it's not broken, it's captured

and gato's (shamelessly stolen) 3rd law

let’s posit 2 very simple ideas, one the base bedrock of economics and the other the base bedrock of all (sensible) social science.

economics: people respond to incentives in predictable ways

social science: people are people, the basic nature of humans does not change much.

ignore either of these concepts, and you rapidly lose the ability to describe or predict reality.

combine them and you get a simple and fundamental understanding of why history is so prone to repetition and why

1. there is so little under the sun that is new

2. those who seek to control the present always seek to shade the past in order that we draw inapt inference therefrom. making up history is control of the future.

ground truth is this:

people don’t change and they respond to incentives in predictable ways.

literally this is all one needs to know to know that no, communism will not work this time. no, government will not resist the temptations of gato’s first law and refrain from putting themselves up for sale the minute they have control over that which you have to buy. yes, the plundercrats will gin up a bunch of faux-moral precepts and safety hobgoblins to justify it. no, this will not check itself and gato’s postulate will pertain: once you give them this power to determine that which is bought and sold, you will always and inevitably get rule by rube.

these things are obvious to anyone who is actually conversant in what was and why, in the long march through institutions and culture, those who would lead you off the path must always with such ardent vigor efface the trail behind you.

and this is why the history of history matters so much in the battle to avoid being eaten by leviathan.

consider:

is the SEC any different? is nasdaq? is anyone?

all regulation works this way. it’s ossification and preferencing for incumbents masquerading as “safety” or “equity.”

in 1720, it was just the same: we cannot let you buy stock from others, just us, because, uh, safety.

bastiat (from whom i shall shortly, in the finest tradition of pablo picasso, steal shamelessly) was a masterful student and expositor of this.

and this is why they push so hard to consign his ideas to the memory hole.

imagine the gaslighting it takes to ignore this and instead teach keynes and marx and (shudder) piketty.

one cannnot understand the american healthcare (or the electoral or basically any other) system until one foregrounds a simple fact:

these systems are not horrendously dysfunctional and broken, they are captured and that is a very different thing.

they are not like this because those running them are stupid or know no better, they are like this because someone wants it this way.

once one realizes that this is the relevant lens, it’s actually easy to work back to seeing who the problem is. you just ask “cui bono?” (who benefits?)

you’ll note that it’s never the voter, the patient, the consumer and always the party, the guild, the cartel.

certificate of need (amusingly abbreviated “CON”) for hospitals, practitioners, and kinds of medical equipment is one of the most anti-consumer regulations imaginable. it literally states that “no, you cannot buy and operate an MRI machine in this area without first getting permission from the guys who currently have MRI machines in the area.”

if one did this with, say, a burger stand, and said “no, you cannot sell burgers in this town unless you get permission from the guy over there who sells gagtastic mystery meat for $27” you’d get run out of town on a rail as an anti-competitive monopolist. but somehow when a hospital does this exact same thing, everyone nods sagely and says “ah, yes, too important to be left to a free market” and prices are left to spiral.

again, this is not a bug, it’s a feature. price is a signal. high prices say “provide more of this” and a free market will do so. the entire point of the CON con is to break that adaptive mechanism and prevent new supply from entering a market and thereby reducing price. the point it to sustain monopoly pricing.

there is always a song and dance about how “if we do not do this some very bad thing will happen” to make such interference look like safety or reason, but the truth is always this:

it’s not protection, it’s plunder.

maybe it started with good intent, but this can never last. big business and big government do not like free markets, they like control and mono/oligopoly. and it’s always cheaper to buy politicians and regulators than it is to compete.

in the days of basiat, “a monopoly” was something one bought overtly from the state.

guess what? it still is.

that is why regulatory capture is always the outcome of regulatory regimes.

it is not the exception, it’s the rule.

humans, nature, predictable incentives.

hence:

gato’s third law: any sufficiently evolved regulatory regime will devolve into a system of legal plunder backed by a system of faux morality used to disguise it as safety and justice.

“good artists borrow, great artists steal” -pablo basticat

what does this plunder look like? it wears many masks cunningly carved to allow the crony to appear the savior. remember covid? even past the jabs, there was a comet sized piñata stuffed with dirty money candy that every politician and powerbroker in the world struck repeately with as big a stick as they could find. covid tests, masks, ventillators, you name it: if one of my pals makes it, i’m gonna make you buy it and pay top dollar for the privilege.

it never stops.

this is the always on 24/7/365 raison d’être of the intrusive state. it’s so prosaic and commonplace that we cannot even see it. from quality learing center to FEMA hustles, it’s the whole game. i’d wager that just from the US government, the GDP of taiwan gets stolen in this fashion, every year. expand the scope to “that which you are made to buy that you would not have wished to” and “the cost of features and limits you did not want” and “regulatory compliance and preferencing” and i’d wager you’re baking $5 trillion a year in to US costs. it touches absolutely everything from homes to cars to healthcare to law to baby clothes, from gasoline to green energy and ethanol to tupperware to barber shops.

it never lets up to the point where you cannot even see it in the same manner that fish forget to think about being wet.

it’s obvious with things like “you have to buy a heat pump” or “new windows must cost 5X the electricity they will ever save” or “every public space needs to have an electric defib that no one will ever use.” it gets blurrier with “every car must have this feature” or “all baby clothes need $10k/sku testing even if all the materials are known.” it’s always “safety” and some facile moral line about “what, are you anti-baby?”

yes. if the state is the one to define it, i am. because what they push is not safety, it’s robbery and crony corporatism.

law schools are not improved by needing to be certified by the american bar association, they are captured by it. it’s not safety, it’s price gouging and risk. the schools become a subsidiary of a guild and the guild seeks to benefit the guild members by limiting supply and (increasingly) to control their membership with severe political bias.

again, there is no accident nor stupidity, there is capture and imposition.

and once you see it, you realize that it’s everywhere.

like, literally, everywhere. everyhting leviathan touches is corrupt and plunderous. everything. and the more prosaic they seek to make it sound, the more tightly you need to grab ahold your wallet.

remember gavin and his diapers for newborns plan?

sounds lovely, who could be against being sure that babies have diapers?

well, me. because this is not an access program, it’s theft.

baby2baby, the nonprofit set to guzzle this largesse on a no bid/no shop contract is run by norah wienstein who sits on the board of california partners project with, wait for it, jennifer siebel newsom.

and the costs are multiples of what you’d pay on amazon or costco. it’s legal plunder to favor a crony. see below.

and they ALL do this.

you could buy these in bulk for $3.

call me "mr cynical paws" but when i read this, all i can think is:

"which one of your constituents is a bath mat company any how much did they donate?"

it’s just endless.

they prey on the “well, but isn’t this true? isn’t this safety?” idea.

no, it’s probably not and even if it were this would still not be the way to go about it.

they choose this for a scam because it’s so easy to blow by you unless you stop to think. what are you, pro old people breaking hips in showers?

but paws (sorry) to consider:

do you seriously think that there are a meaningful number of people who:

1. need these
2. do not already have them
3. and would put them in if you sent them one

(don’t discount this one, people are people, not the rational and proactive avatars we might wish)

and that even if all 3 of those criteria were met, that medicare/medicaid, one of the least efficient and most fraudulent systems in america is the way to distribute it?

yeah.

and that is why we simply cannot tolerate these programs.

it will always be all theft, crony corporatism, and legal plunder, and they will always and inevitably gussy that up with some coat of righteous moral whitewash and harangue and vilify you for pointing out what larcenous claptrap this all is.

when you allow politicians to determine that which is bought and sold, the first things bought and sold will be politicians.

such a system, like all systems of legal plunder will devolve to story time about why the capture of the system is vital and moral.

those taken in by such justifications by faithlessness will, over time, lose control and degenerate to rule by rube who know no other way.

and that is the death of both the republic and the high trust society.

it’s really not complex - big government becomes a form of organized crime that ultimately forgets that it’s a mafia.

you cannot fix it or change it because people do not change and they will always respond to incentives in predictable ways.

so all one can do it tear it out, root and stem, until there is no point in buying politicians because they have nothing of value to sell.

and when you do this, the speed with which things get better is remarkable and obvious.

it’s why they try so hard not to let you or to let you see how it works.

did you think it was a coincidence that argentina vanished from the news without a trace amidst the massive success of ending rent control?

again, not stupid, captured.

forget that one at your peril.

remember it, and the solutions become so obvious that only an academic could miss them or a crony deny them.

and so i leave you with the words of the philosopher mileicat: