,
12 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
It serves the interests of the Left to make everything more expensive, from the labor purchased by companies to consumer goods, medicine, and education. Big Government hides in the tall grass of high prices.
High prices conceal hidden taxes and vast regulatory costs, with the added benefit that voters can be taught to hate the corporations that charge inflated prices instead of the government that imposes the taxes and regulations.
High prices for consumers also conceal the size of the tax burden they pay directly. Dollars seem to be worth less when nothing costs a dollar. More importantly, high prices reduce consumer choices and dilute the apparent value of capitalist freedom.
People are easier to rule when they feel like they have fewer choices and less control over their lives. They part with their freedom more easily when it has less practical value.
Health care is a great example of this. People did not resist surrendering their freedom to buy health insurance because they didn't really *want* to function as informed consumers in a competitive market. The freedom to buy, or not buy, insurance had little apparent value.
This is partly because medicine and health insurance are inherently confusing and intimidating to most people, and buying either of them feels more like a burden than an exhilarating shopping experience. Frustrated and fearful people are Big Government's easiest marks.
But it's also because health care, and by extension health insurance, was very deliberately made incredibly EXPENSIVE over the course of many years, paving the way for a socialist takeover. Only by making things expensive can socialists convince people they should be "free."
High prices are difficult to sustain in an atmosphere of intense competition, so the Left does everything it can to make competition more difficult for everyone from insurance companies to individual Americans attempting to sell their labor to employers.
The end result of this extremely expensive world is that voters don't fully understand the value of the money in their pockets, they can't see how much money Big Gov is siphoning from the private sector, they think their tax burden is much lower than it really is...
... and worst of all, they underestimate the value of choice, competition, and freedom. Even when the Left works as quickly as it did to inflate the cost of education and wreck student loans, not enough voters can see who their true adversary is.
Elevated prices nourish socialism because its core concept is "socializing" costs. People won't swallow that idea if the costs are low and easily borne by responsible individuals. Everything has to be made incredibly expensive so socialism appears more valuable than freedom.
That's one of the reasons polls show younger people growing more amenable to socialism. They grew up convinced that necessary goods like health care and education are too expensive for average people to afford and only rich people have meaningful choices under capitalism. /end
