This quote cracked me up:
Only a few market-oriented think tanks appear in the categories of health, science, energy, and the environment. This might help explain the pervasive growth of government in these areas.
You have to love the boldness, the certainty. The absence of "market-oriented" think tanks "might help" explain the "pervasive growth of government" in the areas of health, science, energy, and the environment. Wow.
Do we have a government (socialist) explosion in the area of environment? I haven't seen it. Market-oriented thinking only gives us tactics relative to the environment, not objectives, so clearly there is a disconnect here on multiple levels. Left to "the market", we could destroy or fortify our environment, through free choices, the question is what is the basis of value, and what is the time-context of our choices?
Health. Well, we have the most dysfunctional, arbitrary, unfair and hardest to comprehend medical billing system in the history of the world, bar none, nearly anything would be an improvement, and here more than anywhere you see the "market-oriented" ethic on the order of the anamalistic, rather than the humanitarian, right-based brilliance that most "market-oriented" thinkers take for granted. If anywhere we need "good" intervention, it's here, when people are suffering and need help.
Energy. We already know a "free market" in energy equals oppression, one needs only to look around the world and its history for the past 100 years. Here, government intervention, as in health, is the only remedy to ensure wholesome human values are honored, rather than violated continually in the breach.
Finally, science. Apparently, we need more free-market think tanks focusing on science. Whatever.
Ultimately, what we have here is the age-old question of values, along with the reality of power and force. A classical liberal system of non-interference has values inherent that protect the rights of persons and property. A market could care less since it's built on top of a foundation which may honor non-interference and human rights, and which may not. When it doesn't, we see all too clearly how it devolves into power seeking that tramples on the less fortunate, in essence becomes a savage bloodletting, where honor and values are meaningless, the objective is "more" and the means is negotiable.