Jasen Comstock

jeffmiller:

crazynutjob:

“The marketplace provides the best health care ever! Hooray for free markety-ness!”

— Robot Heart: Sex, Religion, and Politics: Health Care stories from the United States

I can’t think of an area with more convoluted regulation than the intersection of the health-care and insurance industries in the US. Is there really someone out there arguing that the current system is free market driven? I’m pretty sure tax law has a bigger impact on what you pay for a given procedure in this country than supply or demand of health services. There are several significant barriers that stand in the way of having an efficient market for health care, many of which are considered “good things” by the vast majority of the US (c.f. Arrow). However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t many ways that our wonderful lobbyists can’t work with legislators to make the system worse than the status quo. When in doubt, it’s typically safe to assume that the government will make things less efficient. Please-all solutions will most certainly have that effect.

Progressives seem to think it’s still the 1880s, and that their enemies are Rockefeller and Carnegie.  Guess what?—we free-market types lost the argument around 1900, and the coffin was nailed shut when FDR threatened to pack the Court in 1937.  This world around us?—it’s heavily regulated.  You won.  You got zoning, and wage and hour laws, union protections and antitrust, the FDA, OSHA, CERCLA, and RCRA, wetland protections, an endangered species act, automobile standards, light bulb legislation, and five million other acronyms, rules, regulations, laws, edicts, and orders.  You got medical licensing and Medicare and Medicaid and pharmaceutical testing.  Yes, sometimes a little bit of all of this gets peeled away, but it’s always ten steps forward for every one step back.  Every year, there are more rules and regulations on the books than the year before.  And yet, when things go wrong, it’s always us free market advocates to blame.

Memo to the Progressives:  We’ve been living in your regulatory state for over a hundred years.  It isn’t our fault.  Free-market libertarians have never held an important office; the only libertarianish Presidential candidate lost in a landslide.  If you want a villain, and if you can’t bear to look in the mirror, then look to corporatist Republicans—the ones that write regulations and laws for moneyed interests, the ones who carve exceptions, the ones who dole out favors to their friends, and punishments to their enemies.  These are your villains, because these people have actually had power.

Stop acting as if we won.  We didn’t.  You did.  I’m sorry that you’re shocked that a hundred years of regulation haven’t brought us to utopia.  And we’ll all be sorry that you think things will get better with more of the same.

Memo to Libertarians.  I swear to jeebus I would never accuse you of winning anything.