If you’ve been around the business world, you’ve probably seen all sorts of acronyms: EBIT, DOD, BOC, NPV, ROI, and so on. Well, here’s an important one that’s not yet in everyone’s lexicon: OPM – Other People’s Money. It’s the simple principle that people don’t have the same concern for costs and benefits in making decisions when they’re spending other people’s money. The corollary is ‘no one washes a rental car’.
Mark Steyn has a great article about the problems with Obamacare and leaving people in control of their own destiny:
American conservatives’ problem with RomneyCare is the same as with ObamaCare — that, if the government (whether state or federal) can compel you to make arrangements for the care of your body parts that meet the approval of state commissars, then the constitution is dead…
Mitt should have known that. As he should know that government intervention in college loans has absurdly inflated the cost of ludicrously overvalued credentials and, in a broader sense, helped debauch America’s human capital. As he should know that government intervention in the mortgage market is why every day more and more American homeowners are drowning in negative equity.
Thus, when people talk to me about making improvements in Obamacare, I tend to cringe because they overlook the simple fact that everything about it is fundamentally founded on the wrong principles.