Do we want a shortage of medical care? Do you want to have to wait for months for surgery -- and suffer needlessly in the meantime, as people do in Canada and Britain?
Behind these wonderful-sounding political "solutions" to our problems is the notion that businesses are just ripping us off with arbitrarily set prices, and that the government can make them stop.
It makes a nice story and it can get votes for politicians who play the role of saviors. But it makes little economic sense. Why do so many businesses have losses, and even go bankrupt, if they can set their prices wherever they want to?
It is not uncommon for companies on the Fortune 500 list to operate in the red. Back during the days of the Great Depression of the 1930s, corporations as a whole operated in the red two years in a row.
They were trying to keep from going under while Franklin D. Roosevelt was denouncing them as "economic royalists." FDR knew how to win elections, even if he didn't know how to get the country out of the Great Depression.
That political lesson has been learned all too well, as much of the strident, anti-business political rhetoric of this election year demonstrates.
Now if only the media and the public had some interest in learning the economic lesson!