There’s a pattern I’ve been seeing in nearly every policy conversation in Nevada, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Here’s how things generally play out. A problem is identified with some broad topic like housing, water, workforce, or education. The seriousness of the problem is acknowledged. And then the conversation skips straight to what I call the “What are we going to do about it?” problem.

The “we” in this question matters. Usually that “we” doesn’t mean you. It usually doesn’t mean your neighbors. It doesn’t mean local businesses or entrepreneurs closest to the problem. “We” almost always means government. The decision that government must be the one to act to solve these problems apparently goes without saying. The only question allowed is what government should do and how much it should spend doing it. The possibility of getting government out of the way never enters the frame.

Why Markets Solve Problems Better Than Political Negotiation

This happens everywhere. In hearing rooms, op-eds, and policy briefs across the state. The conversation follows the same track.

Step 1: Acknowledge the tradeoffs

Step 2: Leap straight to “let’s sit down together and figure out how to split the bill.”

That sounds mature and reasonable. But it skips the most important question economics asks. It’s not about whether tradeoffs exist, but who resolves them and how.

Here’s an example. You’re at dinner. You ordered soup. Everyone else ordered steak. Now someone suggests splitting the bill evenly. It sounds fair until you realize it punishes the person who only wanted soup. Now your friend with the soup has to pay for the person who decided they wanted more. The market solution is simple: you pay for what you ordered. The political solution is negotiation. And in political negotiations, the person with the most leverage sets the terms.

The market resolves tradeoffs through prices, competition, and voluntary exchange. It’s built on millions of people making decisions based on their own knowledge and bearing the consequences of being wrong. The political process resolves them through negotiation among parties with unequal power. It’s managed by officials who rarely bear the consequences of failure. When the policy conversation says “let’s split the bill,” that’s not economics. That’s politics disguised in economic language.

Economics Without Markets Is Just Politics

Political conversations love to mention economics. Politicians, lobbyists, and, we will call them “others,” all make mention to economic statistics. They’ll throw in jobs, unemployment, and wages. You hear buzz words like “economic development” or “economic impact.” This makes it seem like economics is part of the conversation. But, just because you mention economics it doesn’t mean you are actually making decisions informed by economics. Economics without markets is just politics using vocabulary that’s harder to question.

But the “split the bill” framework rests on a deeper assumption that’s even more damaging: the belief that there’s only so much to go around. If resources are set in stone, then policy becomes an allocation problem. We sit down and fight about who gets what share. And if that’s the case, then negotiation really is the only game that matters.

But, luckily for us, political negotiation isn’t the only way to address big problems. The entire history of human progress proves this. In 1980, the economist Julian Simon bet Paul Ehrlich that commodity prices would fall despite population growth. Simon won. He understood something that those who default to having a fixed mindset miss. Scarcity isn’t permanent. It’s a signal. Rising prices trigger conservation, substitution, innovation, discovery. People don’t just fight over what exists. They create what didn’t exist before.

Nevada’s Housing and Water Problems Are Rooted in Policy

Yet almost every policy conversation ignores this. Every hot-button topic gets its own version of “let’s sit down and split the bill.” Housing. Water. Economic development. Workforce. Education. You name it. The vocabulary changes, but the approach to solving the problem doesn’t.

This is what I’d call a mind virus.

This isn’t an objection against any specific policy. Reasonable Nevadans can disagree about policies.

The virus that’s infected us is this default setting of using the political approach for every problem we face. The automatic leap from “problem exists” to “government must solve it.” There’s never a stop along the way to ask whether government is causing the problem. Whether the people at the table have the knowledge to solve it. Or whether the market process might discover solutions that no committee could design.

Consider how many of Nevada’s biggest challenges trace back to government action, not market failure.

Housing is expensive in Southern Nevada due in large part to the fact that the federal government owns 88% of Clark County and local zoning prohibits multifamily development on two-thirds of what’s left.

Workforce shortages persist partly because of occupational licensing and a bloated education system.

Water resources are scarce because a 1922 political agreement gave Nevada 1.8% of the Colorado River, and no market mechanism exists to correct the imbalance.

In each case, the instinct is to add a new program on top of the old problem. More housing subsidies instead of more land. More training programs instead of fewer licensing barriers. More conservation mandates instead of a reexamination of who’s bearing the cost. The seen solution gets funded. The unseen cause goes unaddressed. More politics and less markets.

Before Expanding Government, Ask Whether Markets Were Allowed to Work

I know what critical readers may be saying right now. “But these problems are serious! Something HAS to be done.” I agree. Something should be done. Problems shouldn’t persist. I happen to care so much about these problems in our community that I want solutions that work rather than simply actions that make it seem like something is being done. Luckily, the market is great at solving big problems.

The market process is what sits between “do nothing” and “government manages it.” The market resolves tradeoffs without requiring anyone to have all the information. It doesn’t depend on the wisdom of whoever shows up to the meeting. Most importantly, it functions with built-in accountability.

Politics, instead, resolves problems through concentrated power and negotiation. Politics and markets do not produce equal outcomes.

The people making decisions in the market bear the consequences of being wrong. They can lose their business and their dollars.

Politicians and bureaucrats simply…lose your dollars and tend to keep their jobs in the process.

Before we do something — before we launch the next program, fund the next project, or sit down at the next negotiating table — we should ask whether the market process has been given a chance. Not as an afterthought. As the most basic economic question there is. “Are the people with the best information and the strongest incentives the ones making the decisions?” That’s the question that needs to be asked in every conversation.

If not, we’re not splitting the bill. We’re just deciding who pays for everyone else’s steak.

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