Andrew Sullivan, writing about the push towards universal health care:
The market enforces these limits by its usual brutal mechanism - price. A socialized system enforces it by its only real option - rationing... The question is whether this unavoidable issue should be a function of politics or economics...
And there, in three short sentences, is the flaw in his argument. Politics and economics are not separate spheres. They have never been, nor will they ever be. Even the people over at CATO understand that. Surely Andrew understands that. And yet he pretends he does not. Why?
I suspect Ezra Klein is right about Andrew:
I wonder how Sullivan would really feel in a world where the tax incentives were set-up to incentivize sparse health care coverage and high deductibles. That's a land that's very good for the healthy, and quite bad for the chronically sick. Sullivan increasingly strikes me as a first order idealist who ably sees the principles behind things (freedom! choice! equality!) and is stunned when policies based on those concepts don't appear to work.
A "first order idealist" is a perfect description of not just Andrew but most of his fellow free market conservatives as well. The difference with him, I guess, is that unlike his fellow travelers, he has enough compassion to be horrified by the inevitably imperfect way ideals translate into reality.
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