Hello healthcare! That Verdon Guy [you know what to do] put up that nice little post as a dissection of an Atrios post on healthcare. Go read it. What that post brings to mind, as did this one (whose original intention is a criticism of Austrianism, but it got me thinking) from earlier in the week, is the question of whether or not healthcare is a public good.

Meaning, really, does healthcare have the following two properties:

1) non-excludability [people cannot be stopped from consuming the good]
2) non-rival consumption [one person consuming the good doesn’t reduce the amount of the good available for others to consume]

In the United States, and the world more broadly, it is pretty much cannon that people cannot be stopped from consuming healthcare. In the US, hospitals are bound to treat any patient who comes through the door, regardless of ability to pay. Now, we can debate the relative merits of that policy at a later date, but for now we’re going to have to take it as given. So, clearly, healthcare meets the first criterion.

Non-rival consumption is a bit trickier in my view. If we assume there are both a finite number of doctors and a finite number of hours those doctors can work in a given period (say a week) then it seems fairly obvious that there is rivalry in consumption of healthcare. That is, if I’m taking nine hours to have my knee reconstructed, that’s nine fewer hours available for you to have a hip replacement [yes, I am assuming homogeneity of doctors and hours, don’t get on me about that, I know]. There are also finitely many medical devices and such. Just by failing that criterion, I’d say that healthcare certainly isn’t a wholly public good.

There are, of course, arguments regarding positive externalities etc. which might be used to make a socialization case, but if healthcare is not a public good, the argument for complete socialization fails because socialization would enter us into monopsony from oligopoly and even neo-classical economics predicts that oligopoly outcomes are better than monopsonistic outcomes. The question becomes, then, how is a government monopoly better than a private industry monopoly in the market for a non-public good?

The “Quacks & Smacks” feature has been an endless parade of bizarre segues and comical overreach since its inception, but this:

Smacks to the Saudi Arabian gunmen who killed 22 people in the city of Khobar. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they threatened to kill 242 more people they were using as human shields.

followed immediately by this:

Quacks to graduating seniors.

is a juxtaposition that’s going to be hard to beat.

This feature has achieved maximal hilarity. There’s no way it’s going to get any funnier. For the love of God, ODE, bow out while you’re ahead.

Some of them, anyway. Volokh links to this as “Life Imitates The Onion.” I might call it “Life Imitates Toni Morrison” but whatever it is, it’s dumb:

A Portland lawyer says suffering by African Americans at the hands of slave owners is to blame in the death of a 2-year-old Beaverton boy.

Randall Vogt is offering the untested theory, called post traumatic slave syndrome, in his defense of Isaac Cortez Bynum, who is charged with murder by abuse in the June 30 death of his son, Ryshawn Lamar Bynum. Vogt says he will argue — “in a general way” — that masters beat slaves, so Bynum was justified in beating his son.

According to the article, the judge will only accept evidence of such a defense if the “syndrome” can be shown to be “an accepted mental disorder with a valid scientific basis.” Which it isn’t, so there’s no chance of it getting in. Still, that someone even dreamed it up is nauseating. Hilariously nauseating.