Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), the same Sen. Durbin who put the language in last February’s Omnibus spending bill to eliminate the D.C.Opportunity Scholarship Program (DCOSP), now says he might be open to reauthorizing the program.
The Wall Street Journal Reports:
I have to work with my colleagues if this is going to be reauthorized, which it might be,” said Mr. Durbin at an appropriations hearing Tuesday morning. He also said that he had visited one of the participating private schools and understood that “many students are getting a good education from the program.
Talk of reauthorizing the program represents a 180 degree turn for Sen. Durbin, one of the program’s harshest critics to date. Sen. Durbin’s acknowledgement of the program’s positive impact puts him among a number of others who were originally skeptical about the program but later admitted the educational benefit of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.
The residents of the District of Columbia want this program. 70% of D.C. residents want the program to continue and a majority of the D.C. City Council members have signed a letter asking the program to be reauthorized. Now, it is up to Congress to do the will of the people and reauthorize it.
So claimed Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) in the Senate Finance Committee debate on Tuesday morning. The “public option” would create the “choice” of a new government-run health insurance plan to “compete” with private insurance in the free market. If Adam Smith means choice, competition and free markets then he would favor the public option. Rockefeller went so far as to claim that “Adam Smith would have cooked up this amendment” establishing the public option. Members of the committee did not see it that way, and the amendment was defeated. But does Rockefeller seriously think Adam Smith’s principles are consistent with the government-run healthcare?
This view depends on the patently false idea that competition would be enhanced by the addition of a new player – the government – in the insurance market. The problem is that government, by definition, isn’t just another economic player, and will always tend to want to control markets for its political purposes. That threatens economic as well as political liberty. (Hmmm . . . isn’t this why we favor free markets in the first place?)
Adam Smith himself long ago debunked the idea that government charters, giving a corporation exclusive privileges to engage in a particular type of business, enhanced competition. Far from it, government intervention would prevent competition by restraining the private market from having true competition in prices, products and free exchange. Smith lamented the old mercantilist policies of Europe which, like the “public option” plan, did not allow competition and choice:
The policy of Europe occasions a very important inequality in the whole of the advantages and disadvantages of the different employments of labour and stock, by restraining the competition in some employments to a smaller number than might otherwise be disposed to enter into them.
The exclusive privileges of corporations are the principal means it makes use of for this purpose. The exclusive privilege of an incorporated trade necessarily restrains the competition, in the town where it is established, to those who are free of the trade.
Anyone who is remotely familiar with Smith’s ideas, let alone the basic ideas of introductory market capitalism, knows how implausible Rockefeller’s claim is. Adam Smith wasn’t there to defend himself in the committee hearing, but we should—not just for his sake, but for the sake of the liberty he defended and we have long enjoyed.