I think we are agreed that healthcare in the US is not a free market but a sort of hybrid. The Democrats push towards full socialization, the Republicans toward full free market medicine. The battles can get pretty arcane. The Republicans created Medicare Part D so that the part D providers could eventually take over the other parts. The Democrats would like to see the part D providers go away and all provision be the same sort of government rule micromanagement that has served us so “well”.

Max - The key is not whether a particular school is secular or religious, government or private run. The key is whether it works or not and what happens when it doesn’t work. My son goes to public school as will my daughters when they get old enough. This is because the school in my district does a good enough job at educating children that it’s not worth the high cost of going into the private system. I could improve their overall education with tutoring and educational trips and materials for the same money (for instance, buying my robot-crazed boy a robot building kit so he can learn the basics). If I were in any number of other districts, I would send them to private school because it would be my best option.

And if you look at the education system, you will find a few private institutions (like Catholic or other religious schools) and some home-schoolers, but many more state schools. Of course, it is still less government-regulated than German schools with the famous Schulpflicht, but still most of the services in the education sector are govenment run or initiated.

I agree, Wal-Mart is a major step up from lining up at the strip every morning, waiting to get hired by some fellow who pulls up in his pick-up looking for day laborers.

But it does shunt off a lot of its health care expenses onto the state by paying them so poorly that they cannot afford health care and have to visit state-funded clinics.

And although health care in America is nominally private, it is so closely regulated by government that it is miles removed from being a “free market”.

Max - healthcare is *not* nationalized in the US. That would be communist. If you want to get technical about it, the medical system is a mixture between free market capitalism (procedures not covered by government insurance) and economic fascism (government control without government ownership. Several times a year, Medicare (old age health insurance by government) comes out with a price list for the thousands of different CPT codes that describe what it is a doctor does. Most “private” insurers merely reimburse at a percentage (above or below 100%) of the government rate. The employment in the health sector is mixed as well with many private institutions hiring and paying people in healthcare.

Education is also not nationalized in the US. It is a mixed system with private options from the smallesst child up to doctoral programs. MIT, Harvard, Princeton are not government institutions.

If Bush had managed an unemployment rate like this on the strengh of the economy, I would have to nod my grudging approval. But look at the size of the budget deficit, the national debt and the trade balance and there is little wonder where it is coming from.

And to turn a recent Rush quote of the day around, if Clinton had run up a deficit, debt or trade imbalance under his term of office, Republicans would be gunning to have his feet set in concrete, not his face carved in rock

iring gains were fairly widespread. Construction, financial activities, education and health care and government were among the sectors posting payroll gains. That help to blunt job losses in manufacturing and in the transportation industries.

You see, it is exactly the government who seemed to have created jobs in this “payroll spring”. Education and health care is literally nationalized in the US (as in Germany) and government hiring is, well, a result of government direct intervention. This leaves construction and financial parts of the market, but I’d first like to the seperate figures, before I get my hopes up. It looks like the Repulicats have expanded the state further and therefore need more employees…

I wish that your scenario were the rule: that bad employers eventually tank and leave more room for good ones. But then again, look at Wal-Mart…

I’ve taken jobs with “bad” bosses. You know what happens? People go on vacation and just never come back. They steal from such bosses. They engage in work slowdowns and “working to rule” and all sorts of petty harrassments to balance the petty harrassments the bosses impose.

Guess what? Such workplaces tend to do poorly, tend to fail in the marketplace. But even then, I would say that it is highly unusual to see a case of outright exploitation in a capitalistic society.

I am saying that Germany and France are very succesful at keeping a large percentage of their workforce unemployed. That is not my personal idea of “success”, but it seems to be the majority view of voters in lots of EU countries.

When I read comments and articles praising the “victory” in France against the CPE, I have to ask: what are they celebrating? Further high unemployment? What positive steps are they ready to embrace to create employment opportunities of their underemployed youth, especially the social tinderboxes of the suburban ghettoes?

The French were very clear about expressing what they do not want, but what sort of solutions are they willing to accept? I guess their answer is to just print more money and hire people using money loaned to them from abroad or from future generations. It works of the USA…