The majority of New Mexico is either not employed or only barely employed enough to count towards employment participation. The states employment participation rate is like 58%.

Without making any judgement on whether the economic calculation is "efficient" or not, it's not really something the majority of voters have to worry about as it's essentially entirely OPM to get the votes to get there.

markets have criticism too. this is why we have nothing, neither roads nor businesses, and are currently hallucinating this conversation while scratching at the ground with sticks.

do we really need to point to how badly private healthcare has been working?

Private healthcare is barely a market at all - heavily distorted due to government policy.

Not everything is about the economy, but someone's gotta pay for it.

Well, for the next century we'll keep pretending kids don't matter. We've done it for the past 50 years, already. Let's see how far that gets us as a species.

I don't think we've necessarily "pretended kids dont matter" for 50 years. But I think we would both agree that we can always do much better!