Anything Government Can Do, The Free Market Can Do Better | An exchange between friends

An old friend responds to my post on The Costs of Repealing Health Reform:

There is one flaw in her reasoning and that is that Government can provide any service more cost efficiently than the free market. The only way they will be able to reduce premioums to the amounts that she is talking about would be for the government to subsidize the difference and that will mean further National debt, and/or increasing taxes to Canadian and European levels.

To which I reply:

I'm not sure we're reading the same historical and contemporary background sources. 

I wonder if your a priori assumptions about the costly ineffectiveness of government and the unfailing efficiencies of the free market are exactly and no more than that: philosophical positions you bring to the conversation, before the evidence is weighed and perhaps sometimes regardless of the evidence. 

The founders showed zero interest in reviving The Plymouth Company or inviting the Hudson Bay Company down to run the show for profit. They wrote the US Constitution in order to form a more perfect union of the states, to establish domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence and secure the blessings of liberty in perpetuity. They were — and I am —  convinced those things can be accomplished better by the government they formed (and reformed by the constitutional amendments they proposed and the states ratified two years later).

I don't think it's a big stretch, looking at what they said in those documents and the laws they enacted pursuant to those powers agreed upon by the states, to say they did not intend to relinquish their liberty to individuals and companies motivated by profit any more than to those motivated by the entitlements of royalty. 

So, there follows a quick list of public interests, activities and operations the founders and/or I am convinced a government can and has run more efficiently than the amorphous free market might have done — had the free market any interest in the common good.*

- establish justice

- insure domestic tranquility

- provide for the common defence

- secure the blessings of liberty in perpetuity

- regulate interstate commerce

- Interstate highways + some other large-scale infrastructure

- FAA

- manage currency

- FDIC

-Federal + state unemployment insurance programs

- copyright + patent protections

- treaties

-consumer protection, food + drug safety

- health + safety — CDC, NIH

- Basic Science + National Academy of Sciences

- GI Bill + Federal Housing Authority

- Student financial aid

- Social Security and Medicare

- Pollution control

- Workplace safety

- National Weather Service + NOAA

- FEMA

* By this I mean some businesses have the skill sets and talent to accomplish some of these ends nicely, but they never will because doing so stands in the way of making money. By this I do not mean that federal, state and local governments perform as well as they can and should. In my view, neither of these notions rules out public/private partnerships nor the need for ongoing regulation and constant improvement by everyone involved at every level. 

respectfully, 

jh