Kevin,

It is not a question of one or the other. Some things are better and more efficiently handled at the government level while others are better off by the free market.
For example, The law enforcement, military, fire brigades, intelligence belong to the core of government services. Healthcare is IMO a mixed bag. The free market has utterly failed where as the more regulated implementations at other country do score a lot better in many aspects. If you really are interested to find out with an open mind you can find out by googling for the statistics.

Here in the Netherlands, healthcare insurance is NOT provided by the government, but the government does dictate the rules. One of the rules is that people with a medical history CANNOT BE refused by a insurance company and more over, IT SHOULD NOT be any factor in the monthly costs. There is a mechanism that distributes the risks of the commercial insurance companies, so they are compensated for clients with a certain medical history. Another rule is for the citizens: Every citizen MUST BE insured.

While our system is expensive (but by far not as expensive as in the US)and it is certainly not flawless, it works very well. Healthcare is VERY, VERY accessible here. Most healthcare is provided without even having to open up your wallet: The bill goes directly to the insurance company.

But even the government provided healthcare in Europe can be of top quality. The NHS in the UK has proven to have a self - improving mechanism. Where it was mediocre in quality some decade and a half ago, the NHS scores quite good currently. A few colleagues and customers have had good experiences about treatment there because they ended up hospitalized during their stay.

Is Obamacare without faults? I have no doubt it will have many. However cherry picking examples of making a point that its bad is laughable to me. Nothing could be worse than what you had to deal with the last couple of decades. Sure, there are some top-notch treatments invented there and some excellent university hospitals which do attract foreigners, but for pretty much everything else the old system was 10 years behind of the rest of the developed world, especially on the PCPs, Emergency care, the use ICT systems, prevention, accessibility, insurance coverage and affordability etc.

A good healthcare system takes many years, and only after so many years we will see the full scope of benefits. However from what I know of obamacare, it certainly a step in the right direction.

Walter,





>>The private sector brought on the depression of 1929 and the great recession of 2008.
>
>Bill, while you can always put 10 economists in a room and get many opinions, the prevailing explanation for the start of the Great Depression is horribly reckless credit expansion by the Federal Reserve (initially pushed by the Coolidge administration). Ironically, one of the goals of the huge credit expansion was to artificially adjust prewar exchange rates w/respect to the British pound. Some view the huge spike in bank credit expansion in 1924 as the "actual start of the New Deal". A few years later the Fed (again, pushed by the federal govt) enacted a second increase in money and credit that jacked up stock prices, railroad stock, the value of mortgages and real estate, etc.
>
>Money and credit expansion ultimately increase business costs. The federal government's initial response was to inject MORE money, until the fears of intense inflation become obvious. Of course, by then it was too late, and you had all the rampant selling leading up to the crash.
>
>But the crash was only part of the story. Hoover ordered deficit spending and increased borrowing and urged businesses NOT to cut prices, but rather to increase wages. This further affected the ability of the U.S. to recover from the crash.
>
>And then you had Smoot-Hawley in 1930, which most historians agree was one of the single biggest acts to prolong the Depression. It caused a horrible domino process that nearly destroyed the U.S. banking system. It ultimately closed foreign markets to U.S. products. Smoot-Hawley destroyed American farms and pushed countless U.S. farmers into bankruptcy. This, of course, harmed their creditors (rural banks), who either closed their doors or suspended operations for years. The ones that didn't close had to dump and liquidate nearly everything they had. So people tend to forget just how badly Smoot-Hawley affected the country (even despite the famous scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, ha)
>
>By that time, you had crisis situations in Europe, such as Germany stopping payments and freezing credits. This further affected American banks, who were already in a weakened state. Hoover and his administration went into panic, blamed speculators for his own policies, and then jacked up income taxes in 1932.
>
>So - are you still going to say the private sector brought on the Great Depression??? :)
>
>And I haven't even gotten to the damage done by FDR. His actions were a bit more complicated. That's a story for another day.
>
>So all of this was essentially due to government manipulation of the money supply - which does not occur in a truly free market society.
>
>Because this country had a string of Republican presidents in the years leading up the start of the Great Depression, many conclude that it was "free market capitalism" that caused everything. While I suppose it's understandable to generally equate a string of Republican administrations with free market practices, and it is correct to hold the Republicans accountable for many of the key errors that lead to the Great Depression, it is not good history to blame the Great Depression on the private sectory. It was government manipulation of the money supply.