Baumol's cost disease: Anyone here not buy it?

[Kasz216]

badgenome said:

Mr Khan said:
I think the simple issue is that, as far as costs are concerned, the American system is caught in the worst of both worlds, and even with the Affordable Care Act, we still haven't broken on through to the other side where a single-payer system can unilaterally set fair prices, nor are we in a free market where prices have to drop to match what people can actually afford. The quagmire competition of big insurance, those who still lack insurance, and those who are government-supported just means that costs are going to keep pumping upward as the health industry just has access to all the big-money troughs.

It's the same with college, really. The middle system of "government-backed loans" gives colleges free license to pump up fees, unlike if the government simply paid for college or if there were no guaranteed loans at all.

Yeah, exactly.

The thing a lot of people don't realize about Hayek is that he actually advocated redistribution and a minimum wage and standard of living, but he wanted it to be in the form of cash transfers so that it didn't interfere with the price system (in his book, the one unpardonable sin). What we have now has absolutely annihilated any sort of price system. My grandmother consumes an obscene amount of health care and neither knows nor cares what it costs, because it doesn't cost her a red cent. She hits the roof if they so much as send her a bill, even though that bill invariably shows that the government is picking up the tab.

I think it's less that and more, nobody knows who Hayek was.

Or Keynes for that matter.  Most of the stuff done in the name of Keynes is stuff he wouldn't of supported.  His kind of stimulus actually would probably look a lot more "new age conservative" then the one we got.  Tax cuts, and government spending specifically done to help the rich and buisnsesses to keep money flowing.

Policy makers and pundits rarely seem to know anything about what they legislate... and in the few cases where they do, troublingly seem to have no problem completley ignoring it when it goes against what they want.  (See Paul Krugman for example.)