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Because government subsidizes kids. And a lot of meds and healthcare is made expensive by government cronyism, even if they then give you welfare to help pay fo

Because government subsidizes kids. And a lot of meds and healthcare is made expensive by government cronyism, even if they then give you welfare to help pay for the cronyism, for example: https://prospect.org/health https://prospect.org/health Edit: This is on the borderline of not even offering an opinion, but a statement of facts; but I guess go ahead and downvote facts you do not want to hear because they disagree with your politics.

deogeo 7y ago
You call it government cronyism, I call it regulatory capture and legalized bribery by corporations. When all you demand of business is that they seek to increase profits, but you demand of government that it protect everyone (including itself) from said businesses, enforce contracts, enact and enforce just laws, and provide all sorts of other services... of course you'll end up seeing business as perfect and government as flawed.
- wallace_f 7y ago
  I didn't say businesses do not have flaws, nor that this cronyism was not consistent with bribery or regulatory capture.
Analemma_ 7y ago
Subsidies are not inherently bad; the public is allowed to decide if there’s something it genuinely wants to subsidize and thus have more of than would be dictated by pure market forces, even if that means paying extra. The problem with subsidies is that they are usually a) not decided on democratically and b) for things we don’t actually want more of, like fossil fuel production. But children are a perfectly reasonable thing to want to subsidize, since without them we go extinct.
namdnay 7y ago
> And a lot of meds and healthcare is made expensive by government cronyism The good news is that this is a very simple hypothesis to test: look at the price of meds and healthcare in a range of developed countries, and correlate with government involvement (or not) in provision of said meds and healthcare

deogeo 7y ago

You call it government cronyism, I call it regulatory capture and legalized bribery by corporations. When all you demand of business is that they seek to increase profits, but you demand of government that it protect everyone (including itself) from said businesses, enforce contracts, enact and enforce just laws, and provide all sorts of other services... of course you'll end up seeing business as perfect and government as flawed.

wallace_f 7y ago
I didn't say businesses do not have flaws, nor that this cronyism was not consistent with bribery or regulatory capture.

Analemma_ 7y ago

Subsidies are not inherently bad; the public is allowed to decide if there’s something it genuinely wants to subsidize and thus have more of than would be dictated by pure market forces, even if that means paying extra. The problem with subsidies is that they are usually a) not decided on democratically and b) for things we don’t actually want more of, like fossil fuel production. But children are a perfectly reasonable thing to want to subsidize, since without them we go extinct.

namdnay 7y ago

> And a lot of meds and healthcare is made expensive by government cronyism The good news is that this is a very simple hypothesis to test: look at the price of meds and healthcare in a range of developed countries, and correlate with government involvement (or not) in provision of said meds and healthcare