Tuesday, April 14, 2015

A Hard Lesson from Reminisce

One of the activities that we do at work is to look at the cost of items many years ago (1949, 1953, etc.) and, guess what, folks, the sectors of the economy that have risen BY FAR the most just happen to be those areas in which the government has most actively inserted itself; health-care/medicine, education (tuition at Harvard was about $800 a year back in the late '40s), and housing. Not this should be surprising to anybody who's ever opened an introductory economics textbook, mind you (the fact that whenever you subsidize anything you tend to increase the cost of it), and the progressives will probably continue to be clueless, but at the very least it's compelling.

2 comments:

dmarks said...

Government intrusion in housing, including the racist CRA, had a major role in the economic collapse. That's extremely costly.

On the other side, however, the government's effort which resulted in the creation of the Internet ( which happened without Al Gore, despite his lie) is something that I think was quite cost effective.

BB-Idaho said...

Everything goes up. (I went to college at $128/semester). Not
sure it is the govt's fault/credit, but we note that
corporate profits have risen from 1% to
12+% as a GDP sector during this same era.