Hobby Lobby wins, but the rest of us already lost

The Supreme Court ruled that Hobby Lobby cannot in fact be forced to pay for abortifacent coverage for its employees after all. Last I checked (about an hour ago) Facebook was just beginning to pile up its usual combination of delight and outrage. By the time you see this, dear reader, it will certainly be in full bloom.

Yet I can’t help but feel anti-climactic about it all, for the “contraception mandate” has problems far, far deeper than this – problems that have been completely lost in the culture battle.

Somehow, with hardly a whimper of objection, we all supposedly acquiesced in the notion that the government can and should force firms to provide a service to their employees (contraception insurance); that said service must have a price ceiling; and that said price ceiling must be zero.

Forget religious objections; anyone who believes in a genuinely free market should be appalled at this kind of intervention.

For those upset about employers having any influence on birth control availability, I have news for you: they’d rather not be involved either. This is the result of earlier distortions – starting with Congress making health insurance a deductible expense for firms, but providing no such deduction or credit for individuals, combined with the requirement that birth control require a prescription. Addressing either would make it easier to leave the employer just where (s)he would rather be – out of this discussion.

Instead, we get the “mandate,” which makes a distorted market even more distorted, vaporizes the incentive to buy generic birth control…and thus leads to the real purpose in my view – a nice payoff to Big Pharma for its heavy lifting in getting the Patently Deficient and Unaffordably Careless Act through Congress in the first place.

In short, this was simply 21st Century corporatism by another name, and thanks to everyone’s eagerness to fight the Kulturkampf, Big Business and Big Government got away with it…again.

So while I’m glad Hobby Lobby won, the simple fact is that the rest of us (save Big Pharma) already lost.

@deejaymcguire | facebook.com/people/Dj-McGuire | DJ’s posts

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