So, the Democrat Party has finally discovered the Affordability Crisis.
Just in time for the 2026 midterm elections, as fate would have it.
But the Democrats’ penchant for blowing trillions of dollars on waste, fraud, and abuse got us to this point. And their solution for the big government intervention that caused the problem?
More government intervention. This is the definition of madness, and it doesn’t take Albert Einstein to see where this is all heading.
Bernie Sanders is at the forefront of this socialist bait-and-switch. He recently proposed that Americans can “solve” the high cost of healthcare if they turn over all control of it to the government.
“An Uber driver shared with a staff member of mine how after Trump’s healthcare cuts, his monthly premiums increased 400%,” he claimed. “His copay went from $1 to up to $90 for each of his medicines. It’s not just this Uber driver. It’s happening all over America. We need Medicare for All.”
This is what the govt being involved in healthcare has done to cost… pic.twitter.com/lBj1JFrwZR
— Carol Roth (@caroljsroth) August 29, 2026
If you take a look at the chart above, you will see a very obvious pattern: Whenever the government intervenes in a sector of the economy, the price of everything skyrockets.
That’s not your imagination. It’s a real phenomenon. And it is why you can make a powerful argument that so much of what is becoming more expensive in America can be traced to a handful of toxic institutions that have been wreaking havoc throughout the so-called “progressive era.”
Look at what has happened to prices over the last quarter-century. From 2000 through 2025, hospital services rose about 281 percent. College tuition and fees increased 197 percent. Childcare climbed 159 percent. Medical-care services increased 147 percent. Housing rose 111 percent.
Meanwhile, televisions fell roughly 98 percent. Toys fell 74 percent. Computer software dropped 73 percent. Cellphone service declined 44 percent.
What distinguishes these groups? It certainly isn’t capitalism. They’re all part of a capitalist economy. The difference is that many of the things becoming brutally expensive are concentrated in sectors that government has spent decades trying to make “affordable.”
Compare that with American healthcare, higher education, and housing. Those sectors are swimming in subsidies, federally backed financing, regulations, mandates, licensing requirements, and restrictions on supply. Government and insurance companies stand between patients and medical providers, while Washington has spent decades flooding higher education with federally backed student loans.
The federal government subsidizes mortgages even as state and local governments often make it extraordinarily difficult to build more homes. And we’re surprised prices went up?
Let’s take a look at what the Democrat Party disingenuously deems “Medicare-for-All.”
It’s like a doctor prescribing a poisoned patient more of the poison that got him sick in the first place.
Never mind that Obamacare was supposed to fix this problem. That has already been memory-holed, because every thinking adult knows it was sold on false promises.
The entire point was to get to Single-Payer, aka taxpayer-financed, socialist medicine.
You might recall that viral clip of Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) speaking to a Chicago healthcare rally in 2009.
She boasted that a public option “will put the private insurance industry out of business and lead to single-payer.”
Barack Obama himself wasn’t bashful about his true objective: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program… A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately.”
But perhaps the pithiest synopsis came from former Sen. Barney Frank (D-MA), who said, “If we get a good public option, it could lead to single payer, and that’s the best way to reach single payer.”
Thus, we would be fools to believe that the Democrat Party actually wants the healthcare market to succeed through lowering costs and offering patients choice.
The socialist Democrats’ damage to the market isn’t limited to the healthcare sector, however.
This is where Austrian economics provides a useful explanation. Economists such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek understood that prices are information. They communicate scarcity, demand, and production costs across millions of people who could never coordinate their decisions directly.
Hayek’s famous critique of the “pretense of knowledge” was aimed at the conceit that central planners can possess enough information to rationally manage something as complicated as an economy. A bureaucrat may have statistics and models, but he cannot possess the constantly changing knowledge distributed among hundreds of millions of consumers, workers and businesses.
Government nevertheless keeps pretending that it does. Washington subsidizes demand, guarantees loans, restricts supply, regulates prices and mandates benefits. The Federal Reserve manipulates perhaps the most important price in the economy: the price of money itself.
People then respond rationally to distorted information. This can produce what Austrian economists describe as a cluster of errors. Individual mistakes occur constantly in markets. But when government or a central bank systematically distorts a signal used across an entire economy, millions of people can make similar mistakes simultaneously because they’re responding to the same artificial incentives.
Housing is an obvious example. Make mortgages artificially cheap, subsidize borrowing, and pump credit into the economy while local governments restrict construction through zoning and permitting. More money chases a constrained number of houses, and prices rise. Washington then declares a housing affordability crisis and proposes building more Section 8 housing.
Over time, the entire economy gets dragged down, and urban areas start to resemble Soviet-era Eastern Europe.
Higher education is another example. Washington wanted to make college affordable, so it expanded grants and federally supported student lending. Universities discovered that their customers could borrow increasingly large amounts of government-backed money, and tuition marched upward.
The deeper historical problem goes back more than a century. Woodrow Wilson’s era gave America both the Federal Reserve and the modern federal income tax. Those institutions supplied the monetary and fiscal machinery that allowed the federal government to grow far beyond anything previous generations had experienced.
The dollar has since lost roughly 97 percent of its purchasing power. Americans have become so accustomed to permanent inflation that the Federal Reserve describes prices rising approximately 2 percent every year as “price stability.”
December 23, 1913 was the founding of the Federal Reserve which gave a cartel of banks a monopoly over the issuance of the US dollar.
— Scott Adams (@scottadamsshow) December 23, 2024
Here are the results ... Perpetual war and a steady devaluation of our currency.
US dollar purchasing power down 98%
🔥 Happy Fed Day !!! pic.twitter.com/V9FZ7bZAWs
This monetary degradation sits beneath the entire affordability debate. Americans earn, save, and retire on dollars whose purchasing power continually declines, while artificially cheap credit can inflate assets such as housing.
The New Deal and Great Society then accelerated the growth of the administrative state, creating another problem: Bureaucracies have their own incentives.
A private business that continually fails its customers can disappear. A government agency that fails can use the persistence of the problem as an argument for a larger budget. If homelessness gets worse, the homelessness bureaucracy needs more funding. If education deteriorates, education agencies need more resources. If health-care costs increase, government health programs need to expand.
There is a perverse incentive built into this arrangement: Actually solving a problem can weaken the institutional justification for the people being paid to solve it. Over time, government programs also develop their own constituencies — bureaucrats, contractors, advocacy groups and beneficiaries — with a vested interest in keeping the machinery running.
That is the vicious cycle now sitting at the center of the Democrat Party’s affordability agenda. Eventually, nobody remembers what the market looked like before Washington began “fixing” it.
This is why the Democratic response to the affordability crisis is so fundamentally wrong. They are presenting government intervention as the antidote to a problem that has become most severe in some of the most heavily manipulated sectors of the economy.
When government intervention produces a disaster, the answer is invariably another intervention designed to fix the consequences of the first one. And when that intervention produces another set of distortions, Washington discovers yet another crisis requiring another government solution.
That isn’t a way out of the affordability crisis. It is the mechanism by which the cycle perpetuates itself.
Washington has been trying to “help” make Americans’ lives more affordable for generations.
Judging by the bill, it might be time to ask Washington to “stop helping.”
