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Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

> “Where it is impossible to create the conditions necessary to make competition effective, we should resort to other methods of guiding economic activity.”

- Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, p.37

Free markets work as expected where the alternative is dying at worst: They fail completely. If you're lying unconcious in the ER and there's zero regulation in the country of unlimited capitalism worship, the hospital can charge whatever the fsck they want. And yet, there are still a few people in the US surprised they actually do so.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisladd/2017/03/07/there-is-n...

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I'm kind of surprised that quote is from Hayek, considering I know of him as "that Austrian Austrian economist", and mostly see him quoted in defense of radical free market ideology. I guess it just goes to show how far pro-market the Overton window's shifted recently.

Indeed!

In fact he was outright pro-Universal Healthcare, eg: "Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance, where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks, the case for the state helping to organise a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong. "

https://thinkprogress.org/hayek-on-health-care-e29ae2d600e6/

It is a myth that the US has a free market in healthcare. It is a web of regulatory hell and perverse incentives.

While that's true, it's a complete non-sequitur to the parent comment.

It appears that he's trying to argue that we haven't tried hard enough to deregulate healthcare, and therefore we haven't proven it's "impossible to create the conditions necessary to make competition effective". Which imo shows a startling amount of specious reasoning or delusion.

Hayek, like Adam Smith, has been quoted to intellectual death by libertarians who haven't actually read him.

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