Roger Scruton at The New Criterion: ‘Populism, VII: Representation & the people:‘
‘All this has left the conservative movement at an impasse. The leading virtue of conservative politics as I see it is the preference for procedure over ideological programs. Liberals tend to believe that government exists in order to lead the people into a better future, in which liberty, equality, social justice, the socialist millennium, or something of that kind will be realized.’
Is there a global conservative movement or moment happening right now? Different people, as parts of different and sometimes competing traditions have different things to conserve…
Megan McArdle at Bloomberg: ‘Best Health-Care Plan For Republicans?-Wait‘
‘A plan based on these ideas may, to be sure, end up covering fewer people than Obamacare currently does. But then Obamacare may end up covering fewer people than Obamacare currently does, because it seems to be slowly strangling the individual market.’
One goal was to get various poor and sick people as permanently ensconced and dependent on a vast expansion of federal authority as possible (or Medicaid, for now, while raiding Medicaid). Don’t mind the rotten deal and bad incentives for many other people that came about (rising health-care costs were unsustainable, after all).
If this meant a vast expansion of money, politics, and power into your life, limiting policy options, limiting many doctors’ freedom to serve you locally and directly, well, it was for your own good.
You see, the designers of the ACA have the knowledge, moral virtue and ability to make everyone’s lives better. Their principles are universally true, and descriptive of a future they can predict with as much accuracy as a formula predicts the probabilistic path of a particle. Hard choices, scarce resources, and basic human suffering are mostly a thing of the past.
Health-care is a right derived from these true principles, the knowledge to design the ACA just a matter of implementation now….
What was that again?
Ah yes, money, politics, and power.