Negative Space: exchange
- ACLU enables Texas textbook takeover
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If you give the government a gun, some politician or bureaucrat somewhere is going to pull the trigger. Make sure that whatever powers you cede to the government are powers you want them to exercise.
- Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy
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Economics is an important topic, because unlike every other complex field, “from botany to brain surgery”, we cannot avoid taking part: while we can, and usually should, refuse to perform brain surgery, we should not refuse to vote for politicians (and, in some states, initiatives) that have wide-ranging economic effects.
- Economies of scale and government-run health care
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Economies of scale only produce lower prices when people are allowed a choice of service providers—including the choice to forego the service. Government-run programs do not benefit from economies of scale—in fact, scaling up will cause increased prices when the industry is run by the government.
- 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.
- Firewall affordable care act failures
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Because Senate Democrats are not going to repeal the mess that is the ACA, we need to firewall the failing parts of it in order to keep health care and health insurance costs from escalating too much.
- Health care reform: walking into quicksand
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The first step, when you walk into quicksand, is to walk back out. Health providers today are in the business of dealing with human resources departments and government agencies. Their customers are bureaucrats. Their best innovations will be in the fields of paperwork and red tape. If we want their innovations to be health care innovations, their customers need to be their patients.
- 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.
- 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.
