Warren Hates Market Concentration

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has a contradiction at the center of her political program. On the one hand, she campaigns as a relentless opponent of monopoly and a proponent of vigorous antitrust enforcement. She wants to break up big tech, restrain big banks and try to reduce market concentration throughout the economy. On the other hand, she wants to erect an unshakable monopoly in one of the largest sectors of the economy: health care. Ms. Warren plans to ultimately make private medical insurance illegal and favors a government monopoly to replace their competition.

It is true that while most monopolies tend to raise prices on the products and services they sell, Ms. Warren’s would try to force prices down. As a single payer, the government would act as a monopsony—a monolithic buyer—and use its market power to reduce prices. But relying on this distinction to support single payer shows a complete misunderstanding of competition law. Antitrust’s goal isn’t low prices but efficient production.

The real cost of any monopoly or monopsony is lost value. When a monopolist jacks up prices, some buyers forgo purchases they would have made at market price. The value their transaction would have created disappears.

But a monopsony is just as bad. When it forces prices down, some suppliers won’t be able to provide services they could have at market price. The jobs, investment, innovation and improvement to consumers’ lives that their business could have produced are all lost. For that reason, monopsonists that engage in exclusionary conduct are liable under antitrust laws. Ms. Warren herself has complained that the market concentration in some industries reduces competition for workers and thus lowers salaries.

SOCIALIZED MEDICINE: =

(EGALITARIANISM + medical price & wage controls + government bureaucratization & regulations + force/aggression/power) which causes:

-decreased apparent prices for medical services & decreased apparent cost to the individual patient for medical services

-increased aggregate demand for and consumption of medical services by individuals (due to decreased prices and decreased costs to the individual)

-constant and continuous tendency to increase total costs of the system as a whole, causing excessive costs (due to increases in demand and consumption by individuals, and the abolition of causality in the spending of income, which leads to the abolition of the need to worry about cost when spending income, when cost is collectivized)

(The costs are judged as excessive when compared to the rational standard of value of capitalism and limited government, which prohibits egalitarianism + false rights + medical price & wage controls + government bureaucratization & regulations + force/aggression/power + collectivization of costs, and thus is the proper standard of value that is compatible with a society that values objective rational principles such as individualism, freedom, and all other natural rights)

-increased government force = wage and price controls (to reduce excessive costs)

-increased government force = controls over methods of treatment (to reduce excessive costs)

-death panels & aged become sacrificial victims (to reduce excessive costs)

-decreased technological advances and decreased technological progress in medicine (to reduce excessive costs)

-constant and continuous increased waste and inefficiency (due to government bureaucratization of the medical system)

-enslavement of doctors and intolerable working conditions (due to government force/aggression/power to control doctor’s fees and methods of treatment, which cause doctors with a high level of self esteem to feel like slaves working in intolerable working conditions)

-decreased supply of doctors = shortages of doctors (due to intolerable working conditions and enslavement of doctors which causes old doctors retire early and discourages young people from entering the medical profession)

-decreased quality and quantity of medical services for each individual patient + rationing & long waiting lines/times (due to increased demand for and consumption of medical service, plus decreased supply of labor due to shortages of doctors)

-hatred of the doctor by the patient (due to decrease in quality and quantity of service by the doctor)

-decreased value of each individual patient to a doctor (due to medical wage and price controls + shortages of doctors + rationing + waiting lines/times. These conditions make make doctors feel like victims, because they are being exploited by angry patients who want better quality and quantity of service, but without proper payment. Victimization of doctors + intolerable working conditions + over supply of patients + law of diminishing marginal utility of each additional patient that needs to be seen = decreased value of each individual patient to the doctor)

WARNING to liberals/leftists: You can choose to evade the realities of socialized medicine, but you cannot evade the disastrous consequences of evasion of reality.

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