More on Health Care (This Isn't Over Yet)

Steven Benen at C&L has done us the favor of pulling Paul Krugman on health care out from behind the NYT firewall:

Suppose, for a moment, that the Heritage Foundation were to put out a press release attacking the liberal view that even children whose parents could afford to send them to private school should be entitled to free government-run education.

They’d have a point: many American families with middle-class incomes do send their kids to school at public expense, so taxpayers without school-age children subsidize families that do. And the effect is to displace the private sector: if public schools weren’t available, many families would pay for private schools instead.

So let’s end this un-American system and make education what it should be — a matter of individual responsibility and private enterprise. Oh, and we shouldn’t have any government mandates that force children to get educated, either. As a Republican presidential candidate might say, the future of America’s education system lies in free-market solutions, not socialist models.

There you have it: the McArdle model. The state forcibly taking resources from one class of citizens -- those without school-age children -- and awarding them to another class -- those with.

I'd love to see McArdle's response to that. I truly would.