Monopoly vs. Competition -- What Kind of World Do You Want?

When a market becomes monopolized, the government is empowered to intervene in to foster competition. Antitrust law has three basic components:

• Prohibiting agreements and practices that restrain trade;


• Banning abusive behavior by a firm dominating a market;


• Transactions that are considered to threaten the competitive process can be prohibited.

Alas, the Federal government is exempt from antitrust liability. United States v. Cooper Corp., 312 U.S. 600, 609 (1941). Taking full advantage of this, liberals are poised to create a powerful national health care monopoly--already accomplished, in various forms, in Canada and Europe--a perpetual socialist machine managing the economy and controlling your life.

To show how clearly the current Administration is signal-calling from the socialist playbook, Texas Rainmaker collected various campaign and policy pronouncements to create a clever video "debate" between Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. Roger Kimball over at PajamasMedia highlights moments from this popular video:

Reagan:

One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.

BO-44:

As President, I will sign a universal health care plan into law by the end of my first term in office.

Reagan:

The doctor begins to lose freedom. . . . First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then doctors aren’t equally divided geographically. So a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him, you can’t live in that town. They already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it’s only a short step to dictating where he will go. . . . All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man’s working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it’s a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay. And pretty soon your son won’t decide, when he’s in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do.

(via El Opinador Compulsivo)