Does Cash-For-Clunkers tell anything about Healthcare Reform?

Last night the government announced it was suspending the Cash-For-Clunkers program. In my twitterstream I reacted as follows:

dhsmith24 Cash for clunkers suspended w/i a week. What the heck are these guys doing? And they want to run #healthcare?

The doubt this #fail creates is real enough, but there is more, and Hugh Hewitt has expressed it best:

Just as with the tax credit for new home purchases, consumers altered their behavior when presented with an opportunity. Democrats thus have received a second example of an iron law of economics: People respond quickly to significant cash incentives.

The Democrats never get this. They never believe economic actors respond to incentives. There are alway massive unitended consequences of their great economic projects because they are constitutionally unable to work through all the implications of these projects. Democrats are working on a root-and-branch restructuring of the U.S. healthcare system that cannot work as they have currently proposed, they have passed a Cap and Trade energy restucturing plan that may more correctly be called the China Opportunity Act of 2009, and they think they can raise taxes on producers without limit. In every case they totally fail to reckon with the fact that producers will produce less, arrange their affairs to minimize the tax, or in the limit just bail out -- "Go Galt" in the emerging parlance.

But the people are sovereign, this is what they voted for, so all we in the reality-based community can do for now is speak out against things we know cannot work and hope they can be changed in process.