Half-Baked

Government tends to prefer queues to prices.

That's two weasel words there. But for the sheer hell of, we'll pretend it's true, assuming it's a metaphorical "queue." No, wait, no assumptions here, it's Megan.

This makes most people worse off, since their time is worth much more than the price they would pay for the good.

No, she means "queues." As in, people will literally be standing in line waiting for health care? Not the dreaded "Canadian Healthcare Wait" where fixing that deviated septum may be a couple of months, but literal WAITING IN LINE, where you can't do anything but wait in line, & your time is lost forever?

She's apparently imagined a socialist dystopia where the insurance cos. have all been driven from business from heartless bureaucrats, & the only source of "healthcare" is the GOV'T. HEALTHCARE STORE, a gray windowless edifice where the doomed line up outside (See her iPhone refugee item, if you can stand it.) hoping against hope that here's "healthcare" today, & that they're close enough to the front of the line to get some before the day's shipment runs out.

And when the non-productive have been gently placed on their ice-floes, & the floes given a good shove, well,

Then the doctor can disclaim responsibility too, because after all, no one really has any agency here--we're all just in the grips of an impersonal force.

What a slippery slope we're on. Certainly doctors are well known push-overs, & would never resist anything proposed by impersonal forces.

And there's no reason to believe that a gov't. health system serving millions of voting citizens would be less impersonal than a corporate entity responsible to no one but stockholders, & responsible for nothing but delivering a profit to those same stock-holding parasites.

Don't forget an extra cop-out at the end, Ms. McArdle!

Using the government's coercive power to decide the price of something, or who ought to get it, is qualitatively different from the same outcome arising out of voluntary actions in the marketplace. Even if you don't share the value judgement, it's not irrational, except in the sense that all human decisions have an element of intuition and emotion baked into them.

Please. What does the penultimate sentence mean? If imaginary granny is dead, imaginary granny is dead, no matter which bureaucracy your ideology wants to blame. "Qualitatively different" in which fucking quality, & how, & why, damnit!?! Address my post, glibbette!

NITWIT UPDATE: Thanks to Ed.-in-Chief/Publisher brad for providing the link, directly above. OMFGetc., I've made a mistake; I won't be justified in any attacks on ... well, it's not as if Megan's never forgotten a link herself, no one's perfect ...