What two things do college tuition, health care and housing have in common?

One is that the price of these things has been rising at least twice as fast as other prices. (www.econlib.org) The other thing is that they are all subsidized by government…

Let’s take college tuition. The reason colleges do raise prices, like any other business, is because they can. And one of the big reasons they can is the ever-increasing amount of public money pumped into the system in a losing effort to keep college “affordable.” In effect, these well-intentioned subsidies have the perverse effect of shielding colleges from the kind of market discipline that would have forced them to hold down prices by constantly improving their productivity and efficiency, as happens in just about every other industry.