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Jon Stewart typically maintains his Comedy Central program as a safe space for leftist politicians. Fortunately he’s bright and talkative enough that he occasionally lets it slip that their ideas don’t work. One such happy moment occurred this week when he was discussing another massive round of ObamaCare spending that Democrats are demanding before they’ll agree to end the government shutdown. Mr. Stewart has noticed how expensive services get when the government launches programs to make them affordable. Harold Hutchison writes for the Daily Caller: Comedy Central host Jon Stewart explained the impact subsidies have on prices to independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont during a Monday appearance on “The Daily Show” while discussing the government shutdown… “What happens is, when the government promises endless funds to insurance companies or private universities without any cost controls — and Trump seems to understand this — prices rise far beyond the rate of inflation. And we have seen it in tuition, we have seen it in pharmaceutical, and we have seen it in health care. So my
question is, will Democrats recognize the poison pill that they have often placed into well-intentioned policy?” Stewart asked Sanders. The pharmaceutical reference is off target because government regulation of drugs tends toward a different interventionist model. But Mr. Stewart’s point about education and health insurance is right, and one could add housing to this list as well. Broadly available subsidies for the purchase of a product tend to be pocketed quickly by the providers of the product, who realize that government has just given them the ability to raise prices. Mr. Stewart pleased his lefty studio audience by allowing Vermont’s senior socialist to dodge the larger issue of distorted incentives and pretend that the fault
lies in particular details of policy implementation. Mr. Stewart seems to think the issue is whether massive distorting subsidies are delivered directly or indirectly. Sadly, there is a voluminous history of prices rising whenever and wherever central planners announce they are intervening to make goods affordable. Mr. Sanders for his part would double down on the problems at hand by removing market incentives entirely and forcing Americans into the government-run care that now afflicts patients throughout much of the world.
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