Hotel Guests Aren't Green, But do Illustrate Problems with Government Programs

This article (H/T the Freakonomics blog) discusses how a survey of hotel guests were more likely to use more water and electricity in a hotel than at home. While I don't give a crap about the environmental movement, one line in this piece is a striking piece of evidence against government paying for things, be it health care or education.

Most of those polled said they are less likely to conserve water and electricity while they're away from home. More than six in 10 said they were using more because they knew it would be free.

See, everybody makes choices and trade-offs, a basic tenet of economics. When people don't directly pay for something, they don't have an incentive to weigh options efficiently. So, when a person...ahem....lives in a college dorm with pre-paid rent covering all electric, water, basic cable, and Internet charges, it is very likely that that person will run the A/C all summer long, leave the computer on all night long, and ignore the kind of costs that a non-dorm renter would worry about.

The same principle applies with government provided medicine and education. People with "free" health care, meaning they don't directly pay for it, will go to the doctor's office more often and be more reckless than someone who pays out of pocket for health care. When the government will give a grant that does not need to be paid back so a person can attend college, not only does the student end up choosing a more expensive school but also probably ends up partying and spending less time on school work. Who cares if it takes 5 or 6 years to get through school? It is "free!" On the other side, when a doctor or a college sees people lining up to pay no matter what the cost, what do you think the cost does? If you said go up and up and up, you must have taken a beginner econ class with a competent teacher. The high cost of education and the crisis in health care is easily solved, but difficult to implement. Get government out of it. Get the ACLU to treat health care and education as it treats religious activities using government. If the government can't be involved in religion and can't lend a park to hold a religious ceremony, why should the government be involved in health care? Isn't there a religious aspect in health care too? How come the only time the ACLU ever fights for patients' rights is when the patient wants to kill themselves and the government stops them? What about my right to affordable health care with no government interference? Of all the rights not spelled out in the Constitution that people come up with, my right is the closest thing the Constitution allows. (Actually, I would have to argue that up until socialists took over the government in the 1970s, maybe even earlier, my right would actually have been respected.)

Isn't it amazing what an article on a hotel and the religion of environmentalism can bring up? (Sorry, if that got a little long-winded. Everything tends to run together at times when discussing government interference as the government is everywhere.)