So says Michael Roz3ff in an article posted on Lew Rockwell:
More and more, I have come to believe that state regulation of anything not only destroys liberty but also is essentially irrational for those on the receiving end, which is frequently most of us and very often many of us. Somebody always stands to gain, but the costs they impose on others are much larger.
Would it be rational to have a state control the production and distribution of pizza or shoes or computers or pets or movies or music by the use of compulsion and regulation? Would we observe pizza stores located where they now are located, open at the hours they are open, providing the variety they provide, at the prices they now charge? Would our pizza desires be satisfied via government-mandated pizzas? If our desires for pizza waned and were replaced by desires for submarine sandwiches, would the state respond quickly and effectively? Evidently not, for the state is not a business. It does not respond to the profit incentive.
Health care, like it or not, is a business. It takes resources to produce it. It takes toil and sacrifice. A doctor is not doctoring us out of the goodness of his heart and generosity, even if he does possess the milk of human kindness. He is responding to an economic problem wherein he, as much as the pizza baker, has to use limited resources to achieve his ends. No better system – no more rational system – has ever been found for producing health care than a system of liberty in which the choices are left up to the patients who are the buyers and the doctors (or other health care providers) who are the sellers. Profit signals are good. State-controlled health care lacks these. It is far inferior. Bureaucrats and legislators are not doctors and not profit-oriented. If they respond at all to what people want, it is in the most obtuse, roundabout, and counterproductive ways. They seek to augment their own positions or those who pay them off. They produce nothing. Once power and force are used to reach ends, resources are wasted jockeying for a slice of the regulated and/or taxed pie.
Our society and our system are committed to government-by-force – to compulsion. Our society and our system not only allow fascism but want it. If we want irrationality, we shall have it. And we are getting it.