If one is committed to intellectual discourse, but within the range of the politically feasible, a lot of intellectual principle is difficult to sustain. I do believe in principles, but I don’t see that any point of view has overcome this quite general problem.

I get very tired of saying this, but it will never cease to be true, so I will keep at it: the government is the primary tool by which the rich and powerful preserve their riches and power, and whenever a law is passed for the purpose of helping the weakest in society, it will be manipulated to the advantage of the strongest. These problems are systemic and intractable because the powerful have the time and money to invest in keeping their stranglehold on the political system. No matter if they are monarchial, communistic, or democratic, governments all prop up some set of oligarchs.

The freedom of individuals to trade across borders has rarely been held in so much contempt.

It’s been one hell of a non-recovery in housing, smack in the face of now-expiring $8,000 home tax credits that have proven to be as stimulative and futile as attacking fire ants with a BB-Gun.

If you’re uncomfortable publicly defending aspects of your position, reconsider your position. In extremely oppressive societies, keeping your thoughts to yourself is common sense. But in modernity’s largely open societies, your discomfort says more about the quality of your beliefs than the unfairness of the world.

That said, I take seriously Roy’s warning not to reject the notion that Medicaid might be worse than no insurance simply because it violates our “common sense” intuition. Policy history is full of “common sense” policies that didn’t work, and our intuition that Medicaid must be better than nothing is not obligated to actually be correct. Everything I know about Medicaid confirms that it is a terrible program on many levels, with a dysfunctional payment system and a byzantine bureaucracy, and procedures that vary wildly from one state to the next. While I assume it is probably better than having no insurance, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that it’s not much better. And whether or not you think it is actually killing people who would be better off with no insurance at all, there’s no question that it could be massively improved.

I never understood why the progressive consumer finance types got so worked up about interchange fees, which are essentially a knock-down fight between two very powerful business lobbies, not a cosmic injustice perpetrated against the American consumer. Moreover, progressives took the side of a lobby–retailers–that every other day of the week is being excoriated for its excessive accumulation of market power.

The sad fact is that the first time home buyer credit has substantially distorted the housing market and has hampered recovery. One could say that such meddling has set back recovery for nine months, or since last Fall when the tax credit began to artificially stimulate sales. Home prices will now stay under pressure as foreclosures continue to rise which will cause inventory to rise.

This is not to make fun of liberals or conservatives who think that more poor kids ought to go to Harvard; that would indeed be nice. But the fact remains that very few kids are going to go to Harvard, no matter how you play around with their admissions formula. Good primary education, on the other hand, could help millions. It requires vigilance to root out the assumption that what’s good for the urban upper middle class, is good for America.

Indeed, government should opt to provide the most services at the least cost, not the fewest benefits at the most cost. Public unions invariably do the latter.