Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we have decided life's necessities should be sold to you with a healthy profit margin First, profit margins on things like groceries are pretty small. That's why grocery store chains are heavily consolidated: the only way to make a decent overall income in this business is with volume. Second, both basic economics and all human history teach us that the best way to maximize the quantity and quality of "life's neces…
GP did not articulate their point well, but you've straw-manned them about groceries. GP specifically enumerated housing, healthcare, transport etc - not groceries. I assume HN users are American unless informed otherwise. I'm glad that your health insurance bureaucrats can make a salary, but it's nonsense to believe that's a good way to run a society, even if it is profitable for some or can be deemed to be "free-ma…
The post I responded to mentioned "food" as well as the other things you list. Last I checked, "groceries" is food.
I focused on groceries because they are closer to being in a free market than any of the other things you mention, all of which are more heavily regulated by the government and therefore are more inefficiently and wastefully provided than groceries are. If we want to talk about giving everyone easy access to "life's necessities", it seems obvious that making the provision of those necessities more efficient, hence making them cheaper and easier to afford, would be a good thing to do. That means making all those other things more like groceries in the way we provide them. That might well decrease the per-unit profit on such things--which is why I pointed out that profit margins on groceries are pretty small. That's what free markets do: they drive profit margins down, not up, through competition.
Most of the rest of your post is simply uninformed about how things in the US actually work. I'll focus on one particular statement of yours to make that clear:
> this is because pretty much every move your country makes is individualistic instead of collectivist
Quite the contrary: things that are a mess in the US are a mess because of too much collectivism, not too little. To take your two major examples:
The US health care system is a mess because the people who actually have to make decisions about care--patients and doctors--have no idea what the care they are deciding about actually costs. All those costs are hidden--negotiated collectively behind the scenes by large corporations who have no skin in the game in individual cases, which is where the availability and quality of care actually matters. How can people possibly make decent tradeoffs of benefit vs. cost when providing or receiving care if they can't see and control the costs?
Housing is a mess in the US because much, if not most, urban and suburban planning was done from the top down, by collectivist central decree, instead of from the bottom up, evolving as individual choices and interactions shaped communities. (In Europe, by contrast, most cities and towns developed from the bottom up, and hence were much more suitable for introduction of a few top-down things like mass transit when those became available, because the top-down planners had the benefit of centuries of bottom-up evolution of communities.)