Thursday, February 05, 2004
Ampersand got this cartoon published. Here's what I said in the comments thread.
ampersand, minor quibble: you are mixing up the terms "market" and "free market"; they aren't interchangable. The cartoon was funny without being mean. I represent panels 1 and 2.
Government interferance with health care is indeed evil, evil. A woman has a right to choose, and her decisions are between her and her healer of choice. Well-intentioned meddling with that violates her privacy and autonomy.
Dumpster diving for medicine is indeed fun. Beats hell out of golf. I haven't found hospitals good locations for dumpster diving. I have better luck at drug stores, apartment complexes, dorms at end of semester. I also have a medicinal herb garden. At times I've been sued by our local health and hospital corporation because my herb patch violates the weed ordinance, and they sent out goons to cut down my marigolds. I digress.
In the short term, government-provided health care, as well as insurance, provides powerful disincentives for people to manage their own health via prevention.
In the longer term, government meddling that makes markets less free takes away incentives to innovate. This is a life or death issue for me.
I'm gonna need a new set of lungs some decade soon, and other life-extension gimmicks, or I will die. The current state of the art won't do.
Markets are really really good at innovation and adaptation, in the same way that ecologies are better than monocultures. Governments aren't.
(There is a subset of public health concerns, like mad cow or yellow fever, where government style command-and-control measures may have some advantage over unconstrained markets; it's an externality problem, we're working on it.)
So when somebody like Bush or Truman comes up with a new boondoggle program to further interfere in medical markets, what I hear is that they are trying to kill me. To which I am adverse.
ampersand, minor quibble: you are mixing up the terms "market" and "free market"; they aren't interchangable. The cartoon was funny without being mean. I represent panels 1 and 2.
Government interferance with health care is indeed evil, evil. A woman has a right to choose, and her decisions are between her and her healer of choice. Well-intentioned meddling with that violates her privacy and autonomy.
Dumpster diving for medicine is indeed fun. Beats hell out of golf. I haven't found hospitals good locations for dumpster diving. I have better luck at drug stores, apartment complexes, dorms at end of semester. I also have a medicinal herb garden. At times I've been sued by our local health and hospital corporation because my herb patch violates the weed ordinance, and they sent out goons to cut down my marigolds. I digress.
In the short term, government-provided health care, as well as insurance, provides powerful disincentives for people to manage their own health via prevention.
In the longer term, government meddling that makes markets less free takes away incentives to innovate. This is a life or death issue for me.
I'm gonna need a new set of lungs some decade soon, and other life-extension gimmicks, or I will die. The current state of the art won't do.
Markets are really really good at innovation and adaptation, in the same way that ecologies are better than monocultures. Governments aren't.
(There is a subset of public health concerns, like mad cow or yellow fever, where government style command-and-control measures may have some advantage over unconstrained markets; it's an externality problem, we're working on it.)
So when somebody like Bush or Truman comes up with a new boondoggle program to further interfere in medical markets, what I hear is that they are trying to kill me. To which I am adverse.
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