Bloomberg News points out that President Obama needs a health-care crisis in order to impose a health-care “solution”:

President Barack Obama returns to Washington next week in search of one thing that can revive his health-care overhaul: a sense of crisis….

“At the moment, except for the people without insurance, we’re not in a health-care crisis,” said Stephen Wayne, a professor of government at Georgetown University in Washington. “You do need a crisis to generate movement in Congress and to help build a consensus.”

This administration has used Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine as a manual. Klein said in an interview that

The Shock Doctrine is a political strategy that the Republican right has been perfecting over the past 35 years to use for various different kinds of shocks. They could be wars, natural disasters, economic crises, anything that sends a society into a state of shock to push through what economists call ‘economic shock therapy’ – rapid-fire, pro-corporate policies that they couldn’t get through if people weren’t in a state of fear and panic.

Whether or not that’s true about the “right-wing” policies that she purported to analyze, the Obama admininstration has taken it to heart. Rahm Emanuel said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.  And this crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before” such as taking control of the financial, energy, information and healthcare industries. Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the president himself all echoed Emanuel’s exultation about the opportunities presented by crisis.

The financial crisis turned out to be shocking enough to let the federal government extend the power of the Federal Reserve, nationalize two automobile companies, spend $700 billion on corporate bailouts and another $787 billion on pork and “stimulus,” and inject a trillion dollars of inflationary credit into the economy. But now people are balking at further expansions of government, and the administration is longing for just a little more crisis to serve as a further opportunity.

If I Only Had a Crisis is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the secretary of state who no doubt thinks of herself as “fourth in the line of succession,” tells a European audience how the Obama administration will pass an agenda that Americans have previously rejected: “Never waste a good crisis … Don’t waste it when it can have a very positive impact on climate change and energy security.”

As I’ve written several times, governments throughout the decades have taken advantage of wars and economic crises to expand their size, scope, and power. Bob Higgs wrote about “Crisis and Leviathan” long before Naomi Klein called it “The Shock Doctrine.”

But the striking thing about the Obama administration is that they openly acknowledge that’s what they’re doing — using a crisis to ram through their entire policy agenda while people are in a state of panic. Projects like national health insurance, raising the price of energy, and subsidizing more schooling — the three prongs of President Obama’s speech to Congress — have nothing to do with solving the current economic crisis. But the administration is trying to push them all through as “stimulus” measures. And they keep proclaiming their strategy.

First it was Rahm Emanuel: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And this crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.” Then Joe Biden: “Opportunity presents itself in the middle of a crisis.”  Not to mention Paul Krugman and Arianna Huffington. And now Hillary.

Not since George Bush the elder told the media that his campaign theme was “Message: I care” has a president been so open about his political strategy. But these people are displaying a contempt for the voters. They’re telling us that we’re so dumb, we’ll go along with a sweeping agenda of economic and social change because we’re in a state of shock. They may be right.

But voters and members of Congress should remember Bill Niskanen’s sobering analysis of previous laws passed in a panic.

Hillary’s Shock Doctrine is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, says free-market advocates spend their careers stockpiling free-market ideas waiting for a crisis that could be used as a springboard for implementing those ideas. But, as David Boaz asks, what about Obama’s policy proposals amid recession and financial crisis?

In today’s Cato Daily Podcast, Boaz exposes Obama’s Shock Doctrine:

We know from history that, while there are a few examples of free-market or somehow right-wing programs coming about after a crisis, usually what happens in a crisis is government seizes more money and power. And you can see that in the New Deal; the Great Depression led to the New Deal. You can see it after Kennedy’s assassination led to Lyndon Johnson and his 100 days of legislation. You can see it in practically every communist government that ever came to power, was in the devastation of war….

We had a financial crisis and what happened? Did the incumbent Republican administration say, now’s our chance to implement Milton Friedman’s program and privatize and deregulate? No, they did what governments always do: they expanded their own powers at the expense of civil society, and so in that sense, Obama’s just doing the same thing that Bush did. We could call this the Bush-Obama era.

It was, after all, Rahm Emmanuel who said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before.”

New Podcast: Obama’s Shock Doctrine is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog