THE INTERVENTION TAX

How Government Makes Life More Expensive, Then Blames Everyone Else — and Why Personal Agency Is the Only Reliable Exit

An essay on inverted incentives in health, housing, and wealth — and the recovery of the individual as author of his own life.

September 4, 2026

“All the evils, abuses, and iniquities, popularly ascribed to businessmen and to capitalism, were not caused by an unregulated economy… but by government intervention into the economy.”— Ayn Rand

The Mark J. Perry’s “Chart of the Century” graphic is not a metaphor. It is a ledger. From January 2000 through December 2025, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded the following inflation: hospital services up 281.4%; college tuition and fees up 196.7%; college textbooks up 176.9%; childcare up 158.8%; medical care services up 147.0%; housing up 111.4%. Overall inflation in the same window was 92.6%. Average hourly wages rose 131.1%. Meanwhile, goods produced in competitive, tradable markets collapsed in price: clothing barely moved (+1.5%); cellphone services fell 44.1%; software fell 73.0%; toys fell 74.2%; televisions fell 98.1%.

Figure 1. Mark J. Perry, “Chart of the Century,” BLS data, January 2000–December 2025. Recirculated by Carol Roth (@caroljsroth), September 3, 2026.

The common thread is not mysterious, and it is not “late capitalism.” When government subsidizes demand, restricts supply, or inserts itself as the dominant payer, prices stop being disciplined by customers who actually feel the cost. Competitive markets with real price signals have delivered abundance. Heavily administered markets have delivered higher bills. That is not an accident of history. It is what happens when the people who pay are separated from the people who decide.

The political class sells the opposite story. Every intervention is framed as leadership for the greater good. And as we are told by them, without their guidance, ordinary people would be worse off. The chart sure seems to suggest the reverse in the sectors government has most thoroughly occupied. Then, when the bill arrives — in premiums, tuition, rent, taxes, and eroded cash — the same class blames grocery chains, landlords, insurers, “greed,” “speculation,” or the market itself. Capitalism is blamed for wounds inflicted by government intervention. That inversion is the operating system of modern politics.

Legislators and administrators present their work as a personal sacrifice. We are then told to believe that they supposedly forgo all the wealth and luxuries of private life with a/the sacrificial service “for the greater good”, so that the masses of individual citizenry may be protected, housed, educated, treated, and financed. The rhetoric never changes: compassion, equity, security, the vulnerable, the future. The structure of the incentives never matches the speech.

A person who lives by the consequences of his own decisions has a reason to get the decision right. A person who lives by the consequences of other people’s decisions — while billing those people for the privilege — has a reason to look decisive, to look moral, and to expand the surface area of his authority. Re-election, committee power, donor access, bureaucratic budget, and the warm bath of public virtue all pay better than admitting that the last intervention raised prices and reduced options. Failure is therefore never owned. It is reassigned. If hospital prices explode after decades of public payment rules, the villain is the hospital. If housing explodes after zoning, environmental review, and cheap-credit policy, the villain is the landlord. If college costs explode higher after unlimited federal lending, the villain is the university’s “greed” rather than the blank check that made greed rational. (Many will bet that universities as well as other named villains here and government are “partners-in-crime” in these inflationary shenanigans.)

This is not a claim that every official is a cartoon villain. It is a claim about selection and incentives. People who enjoy directing other people’s lives congregate where that power is. People who would rather build, trade, and keep their own score congregate where customers can walk away. The first group writes the rules for the second, then denounces the second when the rules produce scarcity. The masses’ interests are always described as primary. In practice they are subordinate. The politician’s first client is the politician (and it does not matter to which party or non-party that politician is affiliated with). The agency’s first client is the agency. The greater good is the wrapping.

Once that is seen, a second fact becomes obvious: no one is coming to think for you. Government and the in-power class act in their own best self-interest first. They will call that interest “public service.” They will more often than not try to punish you, rhetorically and sometimes legally, for noticing the difference. The adult response is not cynicism as a personality. It is self-government as a habit.

Health is the clearest case because the human body makes the inversion personal. The United States does not have a free-market health system. Government programs and tax rules already control the large majority of spending. The tax exclusion for employer-sponsored insurance is one of the largest tax expenditures in the code. It encourages comprehensive, low-deductible coverage so that patients rarely see the real price of care. Certificate-of-need laws in dozens of states still require government permission before new hospitals or services can open, protecting incumbents from competition. Medicare and Medicaid payment rules distort prices and have helped drive hospital consolidation. The result is exactly what the chart shows: hospital prices rising far faster than wages or general inflation.

Politicians sell each new coverage expansion or payment rule as compassion. The bill arrives later, in premiums, deductibles, and taxes. What the system is built to do is respond after the fact. Acute-care medicine is extraordinarily good at crises. Chronic disease is slower, messier, and less billable as prevention. Short visits, specialty silos, and payment models that reward procedures and prescriptions make it easier to manage the symptom or the late-stage disease than to spend time on the long chain of daily decisions that produced the current state.

The random-switch story

In the Bizarro version of medicine, the body is treated like a machine that randomly throws a fault code. A cancer diagnosis is often framed as an unlucky switch flipping on, after which the entire apparatus — oncology, insurance, public messaging — mobilizes around the tumor, the scan, the infusion, the side effects. The decades of inputs that raised or lowered the probability get treated as background noise.

That framing is incomplete. It is not complete fiction either. Genes, random mutations, infections, and environmental exposures that no individual fully controls are real. But they are not the whole story. A 2024 American Cancer Society analysis found that about 40 percent of new cancer cases and roughly 44 percent of cancer deaths in U.S. adults 30 and older were attributable to modifiable factors. Cigarette smoking was first by a wide margin — nearly 20 percent of cases and nearly 30 percent of deaths — then excess body weight, alcohol, ultraviolet exposure, inactivity, diet, and certain infections. For some cancers the share is far higher. Lifestyle does not determine every outcome. It moves the odds more than the “random switch” story admits.

The patient is often positioned as a recipient of expertise rather than an agent whose mouth, movement, sleep, and stress load have been compounding for years. Recognizing that chain is not an indictment of anyone’s past. People make choices inside constraints they did not pick: family food culture, work hours, stress, information quality, starting health. Blame is a dead end. Agency is not. The current state is the running total of what went in and what stayed out. That total can still be revised. Better inputs from today forward change the trajectory even if they cannot rewrite every earlier chapter. That is the opposite of the helpless-victim script — and it is the script a third-party payer system has little reason to teach.

A system that treats you as a patient can bill you. It has limited incentive to make you harder to manage (and this is just limited to health and medicine indusities!). Symptom-first medicine works better when the individual does not reclaim the steering wheel. The political overlay then completes the inversion: if people get sick, the answer is another program, another mandate, another transfer — never a culture of agency, and never an admission that administered demand plus restricted supply is why a night in a hospital now costs what a car used to cost.

Housing follows the same script. The shortage is overwhelmingly a supply problem created by government. Single-family zoning still covers the large majority of residential land in many cities. Minimum lot sizes, parking mandates, lengthy discretionary reviews, and environmental reviews make it illegal or prohibitively expensive to add the housing people actually want in the places they want to live. Existing homeowners capture the upside of restricted supply. Demand-side programs — mortgage subsidies, tax deductions, rental assistance — then pour more money into a constrained market and push prices higher still.

Places that have loosened zoning have seen construction rise and rents fall relative to the counterfactual. The political pitch is always “protect neighborhoods” or “affordable housing.” The actual effect has been to make the most basic good — shelter — one of the fastest-rising costs of living. Housing in that chart above is up 111.4% since 2000, well ahead of overall CPI inflation rate, and that understates the pain in the coastal and job-rich metros where the rules are tightest.

Here again the blame is reassigned. Developers are greedy. Private equity is buying the stock. Landlords are gouging. All of those actors respond to the scarcity the rules created. If you make it illegal to build, then lecture the remaining owners about compassion, you are not running a housing policy. You are running a protection racket for incumbents and calling it planning.

College tuition and fees are up 196.7%. Textbooks, even after a recent flattening from digital competition, are still up 176.9%. Childcare is up 158.8%. Federal student lending did not make college cheaper. It made it possible for colleges to charge more, hire more administrators, and sell amenities while students signed notes that they did not understand against earnings that often never arrived. The correcting point (universities and governments never want to mention): get government out of student lending and reform it immediately, or young people will keep concluding that the American bargain is a con.

Childcare is the same machine at a younger age: occupational licensing, facility rules, ratio mandates, and subsidy designs that raise the cost of the service they claim to make accessible. Some rules have a safety rationale. Many have an incumbent rationale. The political class then points at the resulting price and demands a larger public role — which further bids up the same constrained supply. Intervention is sold as the cure for the disease intervention caused.

Wealth is distorted the same way, just less visibly. Persistent fiscal deficits and the monetary response to them erode the value of cash. Inflation is a stealth tax on anyone holding dollars. Ordinary people are then told they must invest in stocks, housing, or other assets simply to keep what they have already earned. Government borrowing also competes for capital and can raise the cost of funds for private investment. Layer on the thicket of retirement-plan rules, disclosure mandates, and politically directed investing requirements for public pensions, and the cost of actually saving and allocating capital rises.

The same pattern appears. Government involvement is sold as protection or “investment in the future.” The practical result is that preserving purchasing power becomes more expensive and more complicated than it needs to be. Transformative wealth — the kind that buys time, options, independence, abundance and a step up the ladder of living standards — is rarely the product of one brilliant bet or a secret the government or a guru was supposed to hand you. It is usually the compounding of a few unglamorous decisions repeated for a long time: what you spend versus save, what skills you build, how long you stay invested, which fees you refuse to pay, and whose information you treat as signal.

Starting conditions and luck matter. They do not cancel the direction set by repeated choices and by the inner circle that either reinforces discipline or normalizes leakage. You become the product of what you repeatedly do and whom you repeatedly trust. That is not a slogan. It is how both metabolic health and net worth actually accumulate. The Bizarro version says the outcome arrived from outside and the only remaining job is to manage the damage — preferably through a program. The non-inverted version says the outcome is partly the residue of prior decisions, which means future decisions still have leverage.

Figure 2. The Atlas Society (@TheAtlasSociety), September 4, 2026. “Capitalism is blamed for wounds inflicted by government intervention.”

This Atlas Society graphic is the moral caption that underpins the inflationary costs of all those goods, services and wages. Markets are put in the dock for scarcities created by law.

When laws creates a shortages, the market gets blamed for the shortage and industries and the businesses within them get prosecuted in public opinion for shortages that the rule-makers and regulators created. Businessmen are denounced as gready for charging what a blocked supply and subsidized demand will bear. “Unregulated capitalism” is the stock villain in a country where hospitals, colleges, housing production, energy siting, banking, and labor markets are among the most regulated activities on earth.

This is the Seinfeld inversion made civic. In Bizarro World, the institution that restricted building lectures the public about homelessness. The institution that underwrote tuition lectures the public about student debt. The institution that pays for care through third parties lectures the public about greedy doctors. The institution that prints and borrows lectures the public about the cost of living. And the citizen who notices is told he lacks compassion.

It is a highly efficient arrangement — for the arrangers. Every failure justifies a larger mandate. Every larger mandate produces a new failure. The mass of individuals pays twice: once in price, again in the slow atrophy of the habit of judging for themselves.

Health, money, relationships, work, and status are downstream of agency. A line that is directionally right and too absolute if taken as metaphysics is this: everyone largely gets what they want and deserve. Luck, timing, other people’s choices, childhood, genes, and accidents are real. People do not get exactly what they deserve. What is closer to true is this: over a long enough stretch, most lives look less like a single verdict from the universe and more like the running total of decisions, the quality of the inner circle, and the sources a person treats as authoritative. Those three things are how agency is either exercised or quietly handed off.

Giving agency away is damning because it compounds in the same way good decisions do, only in reverse. When someone treats outcomes as something that happens to them, they stop inspecting inputs. They outsource judgment to a doctor who has twelve minutes, a social media feed that rewards emotion, a friend group that normalizes the same stall, a politician or guru who offers protection in exchange for dependence. The short-term relief (believing and behaving as a victim) is real: less thinking, less blame, a story that explains the present without requiring a change in behavior. The long-term cost is that the person incorrectly trains their brain the wrong belief and course of action. So instead of taking a corrective path to great agency and life well lived, they head deeper down a dark road that deepens the pain and problems that they believe they are improving .

That is why the victim script is so sticky and why systems keep offering it. A system that treats you as a patient, a client, or a constituent can bill, regulate, and speak for you. Lazy thinking is part of it. So is exhaustion. So is a culture that treats personal standards as cruelty and external rescue as compassion.

Reclaiming agency is not a personality transplant and it is not a guarantee of exponential anything. It is narrower and more practical. It means treating your current condition as information rather than identity. It means noticing who you let set the default: what you eat, what you spend, what you believe about risk, whom you marry or partner with, whose panic you absorb. It means refusing to confuse expertise with authority over your life. Experts can inform. They cannot live the consequences.

The people who get more room over time are rarely the ones who waited for the environment to become fair. They are the ones who kept a private ledger: this choice added optionality, that circle lowered my standards, that source made me dumber. They still get unlucky. They still start from unequal places. The difference is they do not interpret constraint as a reason to stop being the authors of their own lives.

So, the larger issue is agency. Not as a slogan that everyone is the sole cause of their fate, but as the only variable a person can actually work. Understand that, and more of life becomes available. Surrender it, and even good systems and good luck get wasted because there is no one home to use them. A person who is lazy with thinking and decision-making, and who hands the wheel to the state, to the feed, or to a hired voice that profits from complexity, should not be surprised when life stays flat. A person who treats agency as a muscle — exercised daily in food, money, company, and information — has a much higher likelihood that life opens rather than closes.

If the diagnosis is intervention plus surrendered agency, the prescription is not another five-point plan from the same class that created the chart. It is a change in who is allowed to decide, and a change in who you allow to decide for you.

•        Stop treating administered markets as if they were free markets. Hospital care, higher education, urban housing, and much of finance are political products with price tags. Judge them that way.

•        Prefer supply to subsidy. If a good is scarce, the first question is what law forbids making more of it. Pouring demand-side money into a blocked market is how you get a more expensive version of the same shortage.

•        In health, reclaim the inputs you actually control. Smoking, body weight, alcohol, sleep, movement, and what you put in your mouth are not the whole of medicine. They are the part no legislature can live for you.

•        In money, first understand and treat what true inflation really is and act from there. Understand that fees charged are of little consequence as long as there’s an increase in value of return performance but any fees, even the smallest of them, paid that with no value average return performance is too much.  Understand that life-changing transformative wealth rarely, if ever, comes from the popular (get-rich-slow) conventional wisdom push, promoted and marketed as the pinnacle of success; it comes from a path less traveled.

•        Audit the inner circle. That first ring around you either raises standards or normalizes leakage. My dad use to say, show me your friends and I will show you your future. You largely are the average of the five closest people and/or sources of information, guidance and advice. Whom you choose to trust is not a lifestyle flex; it is a compounding machine that exponentially compounds negatively or positively.

•        Think and act for yourself and your family. If a policy or advice requires you to become more dependent in order to be “protected,” the beneficiary is more the protector and less you and your loved ones.

That chart does not prove that government is the cause of every private sorrow. Weather, genes, chance, and other people’s freedom will always be able to injure you. What the chart proves is narrower and more damning: in the domains where political power has most thoroughly interjected itself — medicine, schooling, shelter, and the monetary environment in which people try to save — prices have escaped the discipline that still operates in TVs, toys, software, and clothes. The people who designed that escape then sell their service as sacrifice, blame the wreckage on commerce, and invite the public to hand over still more of the wheel.

Everyone has to learn to think for themselves because no one with a budget, a ballot line, or a press conference will do it for them. Government and the politicians in power act first in their own interest. The interest of the masses is, at best, a constraint and, at worst, a talking point. The greater-good speech is the product they ship. Higher bills and thinner agency are the product you receive.

You are, over time, the result of your decisions, of who stands in your first circle, and of whom you trust for information, guidance and advice. That is true of the body, of the balance sheet, and of the kind of country you are willing to live in. The inverted world says you are a victim of switches that flipped without you and of markets that betrayed you. The non-inverted world says you still have a say — and that the first act of that say is to stop confusing the people who raised the prices with the people who will rescue you from them.

The path is available. The next step is yours.

Figures below are nominal price changes from Mark J. Perry’s BLS-based series, January 2000 through December 2025, as shown in the chart recirculated September 3, 2026. “Overall inflation” is CPI-All Items.

Sources and notes: Mark J. Perry, BLS-based “Chart of the Century,” price changes January 2000–December 2025; recirculated by Carol Roth, X post 2095540696602009685, September 3, 2026. The Atlas Society, X post 2095752467799761189, September 4, 2026. Islami et al., American Cancer Society, CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians (2024): approximately 40 percent of incident cancers and 44 percent of cancer deaths among U.S. adults 30+ in 2019 attributable to evaluated modifiable risk factors. Human Progress / Gale Pooley time-price updates of the Perry series. This essay is an argumentative synthesis, not a claim that government is the efficient cause of every private misfortune. It is a claim that political intervention is the recurring cause of the scarcities the political class then campaigns to administer.