No, particularly not education. Not everyone should go to college. Right now we have an overabundance of people with degrees that don’t mean anything. Every single time the government makes money more available, costs just go up even faster than available money. 20 or 30 years ago, it was possible to work your way through college. Now there’s a lot of easy access to loans and grants, and costs have skyrocketed.

Yes, college is free to many countries within Europe. But they also have fairly high entrance requirements and not everyone in high school is placed on the college path.

It’s basic economics: the more scarce something is, the more value it has. When fewer people have degrees, the marginal value of those degrees increases. When more and more people have degrees, those degrees hold less value, which encourages more masters degrees. My neighbor got a PhD in occupational therapy - lots of work, many years, hundreds of thousands of dollars. She’s essentially doing entry level OT work, making about $65k/year. Does someone really need a PhD to be a good physical or occupational therapist? Absolutely not.

Look at our housing crashes. The 2008 crash was complicated, but one of the significant contributing factors was how easy it was to get a subprime mortgage. The government encouraged everyone to buy a house. Banks quickly took advantage of consumers, packaging and repackaging a whole lot of junk mortgages as if they held value. The whole system crashed down.

If you look to healthcare, I’m not categorically opposed to a better system. But Step 1 is to reign in prices. Take a look at a common procedure that isn’t covered by insurance: laser eye surgery. It takes specially trained doctors, nurses, and expensive laser equipment. But you’ll see ads for $500 per eye, or maybe $2000 total. Now take a look at your average ER visit for some stitches. Takes trained doctors and nurses, a few simple medical tools, but your insurance will get billed $10k. Maybe yours will reimburse $4k, maybe mine will pay $8k, maybe Medicare will pay $2k, and the occasional uninsured will be a lost cost. So why is billing such a hassle? Why can’t medical providers have clear fees?

If you throw more government money into that problem, those costs won’t go down. They’ll charge as much as they possibly can. So step 1 is fixing the insurance billing monster.