The idea that the defining characteristics of human experience—where we live, how much health care we receive, the quality of our schools, and the abundance of food on our tables—should be entrusted solely to the unsentimental workings of the market will, with any luck, one day look as insane as burning witches at the stake or applying leeches to attack disease. That this idea achieved the status of truth among broad slices of the populace amounts to a form of collective madness. But it did not gain command of the policymaking levers by accident. This thinking was promoted by people in charge
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