I noticed that those products on the price graph that go down in price are all mass produced whereas the artisanal stuff (healthcare, education, etc.) is going up.

I usually love these emails and most of your tweets  but the graphic you shared on the free market is misguided and downright damaging.

Blaming price gouging by American health insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies on "government regulation" is completely missing the point. In this case, the market is too unregulated, leading to monopolies and backroom price setting deals.

Just compare medicine and treatment prices in America to the EU or even Canada which have stronger regulations ensuring much, much much lower prices. In Norway, healthcare is free, and we spend way less of our GDP on healthcare than the US, which is supposed to be private and free market? 

The incentive in free market capitalism is not to drive prices down and quality of service up, it is to increase profits by any means necessary. Monopolies, cutting corners (not caring about consumer health), even downright lying about dangerous side effects - these are just a few of the effects of free market capitalism plus a LACK of oversight in the health and pharmaceutical industries, not too much of it.

Again, college prices are not due to regulations but by private corporations taking advantage of poor regulation - government loans and support don't stipulate strongly enough the affordability of the education.

A well-regulated free market is a great way to incentivize innovation and lower prices, but without strong, well-formed regulations, companies will exploit anything they can, even children. (Look at the right wing lobbying for child labor laws to be overturned so they can try to keep service and manual labor job wages artificially low).

Sharing that graphic without a caveat is like saying that Gengis Khan helped the planet by slowing down global warming. 

Your Friday emails are always great.  Now did I enjoy this one in particular, not too sure because you reported on the value of the US dollar. Yikes this was a tough one to wake up to and read.  

Guess I will skip the coffee at Starbucks today and brew my own in my little VA kitchen. 😞

Have a great day and keep that creative mind of yours going. 

Always dig seeing these in my inbox.

A couple of things:

1) Using images to convey concepts always reminds me of this old SNL commercial:

"Colon Blow"

2) I'm encouraged by the Maria Popova donation page. I've become really disheartened by the trend to have sponsors. 

I understand that folks are trying to monetize and simply having an ad on their page I can appreciate. 

But it's all of the sheer amount of personal data capture that happens if you click on the link that bums me out. (e.g. You click on an Amazon affiliate link and then Amazon keeps tabs on what you for the next 24 hours. At one point I thought that was cool if you're an affiliate. Now, I think it's just intrusive.)

If you ever choose to have a donation page (even if you were giving it to charity) I'd contribute.

Jason

P.S. ...how it's a shame to waste that GIG giant screen behind it 😬

You know what would be really interesting - I'd like to see how you capture information, store it, and then use it to craft a newsletter

not sure if you've done this before but that's youtube video i'd watch 10/10

have a great weekend!
 

The founding fathers were so young! Although the pics not quite accurate eh? 

I'd like to more publications monetized or being run solely based on donations from readers. Pretty interesting approach.