Health care, to be sure, isn't the same as a comparatively piddling car rebate program. It's infinitely more important and complex. What you realize with CARS is the narrowness of Congress' attention span -- the inability or unwillingness, if not both at the same time, of our representatives to foresee and plan and execute in a manner consistent with, well, good sense.
Government does a few things incomparably well, such as train armies, and a few things less conspicuously well, such as assist the poor and jobless. What government fails to do with any success at all is harmonize the billions of economic decisions that millions make every day, from what kind of coffee to drink to how many new units of thus-and-so to manufacture for public consumption, and how to price them.
Nancy Pelosi's and Henry Waxman's House of Representatives -- with encouragement from the White House -- thinks it knows exactly how to arrange the multitudinous moving parts that make up the health care industry. What gall! They haven't got a clue. They're projecting instead their ideological notions of what's good for whom, not even knowing where all the money is going to come from in the end.
The cash for clunkers mess, limited though its short-term consequences may prove, is instructive as to the built-in defects of government management. At their worst, markets respond to what customers tell them. Not so elected politicians and the unelected tenants of the bureaucracy, where no incentive exists to profit from service. Rather, the incentive is to amass and conserve institutional power.
If the prudent and sensible this summer know what's what, they'll slap an appropriate label on the legislative abortion shaping up as health care "reform." There's only one thing to call that project -- a clunker.