The Monopoly Power of Government
If you dislike the service and selection provided at your local Borders book store, you can use another merchant.? You can go to Barnes and Noble, or a small independent book-seller, or buy from Amazon.? If you don?t like the cheeseburgers at McDonald?s, you can go to Five Guys for lunch instead.? If your apartment is lousy, you can search around for a new one.? If you don?t like your doctor, you can get referred to a different one.? If you don?t like your employer, you can switch jobs.? If you don?t like your friends, you can hang out with other people.? If you don?t like your girlfriend, you can break up with her.
But if you don?t like your current government, you have to find a new country and a new bookstore, burger place, apartment, doctor, job, friends, girlfriend, and more.? You may have to learn a new language, and you will have to make expensive travel arrangements and pay shipping costs for whatever possessions you want to bring along.
This is the monopoly power of government.? There are high costs to shifting the system of laws under which we live, costs that allow our government to charge us far more for the security it provides than the cost of providing it.? These costs are exacerbated by our uncertainty, risk aversion, and limited individual knowledge of our alternatives.? The ?shareholders? of government ? some members of the controlling majority ? may benefit from the profit created by this monopoly power.? Or they may not,? if multiple overlapping majorities simultaneously extract different ?profits? from different groups.? But as a whole, society always suffers.? Economists would say that there is a ?dead-weight loss?.
From this monopoly point of view, the efficient government is one that is not able to price above its cost.? This might be achieved by states so small that people could hop between them without having to change the other circumstances of their lives.? Or it might be fostered by radical decreases in transportation costs.? If a man could live in London and work in New York without suffering any travel costs (time or money), both countries would have less leverage over him.
It is hard to predict what types of laws and regulations would be adopted by the competitive state.? But one thing seems clear.? The redistributive burden thrown on the most productive citizens of a state represents no competitive pricing of the services it provides them.? It is a monopolistic extraction of profit and odious to any person who would have a state treat its citizens equally.
-wallace
Single-Payer Violates Constitution?
On May 26, the New York Times had an article regarding the attempted collaboration by President Obama and the major healthcare industry players to lower costs. In the article, it was discussed how such collaboration could violate anti-trust laws.
Two things occurred to me as I read this: first, legal concerns haven’t stopped this (or other) administrations from violating laws before. Look at how the Troubled Asset Relief Program has been used- not one cent has gone to Relief for Troubled Assets. More importantly, however, I wonder if conservatives have found a new way to attack single-payer health care through anti-trust laws.
When I was a kid, I heard the joke “What is the only monopoly in the country?” “The post office.” The government, which broke up Microsoft for being a monopoly, had the single greatest monopoly in the nation. Similarly, by creating a single-payer system, the government is getting rid of competition. If we follow the logic behind preventing monopolies- because the monopolizing entity controls the product, creation of the product, etc.- having single-payer health care will do exactly that.
A great argument for nationalized health care is the elimination of the cost of insurance marketing- according to the Dennis Kucinich campaign in 2007, it’s around 30% of the cost of business. Single-payer would almost eliminate such costs, bringing administration costs down to about 4%, according to the same members of the Kucinich campaign.
The counter, of course, is why don’t we create monopolies in every aspect of our American markets? Because a no-competition environment creates a situation where a provider can charge basically whatever price it chooses (in the case of health care, the price elasticity is extremely limited), obviously, and it can diminish services however it sees fit. And since the government is made up of people, who are naturally flawed; hires on more people than necessary (unions, politicians, etc.); and tends to take care of its own (http://blog.heritage.org/2009/05/14/morning-bell-the-public-sector-union-threat-to-economic-recovery/), you can guarantee the 26%-or-so of savings will disappear.
My point is simple- beyond every other concern, the same Democrats and liberals who decried Bush’s allegedly unconstitutional/illegal wiretapping, interrogation techniques etc. had better make sure their long-term goals include the same legality they clamored for over the last nine years. Since the ever-so-popular public option is guaranteed to lead to single-payer health care (as Stuart Butler of The Heritage Foundation analogs, would you trust an umpire who worked for the other team? Also, a Republican on the Ways & Means Committee accurately stated that businesses cannot run deficits forever…but governments can), we’d better make damn sure we hold the liberals to the same standard they wanted for us.
-dustin
