources, and shrinking in terms of `emitted production.'"

I suggest everyone read the full (brief) article as it will hopefully shed some light on why more government involvement in healthcare is a bad idea.

"Shutting it [the government healthcare venture] down is an admission of failure, something none of us is prepared to face if we can help it. And they need not shut it down. Instead, in entire good faith, the backers can contend that the apparent lack of success is simply a result of not carrying the venture far enough. If they are persuasive enough, they can draw on the deep pockets of the tax-paying public, while replenishing their own, to finance a continuation and expansion of the venture. Little wonder that unsuccessful government ventures are generally expanded rather than terminated."

Sounds familiar doesn't it.