[loudmax]

Paying for universal education, health care, and basic income via taxation is not totalitarian. With sensible regulation all of these can be accomplished without giving up on the free market. That is, the free market as understood by Keynes, not necessarily by Ayn Rand.

If you take an extremist definition of the free market, where healthcare mandates equal socialism and taxation equals theft, then yeah, that version of the free market doesn't work. (Where "work" means having leading to the general benefit to society as a whole.) Believing that any economic regulation is incompatible with a free market is equivalent to believing that any law is incompatible with freedom. Just as anarchy won't lead to freedom, a complete absence of economic regulation will not lead to a free market.