Negative Space: free market
- Capitalism is not an ism
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Capitalism is not a system—it’s just what people do when they get together peacefully. When people complain about capitalism, they’re really saying that they want more power over what people do when they get together peacefully.
- 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.
- TXU bets against deregulation and loses
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TXU was once the government-sponsored monopoly energy provider in Texas. They just went bankrupt, apparently because they expected a free market to act like a government 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.”
- The Mainspring of Human Progress
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“For 60 known centuries, this planet that we call Earth has been inhabited by human beings not much different from ourselves… But down through the ages, most human beings have gone hungry, and many have always starved… The Roman Empire collapsed in famine. The French were dying of hunger when Thomas Jefferson was President of the United States. As late as 1846, the Irish were starving to death; and no one was particularly surprised because famines in the Old World were the rule rather than the exception… Hunger has always been normal… Down through the ages, countless millions, struggling unsuccessfully to keep bare life in wretched…”
- When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake
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“Boris Yeltsin and a handful of Soviet companions made an unscheduled 20-minute visit to a Randall’s Supermarket after touring the Johnson Space Center. Between trying free samples of cheese and produce and staring at the meat selections, Yeltsin roamed the aisles of Randall's nodding his head in amazement.”
