Industries that have government heavily involved in (health care, education, housing) have seen huge runups in prices. Ones government is not involved in (such as software) have seen precipitous price declines.

You can't blame everything on government involvement. You can't just not get involved in heath care, education or housing, You may get sick, to get a job you often need a degree and you need to live somewhere. But you can live without an iphone.

You need food, too, and food is dirt cheap, and there's far less government involved with that. (Yes, I know about the USDA and agricultural subsidies, but the latter doesn't apply to all the food shipped into the US.)

As far as I know the food basics are highly subsidized. Isn't the yearly farm bill around 20 billion?

US population is 323.1m, annual food per is $6000, or roughly $180b. Even more roughly, then 10% of the food budget is subsidized. $20b doesn't explain cheap food prices.

yeah, deflation is bad for the economy, unless it is high tech, in which case staggering rates of year-after-year deflation for decades on end are the engine of economic growth.

At least in the states, both healthcare and education are subsidized by the government so everyone can "afford" to pay more.

I would not describe government as heavily involved in health care. The prices you see rising are from lack of meaningful competition and transparency allowing providers and insurance companies to dictate prices virtually arbitrarily and certainly irrationally to the consumer using the services.

Meanwhile, government is the only meaningful access many have to healthcare and education.

About half of health care spending in this country is done by the government. That's heavily involved by any metric. Secondly, the amount of regulation of it is very, very heavy.

The price rises are due to this. See

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame...

Note how prices for Lasik eye surgery, which has little government involvement, have trended down dramatically.

While that may be true, the causal link between government spending and high prices is unclear. The vast majority of waste I see getting healthcare myself is the absolutely massive cost of dealing with insurance itself. This is an industry (billing!) that employs vast numbers of people. I think it’s much more likely the high costs are an effect of ludicrously poor price transparency and the unsustainable healthcare practices that this sustains. At worst, government regulation exacerbates this; I think you’d be hard pressed to demonstrate it’s the primary cause.

Either way, we need price transparency before people start acting rationally, and government regulation of irrational spending is going to be wasteful. Price transparency would make the promise of single payer (government) healthcare actually sustainable for a populace; without it, you’re just making the healthcare industry richer without actually providing a proportionate amount of care to the public.

It's the primary cause. See the article I linked to. Government payments, subsidies, regulations, and tax policy all act to distort market incentives.

Hmm, I suppose we have different standards for evidence.

Why have software prices trended to zero, in spite of the desires of their capitalist creators to make it as expensive as possible?

Well, I’d assume price competition. (I appreciate the response!) How can you expect prices to improve if you can’t shop around?

Shopping around in health care is greatly restricted by government policy. Tax policy, for example, is why health insurance tends to be tied to your employer, unlike car insurance. The supply of MDs is closely controlled and restricted by the AMA in order to drive up prices.

See "Competition and Monopoly" by Frecht.

The supply of drugs is heavily restricted by patents and the FDA. See "Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation" by Peltzman.

The very lack of meaningful competition and transparency is caused by and a symptom of heavy government involvement.

Governments corrupt markets.

Well, average pay in SF is only high if you ignore the homeless person sleeping on your stoop. In that sense the job would be extremely rewarding compared to other parts of the country. If you only compare yourself to people in like jobs, that reward vanishes almost entirely for the average worker.