bulba > wrote in news:etqtd09j1rmj62fetqebkuc3q72877jli6
@4ax.com:

> On 26 Jun 2004 12:46:36 -0400, (G*rd*n) wrote:
>
>>time. Hence, although "we" are supposedly much richer now
>>than fifty years ago, "we" can no longer afford Welfare,
>>unemployment insurance, free public education, public health,
>>public housing, job health and safety, job training, day
>>care, environmental protection, and so forth.
>
> This is tyranny. Not to mention economic waste.

We can afford all the goods that Gordon mentions; what we cannot afford
is the waste involved in trying to get government to deliver them. For
example, the good in public education is education. We can afford
education. It's cheap. What we cannot so easily afford is public
education - i.e., it's expensive, and wasteful, to use the government to
deliver education. It costs a lot and delivers a poor education. The
good in public health is health. We could afford better health care, if
only the provision of that good were not made artificially sky-high-
expensive by government intervention. In a world where outrageous
computer technology is getting cheaper and cheaper, medical technology
is getting outrageously expensive. I cannot help but feel that if the
market in health care were truly open, e.g., if there were no licensing
and if there were no FDA and if all medications could be had at any drug
store by anyone (i.e. without a prescription), then prices would drop
tremendously. Medicine, like computers, is a field where improvements
are driven by technological advance, and so, like computers, one might
expect prices to plummet from year to year. They do not plummet, but the
"market" in medicine is far from free, the government is heavily
involved - this may explain it.

The logic of government expenditures is not the same as the logic of the
expenditures of private companies. There is a vast gulf of
unaccountability separating government expenditure from the satisfaction
of the government's "customers". The result is that the government takes
the maximum that it can without causing a taxpayer revolt, and
regardless of whether it "needs" the money for anything. So if tomorrow
everyone got ten times as rich, then the government would take probably
about ten times as much. And then it would spend it on the same stuff,
meaning, that in all likelihood, schools would get much more money. And
where would it go? If history is any indication, most of it would go
into the pockets of non-teachers - i.e., the vast bureaucracy that
public school systems have. In short, it would be wasted, or more
precisely, it would be used as a kind of makework welfare, or workfare I
suppose, for public school bureaucrats. A lot would no doubt be grabbed
by teachers' unions to pump up teachers' salaries. A lot would no doubt
be used to build a lot of ugly new buildings with tiny windows that
won't open.