Opinion | The Economic Mistake Democrats Are Finally Confronting - The New York Times - 0 views
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This is the driving theory of most of the progressive policy agenda, most of the time: give people money or a moneylike voucher they can use to buy something they need or even just want.
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The problem is that if you subsidize the cost of something that there isn’t enough of, you’ll raise prices or force rationing. You can see the poisoned fruit of those mistakes in higher education and housing. But it also misses the opportunity to pull the technologies of the future progressives want into the present they inhabit.
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The first problem is explored in “Cost Disease Socialism,” a new paper by the center-right Niskanen Center. “We are in an era of spiraling costs for core social goods — health care, housing, education, child care — which has made proposals to socialize those costs enormously compelling for many on the progressive left,”
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