European free healthcare is no utopia

U.S. democratic socialists look to Europe as their utopia. So, when someone mentions the greater wealth of U.S. citizens, as I did recently, socialists across the world regurgitate the mantra that Europe is morally superior because it has free healthcare and college education. Yes, it has free healthcare, but is that the whole truth? 

Healthcare is a scarce resource that must be rationed. So if the state provides free healthcare, it must ration it in some manner. It's impossible to provide all the healthcare everyone wants when they want it. So, those socialist countries offering free healthcare ration it by long wait times and denial of services. In the U.S., people rage against insurance companies for denying services, but they are happy for the government to deny them. 

African-Americans Are Among The Richest People On The Planet

Source: AP Photo/David Goldman

According to the New York Times, living in the US is awful! Binyamin Appelbaum, a member of The New York Times Editorial Board and the author of the forthcoming The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets and the Fracture of Society, wrote that.

Life expectancy declined for the poorest 20 percent of Americans. Shockingly, the difference in average life expectancy between poor and wealthy women widened from 3.9 years to 13.6 years.

Rising inequality also is straining the health of liberal democracy. The idea of “we the people” is fading because, in this era of yawning inequality, there is less we share in common.

Shocking! NIRP causes savings not spending

The whole point of negative interest rates (NIRP) in Europe and Japan was to force people to spend by punishing them for clutching their cash. The rationale goes deep into the middle ages before modern economics: the economy is sluggish because people are saving too much instead of spending. Good economists thought they had buried that monster by the 1930’s, but Lord Keynes resurrected it and gave it a title of nobility. That’s how medieval economics came to dominate mainstream academics and central banks for 90 years. If you don’t believe in zombies, you haven’t followed mainstream economics for long.