I think we've seen enough free market failures that it makes us uneasy about that as a solution, but it can always be argued that nothing we've ever had in this

I think we've seen enough free market failures that it makes us uneasy about that as a solution, but it can always be argued that nothing we've ever had in this country counts as a "real" free market because, at least at the federal level, we've always been taxed and tariffed with subsidies and loans and free money awarded to various businesses along with regulations and legal constraints. I'd love to see what happens to a society that has to depend on the free market to provide quality services fairly, but I'm unwilling to give up what we have to experiment on ourselves without even one example of it working elsewhere. > It seems silly to me to force a common pool to pay for schools but not clothing, for health care but not food. Why not just raise taxes and get rid of checkouts at the grocery store? Taxes do pay for food and clothes, but only to a minimum in the form of public aid. You can get food stamps and even reimbursement for nice clothes for a job interview. That's a lot of what taxation does for us. It allows us to set a minimum standard for what Americans are entitled to as a citizen of a great country. Every last American citizen can get food, clothes, and an education no matter how much money they have. The more money you have the better those things are, but there's a baseline for everybody. Spreading the costs of those things over the entire wealthy population makes it extremely affordable, in fact it would cost us more if we didn't pay for them. That's also the argument for public healthcare. We're wasting money and having worse outcomes than other countries. Paying a lot more than others and getting a lot less in return is a very common problem in this country. The idea that only people who want to send their kids to schools should ever pay for them sounds nice, but it would mean fewer kids getting an education and we all benefit when we're not surrounded by total idiots. Things are bad enough in that respect as it is. The average American adult's compitiency in math/science tops out at the 5th grade level! We can't afford to have more ignorance if we want to be competitive. Nobody needs an inventive to avoid wasting money, because we all have things we'd rather be spending our money on and public money is no exception. We're fully incentivized to do good work because we want good results. We don't want to spend tax money on bridges that collapse or space satellites that explode or fail to transmit data back to Earth. I fully agree that consumer choice is very important, and I wish we were much more aggressive about fighting against anti-competitive behavior and monopolies (actual or de facto). That said, some things are better left to the government alone. I certainly don't want 15 private toll roads running past my house. Other things like the postal service or internet service are so important that the government should be allowed to provide them even when/where it would never profitable to do so. They can fill in where private companies who care only about money never would.