Salary Caps, Health Care, and Realism

Well, I'm not sure that those boys over at Cato are actually interested, but I see an interesting problem with their discussion - which I'm enjoying. (I even learned a new term - "sticky jobs.") The problem is that as long as they stick to vague generalities and analogies to sports parity, they can acomplish very little. Not that somethng akin to salary caps wouldn't have beneficial aspects, as Frank Levy eventaully explaned, but on some level realistic policy modification is a goal, and pure abstractions are not. (By the way, I loved that whole interplay about who was taking sides in the culture wars, without anyone feeling compelled to mention any actual issues.) Let me explain by using an example having nothing to do wth salary caps; I wonder, and I put this out as a challenge, how the government could implement universal health care in the most minimalist way possible?

Let me explain; a good concrete goal for creating this "creative workforce" is allowing people not to be tied to jobs for health care, and allowing employers to compete in a atmosphere where it wasn't the 800-pound gorilla in the room. This means some kind of governmental interference, which libertarians dislike. So, given that this is a probable step regardless of our issues about a creative workforce, what is a viable, libertarian approach to universal health care? How can we utilize the free market to provide good care without having costs balloon to an unworkable extent? Who pays, and how? What is the minimum required, and how can it be managed to change as different techniques become commonplace? (Perscription drugs are a sine-qua-non now, but how do we build in what will be similarly important in 20 years without overloading the system?)

These questions are important for libertarians to address now, before the bills begin to be drafted - our best ideas, if put clearly and not marginalized by being too radical, may be adopted. Think of the way carbon trading schemes have been embraced by the far left as a solution to global warming.

In any case, these policies are important because on a very real level, tweaking municipal attractiveness and investing in local education to beat the next town's schools for students is a zero sum game, and while it is certainly interesting in theory, in practice it is irrelevant. The game is so much bigger stakes that petty gains are irrelvant as the major parties throw the country into chaos. we are not going to make our culture more bohemian, if that is a goal, simply by saying it creates growth. We need more than that, and I think that realistic policy ideas are the way to go.