Out of the millions

George Will has been writing a national news column for about 35 years now. If you assume that he writes twice a week and that each column averages about 800 words, that means he's written, conservatively, 3 million words. And all this is aside from his bi-weekly column for Newsweek, his various baseball books and the thousands of words he's uttered as a fixture on the Sunday chat shows, which have probably added a few million more words to the total.

You could conceivably ignore every word Will has written or spoken in that 35-year career and still celebrate him for the following exchange he had yesterday with Robert Reich:

ROBERT REICH, AMERICAN PROSPECT: The health insurers are not, George, you said they’re popular and everybody likes their health insurer. They like their doctor. They hate their health insurer. And health insurance is going up in terms of rates 20, 30, 40, 50 percent in many states. In fact, Goldman Sachs just this past week has said to its many of its investors, “Invest in some insurance companies because they don’t have competition, and they have, are exhibiting huge profits.” That is money directly out of the pockets of Americans.

GEORGE WILL, ABC: A, you say they have huge profits. As you know, confiscate all the profits of all the health insurance companies, with those profits you could finance our healthcare for 48 hours. What you do for the next 363 days I don’t know. Second, you say there’s not enough competition? Fine, let them compete in a national market across state lines.

REICH: Yes, let them compete across state lines, fine. But not a race to the bottom. Set minimum federal standards because we’ve seen over and over again that the recipients of health insurance don’t know what they are buying very often. Until there are common standards, minimal standards, then people are going to be taken. And that is what’s happened over and over again.

WILL: There you have the premise of this legislation and the core of today’s liberalism: the American people are such dopes they can’t be counted upon to buy their own insurance.

Emphasis mine. Those 30 words indeed sum up liberalism and the liberal impulse -- the overweening need to protect people from their own dopiness. You aren't competent to make such decisions, so Robert Reich is duty-bound to make them for you.

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One of my best childhood friends is a hard-core lefty. I remember a time, many years ago, when I met him in Milwaukee for a night of bar-hopping. I had brought along another friend of mine, a college friend that my childhood friend did not know well. After the bars closed that evening, we decided to go get a little late night nosh and visited the Marquette University-area Real Chili, a true Milwaukee institution. My college friend had not been there before and before he could place an order he needed to make a trip down the hall, if you know what I mean. My childhood friend, filled with the certainty that he knew what my college friend ought to eat, placed an order for my friend and then told him what he was having, despite my warning that my college friend wouldn't appreciate his effort. As I expected, my college friend took umbrage and I had to stop the two from engaging in a fistfight in the restaurant.

There is an impulse in many lefties to do things like that, to place an order because they know better. It animates their push to enact Obamacare, to install a cap and trade regulatory scheme to protect us from our own exhalation, to create federal laws regarding the installation of pool drains. Even if there is an existing set of regulators and regulations in place, it may not be sufficient. There must be ever more power concentrated among those who know better. It is the reason that a valued commenter on this blog wrote the following the other day:

The Democrat agenda is about helping those in need, Mr. D - ACORN is a great example of this. Whereas Conservative Republicans (with that I mean literally the politicians and the media, not you personally, or actually any of the Republicans in my life) are about supporting the people who keep the needy people needy - the agenda to destroy ACORN is a great example of that.

I'm going to assume the commenter is serious in believing that. Another valued commenter offered the following riposte:

the relationship tween the democrats and 'the needy' is akin to smokers' relatiosnhip to r j reynolds.

Leaving the typos aside, who has the better argument? Consider what Robert Reich believes, then draw your own conclusions. I trust you to do that.