A little clarification
By now several folks will have concluded I'm some Socialist that hates the free market system and wants to redistribute all the wealth evenly to all the citizens of (and illegal aliens in) the country.
BZZZT! Wrong.
Capitalism is great. Free markets are the best. Anyone who doubts that should think about how a team of people could support themselves while inventing the transistor, figuring out how to use it and manufacture it, spreading the word of the existence of the new things it made possible, selling the things and collecting the proceeds of the sales. No, I fully recognize and deeply appreciate the power of the greed it all inspires.
What I am against is the ahistorical belief that the free market is self-sustaining, and the ideal means of rationing all things. That we should monitize whatever we can, simply because we can.
We as a people have made choices. We do not want to see people starve without cause, we do not want to see people homeless without cause, we do not want to see people suffer from illness without cause. And the fact is, any time you seriously make a choice about the nature of general conditions…which requires following through, by the way…you take things out of free market conditions. And because we don't want to see these things, we will either prevent them from happening or remove those to whom it happens from our sight. The cheaper cheaper option is the market based solution.
We as a people have made choices. It seriously is well past time people stop pretending otherwise, because we can seriously damage the legal and social mechanisms that keep the free market going. I'm pretty sure we've already given it a nasty kick in the shin.
