It’s true that the freedom to make your own decisions comes with both benefits and consequences, but Krugman is squarely focused on just one side of that equation.
by Eric Boehm
Reason.com
Writing in The New York Times, Nobel Prize-winning columnist Paul Krugman offers a unified theory of everything wrong with America: We’re just too free to choose.
Krugman says this is the lesson to be learned from last month’s energy crisis in Texas that left some of the state’s residents—people who had freely chosen to sign-up for variable rate offerings from their electric service providers—with sky-high bills when demand surged as the state’s generating supply crashed. People can’t be trusted to choose their electric service, he argues, because some will make ill-informed decisions that come with unexpected costs. From there, he expands this thesis to a general principle, one that he says is to blame for everything from rising health insurance premiums to the subprime mortgage meltdown of a decade ago.