No "right" to a free market

RE: Free Markets

"Your comments about how much money we are spending on healthcare points to one glaringly obvious point. The government is not being responsible with the money we are giving them in the first place!"

Actually, government-run healthcare systems tend to be far more efficient than privatized ones, for a variety of reasons (as I have already pointed out). Medicare, the Canadian health service, and any other govt.-run system you can point at has a far better track record at spending money not on bureaucrats but on actual care, as opposed to HMOs and other private operations, which can spend upwards of 33% of their money on overhead! (Contrast spending under 5% on overhead, for Medicare/Canada, versus the average of 20% for HMOs)

Furthermore, Medicaid (for the poor folks) is a thoroughly means-tested, state-controlled operation that is also very efficient, and follows strict rules for disbursement. Is it as generous as some would like? Probably not, but at the same time I am willing to grant that it does a good job of achieving its goals.

"Proposed: The government take action to ensure that no one, or small group, of healthcare companies has a stranglehold on the marketplace."

This is precisely what I said would be so difficult. The problem is the nature of this market [health care] and not the nature of markets in general. Like I have said before, for most markets this would be a sound proposal. The problem with health care is that it seems you will never be rid of "small group[s]... [with] a stranglehold on the marketplace." But for that, I think I need to outline my thoughts on government intervention in the economy in general, and shift the discussion in that direction.

Free Market Economics: The point here is not to continue discussing health care (as the above facts are easy to look up) but the role of government in markets, vis-a-vis regulation, policing, and outright intervention.

"...the government is great at regulating, and terrible with money. I have seen very little evidence to show otherwise."

You say you cannot find examples of more efficient government operations that private enterprise could not do better, but I say that you are not looking hard enough. Why is it that I, a proponent of government intervention in only limited areas of the economy, can acknowledge the vast superiority of market forces in the majority of the economy, while you seem to imply that nowhere is government able to do better? This sounds more like faith in "markets" (a false idol) than openness and reason to me (twin yokes of the Enlightenment that produced our American government).

Consider that Milton Friedman, the strident intellectual father of libertarian economics in this country, did not promote adherence to "markets" as the default response to every policy problem: Friedman, for all that I find antithetical about his politics, believed that government did a decent job with roads, bridges, dams, and other things. His introduction to a piece about privatizing education is a good primer to understanding how we should intervene in markets with democratic government, and I say that as someone who disagrees with Friedman and his libertarian cohorts on many policy issues. I quote him fully here:

The role assigned to government in any particular field depends, of course, on the principles accepted for the organization of society in general. In what follows, I shall assume a society that takes freedom of the individual, or more realistically the family, as its ultimate objective, and seeks to further this objective by relying primarily on voluntary exchange among individuals for the organization of economic activity. In such a free private enterprise exchange economy, government's primary role is to preserve the rules of the game by enforcing contracts, preventing coercion, and keeping markets free. Beyond this, there are only three major grounds on which government intervention is to be justified. One is "natural monopoly" or similar market imperfection which makes effective competition (and therefore thoroughly voluntary exchange) impossible. A second is the existence of substantial "neighborhood effects," i.e., the action of one individual imposes significant costs on other individuals for which it is not feasible to make him compensate them or yields significant gains to them for which it is not feasible to make them compensate him--circumstances that again make voluntary exchange impossible. The third derives from an ambiguity in the ultimate objective rather than from the difficulty of achieving it by voluntary exchange, namely, paternalistic concern for children and other irresponsible individuals. The belief in freedom is for "responsible" units, among whom we include neither children nor insane people. In general, this problem is avoided by regarding the family as the basic unit and therefore parents as responsible for their children; in considerable measure, however, such a procedure rests on expediency rather than principle. The problem of drawing a reasonable line between action justified on these paternalistic grounds and action that conflicts with the freedom of responsible individuals is clearly one to which no satisfactory answer can be given. [My italics are added for emphasis]

Friedman gives an excellent description of how government intervention in the economy (in particular markets) should be directed, and I take it to be my launching point for thought about these matters (with a few caveats). The last sentence is perhaps the most important part of the 'graf, because most disagreement among reasonable, well-educated political thinkers of my stripe or yours on the matter of government intervention can be explained entirely in terms of this statement.

We have most water utilities, for example, run by the government. Why? The track record of privatized water utilities in Africa and South America is deplorable, with rapidly fluctuating rates that price people out of potable water, dirty/unsanitary water, and high levels of pollutants and carcinogens/terratogens in the water. The control of public water for a community is a "natural monopoly" and the profit-motive can do nothing to improve its delivery on the grand scale. Government control of this sector is therefore the most expedient and intelligent way of going about things. It is arguable how much other government-controlled sectors (say, Education) are like this, but the fact that we know some sectors are should give us pause to think before we conclude that markets are always "improvements."