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and place by eliminating a host of politically imposed restrictions on
health care markets would result in far better use of the medical
knowledge that already exists, and increase the information and
motivation to expand that knowledge.

Conclusion
Discussions of the harmful effects of much government policy
explain the harm in terms of such things as unemployment caused by

increasing the costs of hiring workers; penalizing success from greater
productivity with high taxation; rewarding unproductive activities with
transfers; distorting investment decisions with tax loopholes and
subsidies; protecting producers against competition with regulations;

providing goods and services through government that would be
provided better and more cheaply by private firms; and imposing one-
size-fits-all mandates when diverse conditions call for a variety of

approaches. All of these explanations are accurate, but they fail to
highlight the fundamental problem common to all harmful government
policies—they censor the most effective way of communicating

information that is essential for people to coordinate their decisions in
ways that make the best use of their talents and resources for serving the
interests of themselves and others. Unfortunately, very few see market

prices that result from private property and voluntary exchange as the
source of the most impressive communication network in the history of
mankind—a communication network that predates the information age
by centuries and is more essential to human prosperity than all the

modern technological marvels of communication that have given rise to
the term information age. With essentially no public understanding of
the importance of the market as a communication network, politicians

and their special-interest supplicants routinely capture wealth at the
expense of the public by censoring the communication of information
that would reduce waste and increase general prosperity. Any
government attempt to censor written or verbal communication of

information on how to reduce resource waste and better serve others, or
on almost anything else, would rightly be seen as an intolerable outrage
by those who routinely advocate and applaud government censorship of

market communication.
In this article, we have explained how government policies on the
financing and provision of public schools, agricultural subsidies, fuel

economy standards, and health care insurance are hampering the
achievement of important objectives by outlawing and distorting the