Ten years ago, I bought a standard glass tube TV with a single coax input. Today, I have an LCD flat-screen TV with more inputs than I can use.
Ten years ago, my car didn’t even have airbags. Today, cars come with all sorts of safety devices.
Ten years ago, my computer had 32 MB of RAM and a 300 MB hard drive. Today, I have half a terabyte of storage and a quad-core processor that can handle anything I throw at it.
Ten years ago, what’s a DVD player? Today, not only are DVD players a commodity, but I could have BluRay if I wanted.
I just took a week-long trip to Colorado on a plane, stayed in a nice hotel, and rented a car, and I am by no means rich.
You can walk into just about any fast-food joint and get a (admittedly unhealthy) full meal for a few bucks.
Ten years ago, my cell phone had crappy service and a two-line, monochrome dot matrix display. Today, the service isn’t quite as crappy, but my phone sure looks a lot better.
Not to mention the fact that cell phone, computer, internet, and broadband market penetration is much higher now than ten years ago, among other things.
The point of this isn’t that we’ve had great technological advances, although we have. The point is that for the most part, all of these new advances come to us at the same cost, or even cheaper, than they were not too long ago. In a huge number of arenas, the free market has worked to give us better products at less cost. The market can and has worked wonders.
So maybe, just maybe, if you look at health care, where there are more uninsured people today than ten years ago, and health care costs more than it did back then…perhaps the free market just isn’t working so well in this area.