Negative Space: free market
- Exchanging the market for high prices and corruption
- The Democratic health insurance exchange looks like it’s going to make many of the same mistakes politicians made in California when they tried to choke electrical power through a power exchange.
- Gravity-driven health care
- All government programs are market-driven, just like all government buildings are gravity-driven. We cannot escape the laws of nature simply by adding the word “government” to the beginning of a phrase.
- Health care the Chicago way
- You can’t fight the law of supply and demand. All you can do is increase the costs of compliance.
- Krugman: Government intervention always hurts people
- Paul Krugman’s odd end-of-paragraph line appears to be him arguing that he’s usually wrong.
- The precarious value of middlemen
- In a world of choice, a middleman must add value (lower prices, ease of delivery) in addition to their added costs (fewer choices, lower quality, etc.) But the costs are always there. Once a middleman is mandated, there is no longer any need to add value.
- Trying the market, or “No, you are.”
- I think I’ve figured it out. When people say they’ve tried the market and found it wanting, they’re really just trying to deflect criticism of government policies. They’re trying to pretend that the problems government causes are someone else’s fault—in this case, the free market.
More Information
- “It’s Like Déjà Vu All Over Again!”
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“You can control the price but not the cost of goods, services—or money itself.”
- The Myth of Price Controls
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“Most forms of government intervention simply force other people to pay the price, without really changing it. Nothing is more expensive than ‘free’ single-payer government health care—it extracts huge payments from a relatively small group of heavily burdened taxpayers, and creates a dependency class which receives benefits in excess of the minor taxes they pay into the system. This inevitably causes the overall price to increase, because it hinders competition.”
