Defenders of the Obama administration’s budget plan and economic policies are talking a lot about the need to “invest” in the nation’s health care, education, and energy systems. It’s a valuable rhetorical device built on a valid insight — human-capital formation is a form of investment, as is (obviously) the development of new or expanded energy infrastructure. But the language of investment is grossly misused when it describes policies that rely on monopolies, dictates, and fantasies rather than on competition, experimentation, and hard data.

The case for conservative alternatives in health care, education, and energy is best made when we get specific, cite examples, and show our work. For example:

• My friend Virginia Postrel writes eloquently in The Atlantic about her battle with breast cancer and how America’s messy, complicated, and competitive market for medical discoveries and devices is the world’s best source of new, effective treatments for debilitating or deadly diseases — such as the drug that may well have saved her life:

In mid-July 2007, after a routine mammogram, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. As cancer diagnoses go, mine wasn’t particularly scary. The affected area was small, and the surgeon seemed to think that a lumpectomy followed by radiation would eradicate the cancerous tissue. Surgery was scheduled for late August, allowing me to complete a planned move from Dallas to Los Angeles.
Two days before the surgery, I went in for magnetic resonance imaging; the MRI would be used to place wires marking the cancer hot spot. On the day of my surgery, I showed up at the UCLA radiology department expecting a routine procedure to insert the wires. Instead, I got news that turned me cold and shaky. The scan had detected a large, completely distinct hot spot in another area of the breast. My prognosis had suddenly become less cheery.
The post-surgery pathology report wasn’t reassuring. Although the tumor was indeed tiny—just seven millimeters across—cancer cells were all over the place; they had invaded my lymphovascular system and extended beyond the margins of both areas of surgically removed tissue. All six of the excised lymph nodes were malignant, a bad sign. The cancer also tested positive for a genetic trait called HER2, found in 20 to 25 percent of breast-cancer patients, which marked the cancer as particularly aggressive. Given the details of my case, with more surgery, traditional chemotherapy, and radiation, I had only a 50 percent chance of surviving.
I was lucky, however. Those were no longer the only treatment options. Adding the biological drug Herceptin, approved by the FDA in 2006 for use in early-stage cancers like mine, could increase my survival odds from a coin flip to 95 percent.

A more centralized health care system, Virginia concludes, might confer some short-run savings in administrative costs but in the long run would likely deny patients life-saving innovations such as Herceptin.

• On education, school-choice advocates now have one more piece of evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of education reform based on competition and innovation. University of Arkansas researchers have completed their latest evaluation of Milwaukee’s long-running voucher program. The Reason Foundation’s Lisa Snell provides a handy summary of the results to date. In brief, the voucher program saves taxpayers tens of millions of dollars a year while improving the performance both of participating students and of students remaining in the school district.

• On energy, new legislation from Reps. Henry Waxman and Ed Markey is being sold as a comprehensive solution. It’s certainly comprehensive, but it’s a solution only if you think the nation’s problem is that energy is too cheap and reliable. Nicolas Loris and Ben Lieberman of the Heritage Foundation have pushed past the promises and pablum to take a close look at the details. The upshot? “Using taxpayer dollars to invest in inefficient energy sources while artificially driving up the costs of reliable energy with a cap-and-trade program will only cause more economic pain for the consumer — with no environmental benefit to show for it,” they write.