William McGurn: Affordability Costs a Bundle

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It makes for a confusing message. The classic free-market approach is to recognize that government’s job is to create the conditions for Americans to better themselves. The government ensures a sound currency, the rule of law and space for people to use their talents in the marketplace. We elect Republicans (or we used to) not because they better manage the economy but because they know it is hubris to assume that the smart people with political power can pick winners and losers and what the right price should be.
Look at the three markets that affect American families most: education, housing and healthcare. It would be hard to find markets that have had as much government involvement as these. And what a disaster that has been—especially in the Democratic strongholds of America’s big cities.
Take ObamaCare. When Congress was considering the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Americans heard reassurances that even its most ardent defenders couldn’t believe. Remember how ObamaCare would “bend the cost curve”—i.e., slow the rate of growth? How about “if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it”? How the bill wouldn’t add a dime to the deficit?
None of that turned out to be true. So here we are, 15 years later, and Congress is debating whether expanded subsidies, sold to the public as a temporary measure during Covid, should expire.
Americans are better off now than we were under Joe Biden. But there lingers an unease over whether the American dream is really back. Americans aren’t going to like being told they are better off if they don’t feel it in their own families.

Yeah, there's really no snappy conservative response to the left's free stuff!

    I continue to suspect--fully realizing that I don't know enough about econ to be even thinking about such stuff at all--that tariffs might be a good idea in the longer term...but I also expect them to raise prices in the short term.

   I've hoped that the Dems would come to their senses at some point and move back toward the center. But now it's starting to look like they're going to lurch from one of their extremist views to another: from social extremism to economic extremism. From Woketarianism to socialism.

   Given the mood of many young adults--or what we're told that their mood is like--one can easily falling for the free stuff scam.

   One econ class, or reading one econ book, might cure a lot of them...

    ...but most of them will never take that class nor read that book.