Katherine Mangu-Ward

The Tea Party tried again, absolutely not.

So it's an idea that hasn't really risen into any kind of political reality in a long time.

Ooh, no, we're going to go the other way on that one, my friend.

So I have good news for you.

The government put both of those things on your plate.

And it could take them off by changing some of our underlying tax and legal requirements.

So I'm sure you know this.

The fact that employers provide health care insurance as a matter of course in the United States is entirely an artifact of the post-World War II kind of leftover price controls and kind of regulatory controls around compensation increases.

There were caps on how much you could pay people.

Employers wanted to attract good employees.

They realized they could offer these benefits and they didn't count against those caps.

So the tax benefit that accrues to you if you provide these benefits is kind of an extra little cherry.

We could undo that whole system and we could have a provision of health care that is done like we provide all kinds of other absolutely necessary to life goods, which is in the private market.

So I agree it's a huge cost to people who want to start a business to have to figure out how to provide these services.

But, you know, you don't have to provide food to your employees, right?

Even though that's totally they have to have food to live and work.

And so the kind of libertarianism 101 argument is there is no reason why we can't have a market in health care and or a market in health insurance, which, of course, are two different things.

And similarly, you know, child care is absolutely choked with regulation right now and get and that's getting worse.

We're actually more aggressively regulating child care providers than we ever have in the past.

And it's creating a totally unsurprising set of shortages and price increases.