Yes, I agree with that, in principle.

I'd argue that the free market is generally very good at producing quality and driving down cost through competition, thus making products and services (including ones that are societal needs) more accessible to more people. Thus, the free market has an important role in providing even societal needs like health care.

But, all of us agree that that does not mean that the free market can provide a service to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. So if we, as a society, determine that a particular product or service is essential for everyone to have, no matter what, then yes, we will necessarily need government policy to help out (lacking private charities, which at least when it comes to health care have proven inadequate). But even then, the free market has a role in keeping costs down in order to save the taxpayer money.

I think you and I probably disagree on the extent to which the free market keeps costs down in health care, and that's a fair disagreement. I'd argue that much of the cost control problem we have has actually result of too much government distortion of the free market, but I imagine you see it differently. That's fine. I'd be happy if you'd agree for now that, in general, the free market does have a role in providing people will basic needs (ie. keeping costs down to limit the amount of subsidies that the government has to pay to the poor).

If you're now saying it's absolute nonsense, well, I'm glad you're coming around. Good night.

Government never proposed to “don a stethoscope.” That's absolute nonsense, and completely untrue. I do remember our “conversation” about writing people checks, but it made no sense then, and it doesn't make any more sense now.

I'm done with this particular discussion.

Sorry, Kathy, I've repeatedly said the opposite. A functioning market works to everyone's benefit, but it will not–and has no moral authority to–play a charitable role redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. That's properly government's job, which it should not by donning a stethoscope itself, but by writing people checks. Remember our conversation about liquor and gigolos?

I have never argued that the free market is not good at providing goods and services to people who have good jobs and disposable income to spend.

Not precisely, no. But you've nevertheless lobbied long and hard against it, six times a day, for the “public good.” If it actually benefits the majority of the public that holds jobs and enjoys incomes, how do you justify trying so hard to tear it down?

In a well-running market, demand creates supply, as if by magic. If you go to the store hoping to buy rice, they have it. Need an affordable place to live? You won't find your dream castle for nothing, but you'll have a range of choices at a range of price points.

And this:

This all sounds simple, but gathering all the data on who wants what and how much they're willing to pay and who can be engaged to produce it and when it will appear and how much it will cost is extremely complex. When a central agency tries to take it all on, they never do it well.

And this:

The invisible hand doesn't “know” anything in advance; its advantage over the central agency is flexibility. When people start to need things (or when someone anticipates people will start to need things), suppliers can react quickly to provide them.

and this:

Given a finite number of people and money to put to work, where to allocate resources for the greatest overall benefit is a daunting, almost hopeless problem. Until you distribute the problem to millions of people and let each of them solve a little piece of it. That's the secret of the invisible hand.

is not true. At best, it is a misleading half-truth. You have presented it as absolute truth, with no qualifiers or caveats, and it is not true with no qualifiers or caveats.

I have never argued that the free market is not good at providing goods and services to people who have good jobs and disposable income to spend. This entire discussion is about the societal needs that the free market CANNOT provide. And all along, you have been swearing up and down to me that the free market is absolutely and by far the best way and the only good way to provide, not just goods and services, but the necessities of life to those who cannot afford them. Like food, clothing, a safe and decent place to live, and, yes, access to basic health care if you have no money to pay for it, or if it's priced at astronomically high levels way beyond the means of most Americans. And that was — you should pardon the expression — a lie. I'm angry, because I feel like you're playing games with me. You know darn well that there are many human needs and public goods (goods as in benefits, not products) that the free market either cannot provide or cannot provide comprehensively or efficiently. Good public schools, public transportation, parks, bridges, highways, playgrounds, a place to live, garbage collection, police and fire services, are all things that government can provide more efficiently and comprehensively — far more so — than the free market, which functions around the principle of profit, not human need.

So if you're telling me now that you agree with me that this is true, that the free market is useful in only a limited circumscribed set of realities, then you've been playing games with me all this time, and I really resent it.

Please don't even post again to me on this if you're just going to play the same game of pretending it was obvious all along that you meant B when you wrote A.

Yes, Kathy, you've summarized it exactly. That's where the market's usefulness stops. The glass is half empty, or in other words half full.

Rosseauian, and more (worse).

What Soft Irony. [chuckle]

“We can't have a particular public policy because you can't have total agreement from 300 million Americans and people are going to disagree over ranked order preferences?”

Don't make that Soft Irony materialize again. We don't require unanimity. However, what we don't “require” and certainly don't want is the current year's experience of an increasingly extremist group of Democrats who are acting in ways that alienate the majority and do not do what the majority (fifty per cent plus one of the voters) want. The House climate bill was a remarkable example of this, and it and related misconduct has underpinned the broad intelligent public displeasure with the Dems and concern about what they may wish to do or threaten to do about health care.

I won't even bother adding much about the superiority of the approval vote, the applicability of proportional representation in a body like the House of Representatives, or what defines a supermajority where such a thing is appropriate in place of “fifty per cent plus one,” as you may not appreciate or even understand these or why they merit thought related to what is currently being discussed.

And the guy who really did make those wacky claims to support a guaranteed minimum income really was a Nutty Law Professor. Thank goodness we may not have many of them in ObamaCo (or at least one fewer now, with the loss of Van Jones due to embarrassment and disgrace).

Sandy, what do you think the government is? People, right? And where do those people come from? Mars?

You appear to be supremely confident in your ability to discern what “we the people” want in the way of all sorts of policies.

Well, I have never taken the phrase “we, the people” so literally that I think I am the entire people, but YMMV. I'm really not sure why the concept of the American people deciding what the priorities should be, as individuals, as groups, via the people they elect and the pressure they bring to bear on their elected officials, is such a difficult one to grasp. It doesn't mean that 300 million people get together in a little meeting room. It means that we, as Americans, as citizens, as “the people,” get to decide what we think is most important to do in this country. I really don't know how to make it any more clear than that, and I don't know why it's such an alien or foreign idea.

I googled “Arrow's impossibility theorem” and it looks to me like it's about making up some faux-scientific-mathematical gobbledy-gook to declare impossible something that is the most basic element of a democracy: the people get to decide what kind of a country they want to have. Basically, what it seems to be saying is that you can't have social welfare policies because you can never get every last individual in the country to agree on any one particular goal and still at the same time decide how to rank priorities in order of preference.

And my response is, Say WHAT? I mean, what kind of garbage is that? We can't have a particular public policy because you can't have total agreement from 300 million Americans and people are going to disagree over ranked order preferences? That really is not a very well-thought-out conclusion there, Sandy. I would suggest that you take your own advice and think long and hard and carefully about what the implications might be of believing that it's not possible for the citizens of a democracy to shape public policy and decide what those policies should be.

As for your views on the role of government in resource allocation, you wrote:

“We choose the people who make the government so that the government can carry out what *we* decide the priorities should be.”

You appear to be supremely confident in your ability to discern what “we the people” want in the way of all sorts of policies. I suggest that you google the phrase “Arrow's impossibility theorem” and give the whole concept of the “people's will” a bit of sober reflection.

Finally, you continue to categorize people as either “for” or “against” government. That's absurd, for reasons I've already pointed out and you choose to ignore. In fact, it's not merely absurd, it's a McCarthyite tactic.

I take your word for it, but when you write things like this, in response to Dr. J's description of the free market model and why it has merit, it leaves room for some to wonder:

“The above is a fantasy.”

I think there is room for both sides to be more clear in their positions, as I attempted to do in my last comment.

So, yes, a balance does need to be struck. I support the free market, but government policy does need to step in to minimize the unfairness that can sometimes result. I've explained more about my views on this and why it means there is an important role for government, especially in the areas of education and health care, in this post: http://sovereignmind.wordpress.com/2008/10/11/f…

But, as we design government policy, we need to recognize that any attempt to level the playing field is implicitly restricting the free market's ability to generate growth (efficiency vs. fairness), so that means that we have to:

1) Balance the benefit of any particular goverment policy to create a more fair system against the detrimental affect to over-all growth. More fair does not always equal better (ie. if we're both poor, that's not better than one of us being poor and the other rich, of course. There are other more nuanced examples: if I can make a poor person 5% richer, but in doing so I make a rich person 25% poorer, is that a good trade-off? How about if I can make you 10% richer, but I have to restrict the freedom of everyone else? This is were the difficult questions come that separate most conservatives and liberals).

2) Design the government policy carefully so that we don't unnecessarily restrict growth (We are at risk of doing this when our motivation for the policy we want to enact is to punish the greedy free marketeers).

Yes, I did forget that quote. Thank you for reminding me. It's a good one.

I can be quite enthusiastic about the fire department without subscribing at all to your astonishing claim that “The government IS the people.”

What an incredibly bizarre statement. Here, read this, maybe it'll sound familiar to you:

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. …

Bearing in mind Godwin's Law, I nonetheless have to say that a statement like yours comes a little too close to “ein reich, ein volk” for my taste.

Only if you think that Nazi Germany is synonymous with the very concept of government. And since you're new here, I'll just let you know that your comparison is not only ahistorical, but deeply offensive to me personally, since my parents were Holocaust survivors. My father believed deeply in the importance of government and governance, and in the ability of government to improve people's lives — and my father was not, as you might guess, an admirer of Nazi Germany.

The government is an agency of a majority of voters. It can do some things well, but determining the allocation of all resources in an economy is way above its pay grade.

Government can do a significant number of things better than the “free market,” and I did not at any point say or suggest that government should determine the allocation of all resources in an economy. I don't know where you picked that up from, but it wasn't from anything I wrote.

In a well-running market, demand creates supply, as if by magic. If you go to the store hoping to buy rice, they have it. Need an affordable place to live? You won't find your dream castle for nothing, but you'll have a range of choices at a range of price points. Want illegal drugs? Visit the right corner of town, and it turns out a bunch of criminals have gone to extraordinary trouble to make some available.

This all sounds simple, but gathering all the data on who wants what and how much they're willing to pay and who can be engaged to produce it and when it will appear and how much it will cost is extremely complex. When a central agency tries to take it all on, they never do it well. You get bread shortages in stores. You get rent control giving existing tenants a sweet deal, while people who need a place to live can't find one at any price. Some things get priced too cheap and they run out. Other things are priced too high, nobody buys them, and they go to waste.

The invisible hand doesn't “know” anything in advance; its advantage over the central agency is flexibility. When people start to need things (or when someone anticipates people will start to need things), suppliers can react quickly to provide them. When there's a bumper crop of avocados, or an unusually lean harvest, prices adjust quickly to throttle demand so it matches supply. When someone starts a business with a good idea that meets people's needs well, they get rewarded. When someone starts one with a bad idea that no one wants, they quickly are forced to close their doors, and the people and capital freed to find something useful to do.

Given a finite number of people and money to put to work, where to allocate resources for the greatest overall benefit is a daunting, almost hopeless problem. Until you distribute the problem to millions of people and let each of them solve a little piece of it. That's the secret of the invisible hand.

The above is a fantasy. It's not reality. First of all, the “free market” you describe here does not work for anyone who does not have the money to buy into it. If the “market” decides that you are not conducive to profit, your scenario does not do a thing to help. Thus, the concept of affordable housing is a complete non-starter for the “free market” unless government steps in to provide incentives. There may be, and in fact are, millions of Americans who need subsidized housing. Doesn't matter how many there are — the “invisible hand” is not going to have anything for those people.

That's just one example, but the bottom line is that any societal need that does not or is not likely to generate profit is not going to be adequately met by the “invisible hand” of the free market.

And by the way, nothing in what you wrote above even gives so much as a suggestion of a hint that you understand the “free market” cannot fix things it was not designed to fix. The entire thrust of your original comment is that the “free market” steps in to fill the public's needs in a highly efficient, focused way. A need comes up, the market responds and meets it. That's what you describe. And it just ain't so.

Politicians pass laws on the basis of what will make the best sound bites and which lobbyists are crossing their palms, leaving the system more wasteful and less fair than when they started. “Ha, see?” the liberals crow, “I told you free markets didn't work.”

Well, I'm glad to know that you are aware of how thoroughly intertwined government and private business are. I'm glad to know you want to end, or at least seriously reform, the incredibly corrupt relationship between corporate lobbyists and government. Dick Cheney's secret energy task force, top-level connections between the Enron scandal and the Bush administration, the savings and loan scandal in the Reagan administration, the millions of dollars oil companies give to the campaigns of friendly politicians — I would never have guessed you felt the same way about that as I do.

There is some common ground, at least, eh?

I can be quite enthusiastic about the fire department without subscribing at all to your astonishing claim that “The government IS the people.” Bearing in mind Godwin's Law, I nonetheless have to say that a statement like yours comes a little too close to “ein reich, ein volk” for my taste. The government is an agency of a majority of voters. It can do some things well, but determining the allocation of all resources in an economy is way above its pay grade.