Negative Space: free market
- California never had a free market power failure
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California’s experiment in free market power generation has become mythological in how it is remembered. The left is desperate to tar it as a free market failure. But California’s experiment wasn’t free market. It was a massive government-managed exchange practically designed to cause high prices.
- 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.
- Reagan’s Lincolnian Revolution
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Reagan provided an alternative to the assumption held by both parties that bureaucracy was superior to individual freedom.
- 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
- Incomprehensible Abundance
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“…a society that has just risen above the hand-to-mouth of no-extra-capital needs the essentials. It is only those who are rich who want the cute little thing that’s completely unneeded but makes you feel happy. They’re the only ones willing to pay for it.
“If you’ve ever bought something because you heard about it and you thought ‘oh, that’s cool’ or because you were browsing booths at a county fair (or a science fiction con) and found…. a cute box, or a pretty necklace, much more expensive than something that would fulfill the same function but mass produced? And you bought it? Congratulations. You’re as rich as Lords and Ladies…”
- “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.”
- All Immigrants Are Born on the Fourth of July
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“A personal take on American exceptionalism.”
