There is a huge demand for health services and health insurance. Whenever demand is high, democratic capitalism stokes into gear and provides product. And customers receive the best bang for the buck as providers compete.

So why are we allowing government control of health care services and insurance when the market plainly calls for competitive capitalism, asked former presidential candidate and magazine editor Steve Forbes in a recent stop to promote his new book: "How Capitalism Will Save US," co-written with journalist Elizabeth Ames.

Forbes is more animated today than during his presidential campaign, and well he should be as the economic meltdown under Barack Obama dramatizes his key issue: capitalism is the answer to prosperity, as stated in the subtitle of his new book - "Why Free People and Free Markets Are the Best Answer in Today's Economy."

Forbes is astonished that, 20 years after the Reagan Revolution, "neo-socialism" has replaced democratic capitalism as the mantra for the US economy. Forbes forcefully maintains it is time for another Reagan to tear down the wall of Obama's command economy policies as we did Soviet communism. As an example, Forbes relates that if the huge demand for cell phones had been parked under the provenance of government, we'd be talking on inefficient, bread-box sized contraptions rather than slim and lightweight instruments that can connect even Third World citizens to satellites that instantly direct callers worldwide and to Internet sites and GPS coordinates.

Health care and insurance are certain to remain costly and inefficient under government control. Forbes points out the appalling inefficiencies of Medicare and Medicaid that exemplify government run health programs. He points out that the ridiculous prohibition preventing inter-state commerce in health insurance, stating that annual fees for an average customer in New Jersey are twice as high than in nearby Pennsylvania. There again, government regulation stifles free market competition - and affordable rates.

The new book ranges across all the hot spots of economic activity and reiterates the campaign plank that gave Forbes traction: the Flat Tax. As GDP declines in an atmosphere of gloom with more onerous taxation glowering over the horizon, the timing is right to free Americans from the yoke of tyrannical apparatchiks and nomenclatura that soak citizens to fund their schemes - and their pocketbooks.