Greed is not a bad thing. Capitalism requires incentives to function. Once you reduce the benefits of performing a service or operating a business, there is less of an incentive to produce. If you want to undermine the foundation of our economy, allow the government to limit prices. It *worked* great during the Iranian oil crisis in ’79. Now imagine that at the doctor; no thank you.

There are very few natural monopolies; most are government-granted. All intellectual property rights are a government-granted monopoly, as are all electromagnetic spectrum rights and many utility infrastructures.

Subsidies are another government specialty. The loan industry is subsidized when they are allowed to borrow from the government at below-market interest rates – subsidized by all users of pre-existing dollars. And any borrower is subsidized when the government agrees to guarantee their loan. Without those subsidies our natural greed would not have been able to indulge itself to the extent that created a recession – we simply wouldn’t have been able to afford it. The costs of our lending and borrowing would have been tied to actual production or economic expansion, and would have faced mounting headwinds whenever it ran ahead of those things. Many utilities infrastructures were subsidized as well, at the time of their construction if not in their ongoing operation.

Heavily regulated industries are nearly always hotbeds for greed and waste. Banking, healthcare, insurance, communications, education and utilities. The regulations stifle innovation and competition, and are often literally written by the major players. If not written by them in the first place, they are lobbied into weapons that are used to aggrandize existing players and keep new players from bothering to compete.

Healthcare suffers from all three. Governmental interference has divorced consumers from product selection, and even from costs. Tax breaks for businesses buying insurance make no sense; consumers shouldn’t be at a tax disadvantage to *anyone* when purchasing insurance for themselves. The present tax law represents a subsidy that distorts normal market effects. By refusing to enforce contracts, the government has made it impossible for me to reasonably limit the liability of my care providers, driving up costs without regard to what I want to pay. I can’t even save money by forgoing privacy features, despite the fact that I don’t give a rip if everyone on the planet knows my medical history. No, every entity I deal with must be HIPAA-compliant, at massive cost, because that is a feature that some other people care about, some of the time. Nor does anyone offer a whole-life healthcare insurance product, because every year the government changes the rules on what they have to cover and how they have to run their companies. No one can predict their costs far enough into the future to write a long-term policy. Nor can I opt for cut-rate medical service. I can’t just get my teeth cleaned by a hygienist who has been doing it for 30 years. No, they have to be under the nominal direction of a state-certified dentist, driving the cost of a simple cleaning up by about 4x.

In short, consumers no longer purchase insurance directly, nor are they allowed to manage their own risks, or select their own providers (from the *entire* population), or individually judge the desirability of expensive features. So why should we expect them to have any power? And if they have no power, how do we expect them to get what they want? Because politicians are going to a) know what in the world that is, and b) actually succeed at forcing someone to provide it to them, at a reasonable cost? Please. That requires more faith than anyone should have in their entire body.