Disgusting Person du Jour

Tyler Cowen, on what the right should be looking for in health care policy:

2. A rejection of health care egalitarianism, namely a recognition that the wealthy will purchase more and better health care than the poor. Trying to equalize health care consumption hurts the poor, since most feasible policies to do this take away cash from the poor, either directly or through the operation of tax incidence. We need to accept the principle that sometimes poor people will die just because they are poor. Some of you don’t like the sound of that, but we already let the wealthy enjoy all sorts of other goods — most importantly status — which lengthen their lives and which the poor enjoy to a much lesser degree. We shouldn’t screw up our health care institutions by being determined to fight inegalitarian principles for one very select set of factors which determine health care outcomes.

Read the whole thing -- it's by turns appalling and head-in-the-clouds (as only a libertarian can do it -- remember the free market doing away with segregation?).

This summed it up for me:

You can think of this post as an “ideal type” analysis which may or may not apply to many actual people.