Silicon Valley Redneck

The difference between plumbing and science

So: The One has proclaimed that we need a Moon-shot-style program to cure cancer.

Um.

Ya know, in 1961, rocket science was sufficiently advanced that there was a pretty darn clear path to putting a man on the Moon.  Actually doing it was an expensive matter of advanced engineering and very sophisticated experimental plumbing, but it didn't require discovering any new scientific principles.

Discovering the cure for cancer - as if there were such a thing, or cancer were a single disease - is not a simple matter of throwing money at the problem.

Yes, research takes money.  And it takes some reasonable sort of oversight; putting a noted imbecile in charge does not seem like good strategy.

But, consider: if someone did find the cure for cancer, he'd end up mega-rich, no?  So you'd expect promising lines of research to attract loads of private capital?  Like, say, all those biotech startups that come and go, promising dramatic new cancer treatments and then, when the clinical trials don't go so well, turning into pumpkins?

Funny how that works: when there's a real problem, there ought to be big bucks in finding even a partial solution... and sure enough, we find investors already chasing solutions in a decentralized fashion.  Do we really want to sweep it all into a big government program managed by the village idiot?  Handing out the money to those with the best influence, regardless of the merit of their work?

Failure to grok the scale of the problem...

... and its nature, for that matter.

From this article:

He cites the movie Apollo 13. When it looks like the ship is going down, and someone says that this could be “the worst disaster NASA has ever experienced,” Ed Harris’s character says, “With all due respect, sir, I believe this is going to be our finest hour.” This, he says, is the Obama administration’s bunker-mentality.

The quoted Obamacare "navigator" is missing an important difference, here.

The Apollo 13 emergency was purely a technical problem.  The equipment had malfunctioned, and a technical solution was needed.  It was only difficult and dramatic because the failure happened in an inaccessible location, and people's lives depended on coming up with a workable solution in a hurry, with materials available on site.

So, think of it being on the scale (and nature) of just one of those "glitches" with the website.

In the case of Obamacare, there are many visible technical problems, which are almost certainly masking further technical problems which lurk deeper in the website and its back-end.

Worse, though, is the vast and tangled web of social problems involved in implementing the greatest tax-farming scheme in human history.  As noted in the article: people who have actually "found out what's in it" just aren't biting.  And that's on the demand side; on the supply side, we have yet to see how many doctors will settle for Obamacaid payment schedules.

It's a fine example of the conceit of central planners, and the ITCPAMOTM fallacy: "If They (i.e., a team of actual rocket scientists) Can Put A Man On The Moon, then... well, surely We (i.e., a self-selected group of liberal-arts majors who keep telling each other how smart we are) Can [fill in the blank with a vastly larger, more complex, and more expensive task requiring dictatorial powers and whose failure risks the lives of tens of millions of people and not just three].

Putting a man on the Moon was an expensive exercise in known physics and advanced engineering, and the only lives risked were those of volunteers.  Exercises in central economic planning are different in kind, and risk the lives of the unwilling public.