President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

My post said nothing about "the successes of markets." Nor does your post really relate to me or anything I was trying to say. The only dogmatism is what you are reading into my posts. You do that a lot and I usually ignore it. Because all you do is lay drive bys, like this one, on me.

To try to anticipate where you are going (but who knows?). ... Markets behave the way they do. I can point out how various markets typically behave under various conditions. Yes, that is observable (no, it isn't a matter of success or failure). You are reading some kind of value judgment into what I typed -- a free market doesn't guarantee outcomes, or create plentiful resources where they don't exist, or make you warm and fuzzy. It only allows people to transact freely based on the things that each individual values. A command economy takes away that freedom. If it price fixes the price of something -- setting a price ceiling -- it's as good as one of the laws of physics that if demand is elastic. ... you are going to create shortages. And yes, that has been borne out over and over again in practice.

I don't see how anyone actually reading what I have typed can read "dogma" into it. Any more than it would be dogmatic for me to say that throwing an egg against a wall is likely to break it, for example. Or if I found all of the instances of people throwing eggs against the wall and breaking them and pointing it out. That isn't dogma. It is pointing something out (and having an understanding of why it happened).

 

We got crossed. People were talking about single payer systems (Gee went there and I had been responding), when you responded. I mistakenly thought you were saying we need that -- and then were throwing something in about "negotiating" prices. That is why I said I found it mind boggling. Sorry.

In the case of a partial command economy, you pretty much get what Medicare, Medicaid, the HMO Act of 1973, the ACA have brought on us. You create regulatory messes that create inefficiencies in parts of the market -- driving up prices. And you shift costs around, so groups of people end up having to bear the costs for others on top of the runaway costs you cause. There is a reason why for decades prior to Medicare, the cost of healthcare was in line with a broad basket of consumer prices (half of all medical costs were paid for out of pocket). Then the government started interfering with the market -- and price fixing segments of it -- and since then health care costs have taken off relative to other things. That "mixed economy" has not worked to our overall benefit.