But none of that makes simply moving money from pocket A to pocket B into the loss and destruction and evaporation of that money or value. There is a beneficiary of every dime of health care spending, and a producer earning that dime, as well. All of them playing the game as it has been structured by all the market players. Pretending that spending in one industry is a waste or a loss, while say gambling or prostitution or cigarette manufacturing or loud lawn ornaments, are just dandy, is simply beyond silly.
Other men use their freedom any way they like, and they often make a hash of it. That is simply freedom.
“But none of that makes simply moving money from pocket A to pocket B into the loss and destruction and evaporation of that money or value. There is a beneficiary of every dime of health care spending, and a producer earning that dime, as well.”
This is completely inconsistent with your earlier statements on this thread about how value is created and how markets allocate resources efficiently. The fact is that if misguided subsidies result in us demanding $2.5 trillion in health care resources that we individually value at only $2 trillion, $500 billion of society’s resources have been wasted, i.e., they could have been put to much more valuable use. The fact that this $500 billion provided income to someone misses the point. At the margin, what these individuals were paid to do was worth nothing (that’s the definition of waste). According to your logic, every single loony government scheme ranging from agricultural subsidies to $24,000 cash for clunkers entails no waste since they all result from political decisions that can be reversed at any time.
“All of them playing the game as it has been structured by all the market players.”
There is a fundamental difference between MARKET outcomes that result from purely voluntary exchanges and POLITICAL outcomes that result from the government being able to force you to pay taxes to subsidize activities you don’t value etc.
“Pretending that spending in one industry is a waste or a loss, while say gambling or prostitution or cigarette manufacturing or loud lawn ornaments, are just dandy, is simply beyond silly.”
I explained earlier that I have no problem with purely VOLUNTARY choices. It’s when government intervenes to distort choices through subsidies or regulations that we end up with sizable misallocation of resources. In the absence of vigilance by citizens, the risk is that we’ll all end up working most of our lives for what government wants us to do rather than what we want to do.