Friday, October 21, 2011

Rhoads: What We Can Learn From Failures Like The CLASS Act

Jared Rhoads of the Lucidicus Project has a nice OpEd at the 10/20/2011 American Thinker, "What We Can Learn From Failures Like The CLASS Act".

In particular, he discusses wrong ways of thinking about the CLASS act failure, such as Robert Reich's contention that it failed because it wasn't sufficiently coercive.

Instead, Rhoads offers this as the correct lesson:
If you are a policy expert in the throes of designing a new program, and at any point during that process you realize that it cannot work if it is voluntary -- that it must rely on the use of coercive force to "make the numbers work" -- then take that as a signal that what you have concocted is immoral. Scrap what you have and start over. You're violating individual rights.
(Read the full text of "What We Can Learn From Failures Like The CLASS Act")