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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: thames_sider who wrote (67589)	10/16/2008 4:28:44 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

It's routine operations and the like, and success/failure is easy to determine. Success or failure can be determined, but not all successes or failures are identical, and not all conditions going in to the operation are the same. Also much routine care isn't operations, or things that have such clear success/failure results. -- Mass health care can't be a textbook perfect case of an ideal market, but successes aren't limited to such ideal cases. In the real world you rarely if ever encounter the ideal, but the market still usually works pretty well none the less. In an ideal textbook perfect market, even the most wise, clever, intelligent, energetic, compassionate but focused on efficiency, honest, non-biased regulator, bureaucrat, or politician imaginable couldn't improve on the market results, because they wouldn't have the dispersed information of participants in a market with active flexible price signals. In markets that go beyond the normal imperfect market, and have worse defects than usual combining things like severely asymmetrical information, compressed time horizons, high barriers to entry and/or other defect, it may be possible that the theoretical ideal bureaucrat or politician could produce better results than the market, but such people are rather hard to find, to say the least, and even if you did find them, they would be subject to more normal less ideal politics from voters, other politicians, organized political groups etc. OTOH its not like many (at least not many in the US) would argue for a purely socialized health care system, so its not like you need the ideal, perfect beyond reasonable possibility, government decision maker, to possibly improve things. But pointing out problems with the market isn't enough to make a reasonable case for heavy government intervention, since in the real world heavy government intervention has all sorts of problems of its own. People present "market failure", or even just "imperfect markets", as if that alone was enough justification for extensive intervention in markets, ignoring all the informational problems and public choice issues involved in political decisions about intervention.