Benedict Evans

It's kind of like, you know, the mayoral election in New York today.

Like if you make it really hard and expensive to build houses, houses will be more expensive.

You've made that choice.

If you do that, you cannot then complain that houses are more expensive.

You can choose that, but you can't complain.

Part of this is that like in most non-emotive fields, we kind of do.

You understand, people understand that, you know, if you make, you know, more employment regulation tends to produce slower growth, but more protection for employment and you're choosing a trade-off.

I think everybody on both sides of that equation understands that that's a trade-off and you're choosing one versus the other.

The point is you can have a fully functioning free market and you can regulate some of the negative externalities of free markets that anybody in any part of the economic spectrum understands there are negative externalities to free markets.

You can also have like a government provided alternative.

You can have the government do the fire department.

Where you have some of the kind of most obvious gaps between the US and Europe, it seems to me sometimes are in places where you kind of have neither.

So the US neither has a government controlled health care system nor a free market health care system.

Do you see what I mean?

You have neither a government controlled housing, which you have in like in weird places like Singapore.

nor a free market in housing.

So you kind of break the free market.

So you stop the price signaling.

This is like the great insight of Hayek is that pricing is a signal.

Pricing is an information system.