Ezra Klein has an op-ed in today’s LA Times banging the drum for universal health care. I absolutely adore this line regarding a particular “serious, albeit extraordinarily complicated, plan” for universal care in California:
The details of the plan are unimportant; it’s the constructiveness of the proposal that matters.
This sentence may be the perfect distillation of everything that has been wrong with American liberalism since the Progressive Era: A preference for action over ideas, an elevation of good intentions over real-world effects, a deference to the highly specialized expertise of a few technocrats on matters of enormous import, and a total indifference to the possibility of unintended consequences.
