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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In Washington, a crisis isn’t real until it has its own budget line-item. The $3-odd trillion we’ll spend this year is, apparently, a ‘best-case’ scenario. Anything unusual happen; a hurricane, earthquake, wild-fires, or, say, a possible flu epidemic, and we’re going to need extra or ’supplemental’ appropriations. Our federal budget, it seems, is so lean and tight, there simply isn’t any extra money lying around to cover the unexpected ‘crisis.’

This scenario played out yesterday when Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention testified before Congress on the still-anticipated H1N1 ‘pandemic’:

The government’s disease prevention chief said Tuesday that a new vaccine to prevent the spread of the H1N1 virus is expected to be widely successful but warned that cuts to state and local public health programs could hamper a nationwide effort to administer the shots.

Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the House Oversight and Governmental Reform Committee that “decades of underinvestment in public health and public health infrastructure” and the recent furloughing and firing of public health workers as a result of the economic downtown could make it “even more challenging to implement the vaccination program.”

Well, yes, vaccines do cost money. If only we had some money for health and disease prevention. Oh wait:

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