“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.
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.
Such as welfare. The billions of dollars we've poured into social entitlement programs has resulted in no gain for the country. We now have more lazy, useless, poor instead of less. We have more inner city crime (and it's associated costs), more illegitimate children being raised as welfare meal tickets (with those increased associated costs) etc. etc. etc. Welfare programs have done NOTHING to improve the standard of life in this country.
The wealth transfer was a near total loss. Neither the taxpayer nor the welfare class has been improved by these billions of dollars spent.
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.
And that would definitely be a loss!
If social security were abolished tomorrow, would Americans being poorer? No. Would they be vastly richer because they didn't have to pay social security contributions? No. They might be marginally richer by much smaller amounts in the long run. But neither the one entry view of social security as an income-asset, nor the one entry view of social security as tax-cost, accurately reflects its impact on our wealth or income, or the effects of any change in it.
Because it is a transfer, and merely moves money from pocket A to pocket B.
Therefore, an "unfunded liability" to pay for it, is no net charge against our net worth or future incomes. By the same token, it gives future retirees nothing they couldn't just as easily get for themselves through a private pension system - which would in fact be marginally (but only marginally) superior.
You are free to use that marginal superiority to argue to the American people that all middle class entitlements should be eliminated tomorrow. They won't listen, largely because they don't understand this, but you can try. I'd be in favor of that outcome, but don't expect it anytime soon.
And no, when a subsidy causes more to be spent on a category of goods or services than a free market would spend on them, the entire excess demand is not completely lost. That is the proposition you are maintaining and it is false, economically. There is a marginal reduction in total wealth that probably amounts to a few percent of the sum diverted, the marginal return to additional demand in the subsidized sector being lower than in other fields, but only by smidgens for the first excess dollar, and so on.
And voluntary choices of *voters* are also voluntary choices. We live in a republic, not a libertarian market-run anarchy. You can advise the people, but they are sovereign, and if they want to subsidize industry A or pet cause B at some lost marginal, they can and they will. No, it does not portend immediate ruin. No, everything spent on it is not deducted from national income as useless.
Economics is not a straightjacket demanding that people do exactly X. It advises on the costs of free choices of both economic and political actors. Fairly, impartially, without tendentious spin. Let alone preying on people's economic ignorance to present as outright losses what are only transfers.