Bruce Bartlett asserts that AEI has muzzled its health-care experts, because the truth is that they agree with a lot of what Obama is proposing. I find this quite believable; back in 2003 Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation, which is supposedly harder-right than AEI, proposed a health care reform consisting of … drumroll … an individual mandate coupled with subsidies to make insurance affordable. In short, Obamacare.
If Krugman is right, then I think it presents us with an object lesson that was articulated here:
Krugman thinks this is an argument for Obamacare, but I see it as another reason not to trust conservatives on questions of economic liberty. During the Bush years, conservative think tanks advocated the unconstitutional individual mandate and subsidies? Of course they did. No surprise here. After all, social democracy is simply soft corporatist fascism, with a different emphasis.