The Moral Hazard of Big Governments

If you tried to buy a homeowners’ insurance policy for much more than the actual value of your home, no one would sell it to you.  The reason is that having such a policy would enable one to prosper financially were the home somehow to be destroyed.  This creates for you, what is called a “moral hazard“.   You have a significant financial incentive to do something wrong.  It is anathema for the insurance industry designed to protect against risk to enable such a risk.

So what if you were a government bureaucrat in possession of the power to help a business to prosper financially by doing something wrong?  Imagine if you had the power to wave your pen and deliver one million new clients to a purveyor of a particular product.  Some might say you have a moral hazard.   Just as insurance companies have a duty not to create that risk, so do those in charge of taxpayer funds.

In New York, some public employees concerned about side effects, and their civil liberties, are protesting because Dr. Richard Daines, New York State health commissioner has mandated that they receive the h1n1 vaccines or be fired.   Did the Governor order this?  No, an unelected bureaucrat essentially placed the order with the vaccine manufacturers.

In Missouri, prior to 2002, all mandated vaccines were voted into law by Legislators.  In that year, the appointed Director of the Department of Health added to the list of mandated vaccines, a compound against Chicken Pox.  With one stroke of the pen, a single bureaucrat created a demand for fresh orders for hundreds of thousands of doses of the vaccine, annually.  One can speculate about the profit in those orders.

In Texas, Governor Perry, usually a solid conservative got loopy over the Gardasil fervor and mandated that girls in his State receive the controversial vaccine against a sexually transmitted disease.   Girls as young as nine years old now have the State forcing upon them conversations about promiscuity and sexually transmitted disease.

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