Prices

Ordinarily I agree with John Stossel.

Healthcare in Canada is not free. Constantly full waiting rooms and long waits for procedures are not an unavoidable fact of life but a product of a "priceless" supply system, where waiting for service acts as a rationing substitute for the market price.

Thomas Mun set forth what would become the standard mercantilist line.

The question of the relation of cost to value is properly only a concrete form of a much more general question — the question of the regular relations between the values of such goods as in causal interdependence contribute to one and the same utility for our well-being.

Alleged deficiencies could be removed by a reform of the laws concerning liability for damages inflicted and by rescinding the institutional barriers preventing the full operation of private ownership.

We are certainly as far from capitalism in its pure form as we are from any system of central planning. The world of today is just interventionist chaos.

"Because there is no link between the 'revenue' acquired by government agencies and the costs they incur, there is no way of utilizing the yardstick of profitability to evaluate whether agencies are performing a useful function."

Recorded at Mises University 2010.

The bottom line here is that insurance of this kind — as opposed to catastrophic insurance like car insurance, which pays for accidents and not for oil changes and general repairs — creates moral hazard.

In deciding to hire a worker, the employer does not ask himself what the worker gets as take-home wages.