Some while back, I proposed a concept that did not stick. I called it “the politics of self-esteem.” My argument was that politics increasingly devotes itself to making people feel good about themselves – elevating their sense of self-worth and affirming their belief in their moral superiority. By contrast, the standard view of politics is that it mediates conflicting interests and ideas. The winners receive economic benefits and political privileges; the losers don’t. This an apt time to resurrect my rival theory because it helps explain why the health-care debate became so inflamed.

Economics is all about preferences and constraints, we tell our Micro 101 students, and politicians like to emphasize the preferences, while economists — at least those not employed by the politicians — point out the constraints.

The United States Code – containing federal statutory law – is more than 50,000 pages long and comprises 40 volumes. The Code of Federal Regulations, which indexes administrative rules, is 161,117 pages long and composes226 volumes. No one on Earth understands them all, and the potential interaction among all the different rules would choke a supercomputer. This means, of course, that when Congress changes the law, it not only can’t be aware of all the real-world complications it’s producing, it can’t even understand the legal and regulatory implications of what it’s doing. There’s good news and bad news in that. The bad news is obvious: We’re governed not just by people who do screw up constantly, but by people who can’t help but screw up constantly. So long as the government is this large and overweening, no amount of effort at securing smarter people or “better” rules will do any good: Incompetence is built into the system. The good news is less obvious, but just as important: While we rightly fear a too-powerful government, this regulatory knowledge problem will ensure plenty of public stumbles and embarrassments, helping to remind people that those who seek to rule us really don’t know what they’re doing.

But then, how have the banks made such staggering profits during the last year? By trading. Instead of being banks, since March of ’09, the Big Six US banks have effectively become hedge funds. They have been trading themselves into profitability. Worst of all, these banks qua hedge funds have been making money by trading with each other. Price-to-earnings ratios bear this out—their general upward trend, across sectors and industries, even as the economy has been severely weakened, is indicative of a speculative bubble. A massive bubble—the kind that makes the Hindenburg look puny.

This is, I think, the philosophical underpinning for our support of property rights - people are generally not qualified to say how much things are worth to other people, and therefore the power to say yes to an exchange should rest with the owner and no one else.

Summing things up in the New York Times, the liberal economics columnist David Leonhardt called Obamacare “the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago.”